Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN THE SPEECHES OF CHARLES PHILLIPS, Esq. tJmi0tcr at Haft. THE SPEECHES CHARLES PHILLIPS, Esq. DELIVERED AT THE BAR, ON VARIOUS PUBLIC OCCASIONS IN IRELAND AND ENGLAND. Seronlr rttfon. SWttir *v Jfcfotself, LONDON : PRINTED FOR W. SIMPKIN AN R. MARSHALL, Stationers' Hall Court ; AND MILUKIN, GRAFTON STREET, DUBLIN. 1822. THE FOLLOWING SPEECHES ARE, BY PERMISSION, DEDICATED TO WILLIAM ROSCOE, WITH THE MOST SINCERE RESPECT AUTHOR. WITHDRAWN CONTENTS. Page SPEECH delivered at a Public Dinner given to Mr. Fin- lay by the Roman Catholics of the Town and County ofSligo' . . . . . ... . . '. . . . . 1 Speech delivered at an Aggregate Meeting of the Roman Catholics of Cork 19 Speech delivered at a Dinner given on Dinas Island, in the Lake of Killarney, on Mr. Phillips's Health be- ing given, together with that of Mr. Payne, a young American '..'.... 37 Speech delivered at an Aggregate Meeting of the Roman Catholics of the County and City of Dublin ... 44 Petition referred to in the preceding Speech, drawn by Mr. Phillips at the request of the Roman Catholics of Ireland 71 The Address to Her R. H. the Princess of Wales, drawn by Mr. Phillips at the request of the Roman Catho- lics of Ireland 74 Speech of Mr. Phillips in the case of Guthrie v. Sterne, delivered in the Court of Common Pleas, Dublin . 76 Speech of Mr. Phillips in the case of O'Mullan v. M'Kor- kill, delivered in the County Court-house, Galway . 102 Speech in the case of Connaghton u. Dillon, delivered in the County Court-house of Roscommon 128 Speech of Mr. Phillips in the case of Creighton v. Towns- end, delivered in the Court of Common Plea?, Dublin 144 ii. CONTENTS. Page Speech in the case of Blake v. Wilkins, delivered in the County Court-house, Galway 161 A Character of Napoleon Buonaparte, down to the Period of his Exile to Elba., ... ._ 182 Speech delivered at the Mansion House, London, on the London Auxiliary Bible Society . . f . 188 Speech delivered at Morrison's Hotel, Dublin, on South American Freedom 197 Speech HI tbfr c#se of Browne v. Blake ...... 202 Speech in the case of Fitzgerald v. Kerr, delivered in the County-Court House, Mayo 225 Speech delivered at the Fourth Apniversary of tjie Glocestershire Missionary Society .... , . 240 Speech on His Late Majesty George III 256 Speech at the London Orphan Asylum 266 Defence of John Barnard Turner, delivered by him at the Bar of the Old Bailey 271 Speech delivered at the. Annual Meeting of the London Hibernian Society, held in the Town Hall, Sligo . 283 Speech in the case of Browne v, Bingham 291 SPEECH DELIVERED AT A PUBLIC DINNER GIVEN TO MR. FINLAY BY THE ROMAN CATHOLICS OF THE TOWN AND COUNTY OF SLIGO. J THINK, Sir, you will agree with me, that the most experienced speaker might justly tremble in addressing you after the display you have just witnessed. What, then, must 1 feel who never before addressed a public audience ? However, it would be but an unworthy affectation in me were I to conceal from you the emotions with which I am agitated by this kindness. The exaggerated estimate which other counties have made of the few services so young a man could render, has, I hope, inspired me with the sentiments it ought; but here, I do confess to you, I feel no ordinary sensation here, where every object springs some new association, and the loveliest objects, mel- lowed as they are by time, rise painted on the eye of memory here, where the light of heaven first blessed my infant view, and nature breathed into my infant heart that ardour for my country which B SPEECH nothing but death can chill here, where the scenes of my childhood remind me how innocent I was, and the grave of my fathers admonish me how pure I should continue here, standing as I do amongst my fairest, fondest, earliest sympa- thies, such a welcome, operating, not merely as an affectionate tribute, but as a moral testimony, does indeed quite oppress and overwhelm me. Oh ! believe me, warm is the heart that feels, and willing is the tongue that speaks ; and still, I can- not, by shaping it to my rudely inexpressive phrase, shock the sensibility of a gratitude too full to be suppressed, and yet (how far !) too eloquent for language. If any circumstance could add to the pleasure of this day, it is that which I feel in introducing to the friends of my youth the friend of my adop- tion, though perhaps I am committing one of our imputed blunders when 1 speak of introducing one whose patriotism has already rendered him familiar to every heart in Ireland; a man, who, conquering every disadvantage, and spurning every difficulty, has poured around our misfortunes the splendour of an intellect that at once irradiates and consumes them. For the services he has ren- dered to his country, from my heart I thank him, and, for myself, I offer him a personal, it may be a selfish tribute for saving me, by his presence this night, from an impotent attempt at his pane- gyric. Indeed, gentlemen, you can have little idea of what he has to endure, who, in these times, advocates your cause. Every calumny which the venal, and the vulgar, and the vile, are lavishing AT SLIGO. 