Pádraic Pearse's remarks, just a month before he took command of the 1916 Easter Rising, may have sealed Mitchel's reputation for Irish republicans. Placed in succession to those of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, and James Fintan Lalor, Pearse hailed Mitchel's "gospel of Irish nationalism" as the "fiercest and most sublime". Pearse's eulogy was seconded by the Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith who, however, did feel constrained in a preface to a 1913 edition of Mitchel's "Jail Journal", to comment that an Irish Nationalist needed no excuse for "declining to hold the negro his peer in right".