3 upon you is visited with exaggeration upon us. We are called traitors, because we would rally round the crown an unanimous people. We are called apostates, because we will not persecute Christianity. We are branded as separatists, be- cause of our endeavours to annihilate the fetters that, instead of binding, clog the connection. To these may be added, the frowns of power, the envy of dulness, the mean malice of exposed self- interest, and, it may be, in despite of all natural affection, even the discountenance of kindred I Well, be it so, For thee, fair freedom, welcome all the past, For thee, my country, welcome even the last ! I am not ashamed to confess to you, that there was a clay, when I was as bigotted as the blackest ; but I thank the Being who gifted me with a mind not quite impervious to conviction, and I thank you, who afforded such convincing testimonies of my error. I saw you enduring with patience the most unmerited assaults, bowing before the insults of revived anniversaries ; in private life, exem- plary ; in public, unoffending ; in the hour of peace, asserting your loyalty ; in the hour of dan- ger, proving it. Even when an invading enemy victoriously penetrated into the very heart of our county, I saw the banner of your allegiance beam- ing refutation on your slanderers ; was it a won- der, then, that I seized my prejudices, and with a blush burned them on the altar of my country ! The great question of Catholic, shall I not ra- ther say, of Irish emancipation, has now assumed B2 4 SPEECH that national aspect which imperiously challenges the scrutiny of every one. While it was shrouded in the mantle of religious mystery, with the temple for its sanctuary, and the pontiff for its sentinel, the vulg-ar eye might shrink and the vulgar spirit shudder. But now it has come forth, visible and tangible, for the inspection of the laity ; and I solemnly protest, dressed as it has been in the double haberdashery of the English minister and the Italian prelate, I know not whether to laugh at its appearance, or to loathe its pretensions to shudder at the deformity of its original creation, or smile at the grotesqueness of its foreign deco- rations. Only just admire this far-famed security bill, this motley compound of oaths and penal- ties, which, underthe name of emancipation, would drag your prelates with an halter about their necks to the vulgar scrutiny of every village- tyrant, in order to enrich a few political traders, and distil through some state alembic the miserable rinsings of an ignorant, a decaying, and degenerate aris- tocracy ! Only just admire it ! Originally engen- dered by our friends the opposition, with a cuckoo insidiousness they swindled it into the nest of the treasury ravens, and when it had been fairly hatch- ed with the beak of the one, and the nakedness of the other, they sent it for its feathers to MON- SEIGNEUR QUARANTOTTI*, who has obligingly transmitted it with the hunger of its parent, the ra- pacity of its nurse, and the coxcombry of its plu- massier, to be baptized by the bishops, and received * Tliis man sent over a rescript from the Pope commanding in some decree the allegiance of Ireland in temporal matters. They spurned it ! AT SLIGO. 5 . STERNE. 81 were dear to him. During their residence in Scotland, a period of about a year, you will find they lived as they had done in Ireland, and as they continued to do until this calamitous occurrence, in a state of uninterrupted happiness. You shall hear, most satisfactorily, that their domestic life was unsullied and undisturbed. Happy at home, happy in a husband's love, happy in her parent's fondness, happy in the children she had nursed, Mrs. Guthrie carried into every circle and there was no circle in which her society was not courted, that cheerfulness which never was a companion of guilt, or a stranger to innocence. My client saw her, the pride of his family, the favourite of his friends at once the organ and ornament of his happiness. His ambition awoke, his industry redoubled ; and fortune, which, though for a season it may frown, never totally abandons pro- bity and virtue, had begun to smile on him. He was beginning to rise in the ranks of his competi- tors, and rising with such a character, that emula- tion itself rather rejoiced than envied. It was at this crisis, in this, the noon of his happiness, and day-spring of his fortune, that, to the ruin of both, the Defendant became acquainted with his family. With the serpent's wile, and the serpent's wicked- ness, he stole into the Eden of domestic life, poi- soning all that was pure, polluting all that was lovely, defying God, destroying man ; a demon in the disguise of virtue, a herald of hell in the para- dise of innocence. His name, Gentlemen, is WILLIAM PETER BAKERDUNSTANVILLESTERNE, one would think he had names enough without G g2 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF adding to them the title of Adulterer. Of his cha* racter I know but little, and I am sorry that I know so much. If I am instructed rightly, he is one of those vain and vapid coxcombs, whose vices tinge the frivolity of their follies with something of a more odious character than ridicule with just head enough to contrive crime, but not heart enough to feel for its consequences ; one of those fashionable insects, that folly has painted, and for- tune plumed, for the annoyance of our atmosphere; dangerous alike in their torpidity and their anima- tion ; infesting where they fly, and poisoning where they repose. It was through the introduc- tion of Mr. Fallon, the son of a most respectable lady, then resident in Temple-street, and a near relative to Mr. Guthrie, that the Defendant and this unfortunate woman first became acquainted : to such an introduction the shadow of a suspicion could not possibly attach. Occupied himself in his professional pursuits, my client had little leisure for the amusement of society : however, to the pro- tection of Mrs. Fallon, her son, and daughters, moving in the first circles, unstained by any pos- sible imputation, he without hesitation intrusted all that was dear to him. No suspicion could be awakened as to any man to whom such a female as Mrs. Fallon permitted an intimacy with her daugh- ters ; while then at her house, and at the parties which it originated, the Defendant and Mrs. Guthrie had frequent opportunities of meeting. Who could have suspected, that, under the very roof of virtue, in the presence of a venerable and respected matron, and of that innocent family, GUTHRIE u. STERNE. 83 whom she had reared up in the sunshine of her example, the most abandoned profligate could have plotted his iniquities ! Who would not rather suppose, that, in the rebuke of such a pre- sence, guilt would have torn away the garland from its brow, and blushed itself into virtue. But the depravity of this man was of no common dye ; the asylum of innocence was selected only as the sanc- tuary of his crimes ; and the pure and spotless chosen as his associates, because they would be more unsuspected subsidiaries to his wickedness. Nor were his manner and his language less suited than his society to the concealment of his objects. If you believed himself, the sight of suffering affected his nerves ; the bare mention of immo- rality smote upon his conscience ; an intercourse with the continental courts had refined his mind into a painful sensibility to the barbarisms of Ire- land ! and yet an internal tenderness towards his native land so irresistibly impelled him to improve it by his residence, that he was a hapless victim to the excess of his feelings ! the exquisiteness of his polish ! and the excellence of his patriotism ! His English estates, he said, amounted to about 10,000 a year; and he retained in Ireland only a trifling 3,000 more, as a kind of trust for the necessities of its inhabitants ! In short, according to his own description, he was in religion a saint, and in morals a stoic ! a sort of wandering phi- lanthropist ! making, like the Sterne, who, he con- fessed, had the honour of his name and his con- nection, a Sentimental Journey in search of objects over whom his heart might weep, and his sensibi- lity expand itself ! 84 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF How happy is it, that, of the philosophic pror fligate only retaining the vices and the name, his rashness has led to the arrest of crimes, which he had all his turpitude to commit, without any of Jiis talents to embellish. It was by arts such as I have alluded to by pretending the most strict morality, the most sen- sitive honour, the most high and undeviating prin- ciples of virtue, that the Defendant banished every suspicion of his designs. As far as appearances went, he was exactly what he described himself. His pretensions to morals he supported by the most reserved and respectful behaviour : his hand was lavish in the distribution of his charities ; and a splendid equipage, a numerous retinue, a system of the most profuse and prodigal expenditure, left no doubt as to the reality of his fortune. Thus circumstanced, he found an easy admittance to the house of Mrs. Fallen, and there he had many op- portunities of seeing Mrs. Guthrie ; for, between his family and that of so respectable a relative as Mrs. Fallon, my client had much anxiety to in- crease the connection. They visited together some of the public amusements ; they partook of some of the fetes in the neighbourhood of the metropo- lis; but upon every occasion, Mrs. Guthrie was accompanied by her own mother, and by the res- pectable females of Mrs. Fallen's family : I say, upon every occasion : and I challenge them to produce one single instance of those innocent excursions, upon which the slanders of an interested calumny have been let loose, in which this unfortunate lady was not matronized by her female relatives, CUTHRIE v. STERNE. 5 those some of the most spotless characters in society. Between Mr. Guthrie and the Defendant the acquaintance was but slight. Upon one oc- casion alone they dined together; it was at the house of the Plaintiff's father-in-law; and, that you may have some illustration of the Defendant's character, I shall briefly instance his conduct at this dinner. On being introduced to Mr. Warren, he apologized for any deficiency of etiquette in his visits, declaring that he had been seriously occu- pied in arranging the affairs of his lamented father, who, though tenant for life, had contracted debts to an enormous amount. He had already paid upwards of 10,000, which honour and not law compelled him to discharge ; as, sweet soul ! he could not bear that any one should suffer unjustly by his family ! His subsequent conduct was quite consistent with this hypocritical preamble : at dinner, he sat at a distance from Mrs. Guthrie ; expatiated to her husband upon matters of moral- ity ; entering into a high-flown panegyric on the virtues of domestic life, and the comforts of con- nubial happiness. In short, had there been any idea of jealousy, his manner would have banished it ; and the mind must have been worse than sceptical, which would refuse its credence to his surface morality. Gracious God ! when the heart once admits guilt as its associate, how every natural emotion flies before it ! Surely, surely, here was a scene to reclaim, if it were possible, this remorseless Defendant admitted to her father's table, under the shield of hospitality, he saw a young and lovely female, surrounded by her pa- Q6 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF rents, her husband, and her children ; the prop of those parents' age ; the idol of that husband's love ; the anchor of those children's helplessness ; the sacred orb of their domestic circle ; giving their smile its light, and their bliss its being: robbed of whose beams the little lucid world of their home must become chill, uncheered and colourless for ever. He saw them happy, he saw them united ; blessed with peace, and purity, and profusion ; throbbing with sympathy and throned in love ; depicting the innocence of infancy, and the joys of manhood, before the venerable eye of age, as if to soften the farewell of one world by the pure and pictured anticipation of a better. Yet, even there, hid in the very sunbeam of that happiness, the demon of its destined desolation lurked. Just heaven ! of what materials was that heart composed, which could meditate coolly on the murder of such enjoyments ; which innocence could not soften, nor peace propitiate, nor hospi- tality appease ; but which, in the very beam and bosom of its benefaction, warmed and excited itself into a more vigorous venom ? Was there no sym- pathy in the scene ? Was there no remorse at the crime ? Was there no horror at its consequences ? " Were honour, virtue, conscience, all exil'd ! Was there no pity, no relenting ruth, To shew the parents fondling o'er their child, Then paint the ruin'd pair and their distraction wild !" BURNS. No! no ! He was at that instant planning their destruction ; and, even within four short days, he deliberately reduced those parents to childishness, GUTHRIE v. STERNE. 87 that husband to widowhood, those smiling infants to anticipated orphanage, and that peaceful, hos- pitable, confiding family, to helpless, hopeless, irremediable ruin ! Upon the first day of the ensuing July, Mr. Guthrie was to dine with the Connaught bar, at the hotel of Portobello. It is a custom, I am told, with the gentlemen of that association to dine together previous to the circuit ; of course my client could not have decorously absented himself. Mrs. Guthrie appeared a little feverish, and he requested that, on his retiring, she would compose herself to rest ; she promised him she would ; and when he departed, somewhat abruptly, to put some letters in the post-office, she exclaimed, " What ! John, are you going to leave me thus ? " He re- turned, and she kissed him. They seldom parted, even for any time, without that token of affection. I am thus minute, Gentlemen, that you may see, up to the last moment, what little cause the husband had for suspicion, and how impossible it was for him to foresee a perfidy which nothing short of infatuation could have produced. He proceeded to his companions with no other regret than that necessity, for a moment, forced him from a home, which the smile of affection had never ceased to endear to him. After a day, however, passed, as such a day might have been supposed to pass, in the flow of soul and the philosophy of pleasure, he returned home to share his happiness with her, without whom no happiness ever had been perfect. Alas ! he was never to behold her more ! Imagine, if you can, the phrenzy of his 83 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF astonishment, in being informed by Mrs. Porter, the daughter of the former landlady, that about two hours before, she had attended Mrs. Guthrie to a confectioner's shop ; that a carriage had drawn up at the corner of the street, into which a gentle- man, whom she recognized to be a Mr. Sterne, had handed her, and they instantly departed. I must tell you, there is every reason to believe, that this woman was the confident of the con- spiracy. What a pity that the object of that guilty confidence had not something of humanity ; that, as a female, she did not feel for the character of her sex ; that, as a mother, she did not mourn over the sorrows of a helpless family ! What pangs might she not have spared ? My client could hear no more : even at the dead of night he rushed into the street, as if in its own dark hour he could dis- cover guilt's recesses. In vain did he awake the peaceful family of the horror-struck Mrs. Fallon ; in vain with the parents of the miserable fugitive did he mingle the tears of an impotent distraction ; in vain, a miserable maniac did he traverse the silent streets of the metropolis, affrighting virtue from its slumbers with the spectre of its own ruin. I will not harrow you with its heart-rending reci- tal. But imagine you see him, when the day had dawned, returning wretched to his deserted dwelling ; seeing in every chamber a memorial of his loss, and hearing every tongueless object eloquent of his woe. Imagine you see him, in the reverie of his grief, trying to persuade himself it was all a vision, and awakened only to the hor- rid truth by his helpless children asking him for GUTHRIE v. STERNE. 8f their mother ! Gentlemen, this is not a picture of the fancy ; it literally occurred : there is something less of romance in the reflection, which his chil- dren awakened in the mind of their afflicted father ; he ordered that they should be immediately habited in mourning. How rational sometimes are the ravings of insanity ! For all the purposes of maternal life, poor innocents ! they have no mo- ther ; her tongue no more can teach, her hand no more can tend them ; for them there is not " specu- lation in her eyes ;" to them her life is some- thing worse than death ; as if the awful grave had yawned her forth, she moves before them, shrouded all in sin, the guilty burden of its peaceless sepul- chre. Better, far better, their little feet had follow- ed in her funeral, than that the hour which taught her value, should reveal her vice mourning her loss, they might have blessed her memory ; and shame need not have rolled its fires into the foun- tain of their sorrow. As soon as his reason became sufficiently col- lected, Mr. Guthrie pursued the fugitives : he traced them successively to Kildare, to Carlo w, Waterford, Milford-haven, on through Wales, and finally to Ilfracombe, in Devonshire, where the clue was lost. I am glad that, in this rout and restlessness of their guilt, as the crime they per- petrated was foreign to our soil, they did not make that soil the scene of its habitation. I will not follow them through this joyless journey, nor brand by my record the unconscious scene of its pollu- tion. But philosophy never taught, the pulpit never enforced, a more imperative morality than 90 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF the itinerary of that accursed tour promulgates. Oh ! if there be a maid or matron in this island, balancing between the alternative of virtue and of crime, trembling between the hell of the seducer and the adulterer, and the heaven of the paternal and the nuptial home, let her pause upon this one out of the many horrors I could depict, and be converted. I will give you the relation in the very words of my brief ; I cannot improve upon the simplicity of the recital : " On the 7th of July they arrived at Milford ; the captain of the packet dined with them, and was astonished at the magnificence of her dress. 5 ' (Poor wretch ! she was decked and adorned for the sacrifice !) " The next day they dined alone. Towards evening, the housemaid, passing near their chamber, heard Mr. Sterne scolding, and apparently beating her ! In a short time after, Mrs. Guthrie rushed out of her chamber into the drawing-room, and throwing herself in agony upon the sofa, she exclaimed, " Oh! what an unhappy wretch I am ! / left my /tome, where I was happy, too happy, seduced by a man who has deceived me. My poor HUSBAND ! my dear CHILDREN ! Oh ! if they would even let my little WILLIAM live with me ! it would be some consolation to my BROKEN HEART. 3> " Alas ! nor children more shall she behold, " Nor friends, nor sacred home." Well might she lament over her fallen fortunes ! well might she mourn over the memory of days when the sun of heaven seemed to rise but for her happiness ! well might she recal the home she had GUTHRIE v. STERNE. yi endeared, the children she had nursed, the hapless husband, of whose life she was the pulse! But one short week before, this earth could not reveal a lovelier vision : Virtue blessed, affection fol- lowed, beauty beamed on her ; the light of every eye, the charm of every heart, she moved along- in cloudless chastity, cheered by the song of love, and circled by the splendours she created ! Be- hold her now, the loathsome refuse of an adulterous bed ; festering in the very infection of her crime ; the scoff and scorn of their unmanly, merciless, in- human author ? But thus it ever is with the vo- taries of guilt ; the birth of their crime is the death of their enjoyment ; and the wretch who flings his offering on its altar, falls an immediate victim to the flame of his devotion. I am glad it is so ; it is a wise,, retributive dispensation; it bears the stamp of a preventive Providence. I rejoice it is so in the present instance, first, because this premature infliction must ensure repentance in the wretched sufferer ; and next, because, as this adulterous fiend has rather acted on the suggestions of his nature than his shape, by rebelling against the finest impulses of man, he has made himself an outlaw from the sympathies of humanity. Why should he expect that charity from you, which he would not spare even to the misfortunes he had inflicted ? For the honour of the form in which he is disguised, I am willing to hope he was so blinded by his vice, that he did not see the full extent of those misfortunes. If he had feelings capable of being touched, it is not to the faded victim of her own weakness, and of his wicked- 92 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF ness, that I would direct them. There is some- thing in her crime which affrights charity from its commiseration. But, Gentlemen, there is one, over whom pity may mourn, for he is wretched ; and mourn without a blush, for he is guiltless. How shall I depict to you the deserted husband ? To every other object in this catalogue of calamity there is some stain attached which checks compas- sion. But here Oh ! if ever there was a man amiable, it was that man. Oh! if ever there was a husband fond, it was that husband. His hope, his joy, his ambition, was domestic ; his toils were forgotten in the affections of his home ; and amid every adverse variety of fortune, hope pointed to his children, and he was comforted. By this vile act that hope is blasted, that home is a desert, those children are parentless ! In vain do they look to their surviving parent: his heart is broken, his mind is in ruins, his very form is fading from the earth. He had one consolation, an aged mo- ther, on whose life the remnant of his fortunes hung, and on whose protection of his children his remaining prospects rested ; even that is over ; she could not survive his shame, she never raised her head, she became hearsed in his mis- fortune ; he has followed her funeral. If this be not the climax of human misery, tell me in what does human misery consist ? Wife, parent, for- tune, prospects, happiness, all gone at once, and gone for ever ! For my part, when 1 con- template this, I do not wonder at the faded form, the dejected air, the emaciat .'d countenance, and all the ruinous and mouldering trophies, by which GUTHRIE r. STERNE. 93 misery has marked its triumph over youth, and health, and happiness? I know, that in the hordes of what is called fashionable life, there is a sect of philosophers, wonderfully patient of their fel- low-creatures' sufferings ; men too insensible to feel for any one, or too selfish to feel for others. I trust there is not one amongst you who can even hear of such calamities without affliction ; or, if there be, I pray that he may never know their import by experience ; that having, in the wilder- ness of this world, but one dear and darling ob- ject, without whose participation bliss would be joyless, and in whose sympathies sorrow has found a charm ; whose smile has cheered his toil, whose love has pillowed his misfortunes, whose angel- spirit, guiding him through danger, darkness, and despair, amid the world's frown and the friend's perfidy, was more than friend, and world, and all to him ! God forbid, that by a villain's wile, or a villain's wickedness, he should be taught how to appreciate the woe of others in the dismal soli- tude of his own. Oh, no ! I feel that 1 address myself to human beings, who, knowing the value of what the world is worth, are capable of appre- ciating all that makes it dear to us. Observe, however, lest this crime should want aggravation observe, I beseech you, the period of its accomplishment. My client was not so young as that the elasticity of his spirit could re- bound and bear him above the pressure of the misfortune, nor was he withered by age into a comparative insensibility ; but just at that tem- perate interval of manhood, when passion had 94 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF ceased to play, and reason begins to operate ; when love, gratified, left him nothing to desire ; and fi- delity, long tried, left him nothing to apprehend > he was just, too, at that period of his professional career, when, his patient industry having con- quered the ascent, he was able to look around him from the height on which he rested. For this, welcome had been the day of tumult, and the pale midnight lamp succeeding ; welcome had been the drudgery of form ; welcome the analysis of crime ; welcome the sneer of envy, and the scorn of dulness, and all the spurns which "patient me- rit of the unworthy takes." For this he had en- countered, perhaps, the generous rivalry of ge- nius, perhaps the biting blasts of poverty, perhaps the efforts of that deadly slander, which, coiling round the cradle of his young ambition, might have sought to crush him in its envenomed foldings. " Ah ! who can tell how hard it is to climb The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar? Ah ! who can tell how many a soul sublime Hath felt the influence of malignant star, And waged with fortune an eternal war?" Can such an injury as this admit of justifica- tion ? I think the learned counsel will concede it cannot. But it may be palliated. Let us see how. Perhaps the Defendant was young and thoughtless ; perhaps unmerited prosperity raised him above the pressure of misfortune ; and the wild pulses of impetuous passion impelled him to a purpose at which his experience would have shuddered. Quite the contrary. The noon of manhood has GUTHRIE c. STERNE. 95 almost passed over him ; and a youth, spent in the recesses of a debtor's prison, made him fami- liar with every form of human misery : he saw what misfortune was ; it did not teach him pity: he saw the effects of guilt ; he spurned the ad- monition. Perhaps in the solitude of a single life, he had never known the social blessedness of mar- riage ; he has a wife and children ; or, if she be not his wife, she is the victim of his crime, and adds another to the calendar of his seduction. Certain it is, he has little children, who think themselves legitimate ; will his advocates defend him, by proclaiming their bastardy ? Certain it is, there is a wretched female, his own cousin too, who thinks herself his wife ; will they protect him, by proclaiming he has only deceived her into being his prostitute ? Perhaps his crime, as in the celebrated case of Howard, immortalized by Lord Erskine, may have found its origin in pa- rental cruelty ; it might perhaps have been, that in their spring of life, when Fancy waved her fairy wand around them, till all above was sun- shine, and all beneath was flowers ; when to their clear and charmed vision this ample world was but a weedless garden, where every tint spoke Nature's loveliness, and every sound breathed Heaven's melody, and every breeze was but em- bodied fragrance ; it might have been that, in this cloudless holiday, Love wove his roseate bondage round them, till their young hearts so grew toge- ther, a separate existence ceased, and life itself became a sweet identity ; it might have been that, envious of this paradise, some worse than demon JXJ SPEECH IN THE CASE OF tor them from each other, to pine for years in absence, and at length to perish in a palliated im- piety. Oh ! Gentlemen, in such a case, Justice herself, with her uplifted sword, would call on Mercy to preserve the victim. There was no such palliation : the period of their acquaintance was little more than sufficient for the maturity of their crime ; and they dare not libel Love, by shielding under its soft and sacred name the loathsome re- vels of an adulterous depravity. It might have been^ the husband's cruelty left a too easy inroad for seduction. Will they dare assert it ? Ah ! too well they knew he would not let " the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly." Monstrous as it is, I have heard, indeed, that they mean to rest upon an opposite palliation ; I have heard it rumoured, that they mean to rest the wife's infi- delity upon the husband's fondness. I know that guilt, in its conception mean, and in its commis- sion tremulous, is, in its exposure, desperate and audacious. I know that, in the fugitive panic of its retreat, it will stop to fling its Parthian poison upon the justice that pursues it. But I do hope, bad and abandoned, and hopeless as their cause is, I do hope, for the sake of human nature, that I have been deceived in the rumours of this un- natural defence. Merciful God ! is it in the pre- sence of this venerable Court, is it in the hearing of this virtuous Jury, is it in the zenith of an en- lightened age, that I am to be told, because fe- male tenderness was not watched with worse than Spanish vigilance, and harassed with worse than eastern severity ; because the marriage-contract is GUTHKiE P. STERNE. 97 hot converted into the curse of incarceration ; be- cause woman is allowed the dignity of a human soul, and man does not degrade himself into a human monster ; because the vow of endearment is not made the vehicle of deception, and the al- tar's pledge is not become the passport of a bar- barous perjury ; and that too in a land of courage and chivalry, where the female form has been held as a patent direct from the Divinity, bearing in its chaste and charmed helplessness the assur- ance of its strength, and the amulet of its protec- tion : am I to be told, that the demon adulterer is^ therefore not only to perpetrate his crimes, but to vindicate himself, through the very virtues he has violated ? I cannot believe it ; I dismiss the supposition : it is most " monstrous, foul, unna- tural." Suppose that the Plaintiff pursued a dif- ferent principle ; suppose that his conduct had been the reverse of what it was ; suppose, that in place of being kind, he had been cruel to this deluded female ; that he had been her tyrant, not her protector; her goaler, not her husband: what then might have been the defence of the adul- terer ? Might he not then say, and say with spe- ciousness, " True, I seduced her into crime, but it was to save her from cruelty ; true, she is my adulteress, because he was her despot." Happily, Gentlemen, he can say no such thing. I have heard it said, too, during the ten months of ca- lumny, for which, by every species of legal delay, they have procrastinated this trial, that, next to the impeachment of the husband's tenderness, they mean to rely on what they libel as the levity H 98 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF of their unhappy victim ! I know not by what right any man, but above all, a married man, presumes to scrutinize into the conduct of a married female. I know not, Gentlemen, how you would feel, un- der the consciousness that every coxcomb was at liberty to estimate the warmth, or the coolness, of your wives, by the barometer of his vanity, that he might ascertain precisely the prudence of an invasion on their virtue. But I do know, that such a defence, coming from such a quarter, would not at all surprise me. Poor unfortunate fallen female ! How can she expect mercy from her destroyer ? How can she expect that he will re- vere the character she was careless of preserving ? How can she suppose that, after having made her peace the pander to his appetite, he will not make her reputation the victim of his avarice ? Such a defence is quite to be expected : knowing him, it will not surprise me ; if 1 know you, it will not avail him. Having now shewn you, that a crime, almost unprecedented in this country, is clothed in every aggravation, and robbed of every palliative, it is natural you should enquire, what was the motive for its commission ? What do you think it was ? Providentially miraculously, 1 should have said, for you never could have divined the Defendant has himself disclosed it. What do think it was, Gentlemen ? Ambition! But a few days before his criminality, in answer to a friend, who rebuked him for the almost princely expenditure of his habits, " Oh," says he, " never mind ; Sterne must do something by which Sterne may be known!" 1 had heard, indeed, that ambition was GUTHRIE . STERNE. 99 a vice, but then a vice, so equivocal, it verged on virtue ; that it was the aspiration of a spirit, sometimes perhaps appalling, always magnificent ; that though its grasp might be fate, and its flight might be famine, still it reposed on earth's pin- nacle, and played in heaven's lightnings ; that though it might fall in ruins, it arose in fire, and was withal so splendid, that even the horrors of that fall became immerged and mitigated in the beauties of that aberration ! But here is an ambi- tion ! base, and barbarous, and illegitimate; with all the grossness of the vice, with none of the grandeur of the virtue; a mean, muffled, dastard incendiary, who, in the silence of sleep, and in the shades of midnight, steals his Ephesian torch into the fane, which it was virtue to adore, and worse than sacrilege to have violated ! Gentlemen, my part is done ; yours is about to commence. You have heard this crime its ori- gin, its progress, its aggravations, its novelty among us. Go and tell your children and your country, whether or not it is to be made a pre- cedent. Oh, how awful is your responsibility ! I do not doubt that you will discharge yourselves of it as becomes your characters. I am sure, indeed, that you will mourn with me over the almost solitary defect in our otherwise match- less system of jurisprudence, which leaves the per- petrators of such an injury as this, subject to no amercement but that of money. I think you will lament the failure of the great Cicero of our age, to bring such an offence within the cognizance of a criminal jurisdiction : it was a subject suited to his great mind, worthy of his feeling- heart, H 2 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF worthy of his immortal eloquence. I cannot, my Lord, even remotely allude to Lord Ersktne, with- out gratifying myself by saying of him, that by the rare union of all that was learned in law with all that was lucid in eloquence ; by the singular combination of all that was pure in morals with all that was profound in wisdom ; he has stamped upon every action of his life the blended authority of a great mind, and an unquestionable convic- tion. I think, Gentlemen, you will regret the failure of such a man in such an object. The merciless murderer may have manliness to plead ; the highway robber may have want to palliate ; yet they both are objects of criminal infliction; but the murderer of connubial bliss, who commits his crime in secrecy ; the robber of domestic joys, whose very wealth, as in this case, may be his instrument ; he is suffered to calculate on the infernal fame which a superfluous and unfelt ex- penditure may purchase. The law, however, is so : and we must adopt the only remedy it affords us. In your adjudication of that remedy, I do not ask too much, when I ask the full extent of your capability: how poor, even so, is the wretch- ed remuneration for an injury which nothing can repair, for a loss which nothing can alleviate ? Do you think that a mine could recompense my client for the forfeiture of her w ho was dearer than life to him ? " Oh, had she been but true, Though Heaven had made him such another world, Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, He'd not exchange her for it !" GUTHRIE v. STERNE. 101 I put it to any of you, what would you take to stand in his situation ? What would you take to have your prospects blasted, your profession de- spoiled, your peace ruined, your bed profaned, your parents heart-broken, your children parent- less ? Believe me, Gentlemen, if it were not for those children, he would not come here to-day to seek such remuneration ; if it were not that, by your verdict, you may prevent those little inno- cent defrauded wretches from wandering, beggars, as well as orphans, on the face of this earth. Oh, I know I need not ask this verdict from your mercy; I need not extort it from your compas- sion ; I will receive it from your justice. I do conjure you, not as fathers, but as husbands; not as husbands, but as citizens ; not as citizens, but as men ; not as men, but as Christians ; by all your obligations, public, private, moral, and religious ; by the hearth profaned ; by the home desolated ; by the canons of the living God foully spurned ; save, oh ! save your fire-sides from the contagion, your country from the crime, and per- haps thousands, yet unborn, from the shame, and sin, and sorrow of this example ! SPEECH OF MR. PHIIL1LIPS IN THE CASE OF O'MULLAN v. M'KORKILL, DELIVERED IN THE COUNTY COURT-HOUSE, GALWAY. My Lords and Gentlemen, I JLM instructed as of counsel for the Plaintiff, to state to you the circumstances in which this ac- tion has originated. It is a source to me, I will confess it, of much personal embarrassment. Fee- bly, indeed, can I attempt to convey to you, the feelings with which a perusal of this brief has af- fected me ; painful to you must be my inefficient transcript painful to all who have the common feelings of country or of kind, must be this cala- mitous compendium of all that degrades our indi- vidual nature, and of all that has, for many an age of sorrow, perpetuated a curse upon our national character. It is, perhaps, the misery of this pro- fession, that every hour our vision may be blasted by some withering crime, and our hearts wrung SPEECH. 103 with some agonizing recital ; there is no frightful form of vice, or no disgusting phantom of infir- mity, which guilt does not array in spectral train before us. Horrible is the assemblage ! humiliat- ing the application ! but, thank God, even amid those very scenes of disgrace and of debasement, occasions oft arise for the redemption of our dig- nity ; occasions, on which the virtues breathed into us, by heavenly inspiration, walk abroad in the divinity of their exertion ; before whose beam the wintry robe falls from the form of virtue, and all the midnight images of horror vanish into no- thing. Joyfully and piously do I recognize such an occasion ; gladly do I invoke you to the ge- nerous participation ; yes, Gentlemen, though you must prepare to hear much that degrades our na- ture, much that distracts our country though all that oppression could devise against the poor though all that persecution could inflict upon the feeble though all that vice could wield against the pious though all that the venom of a venal turpitude could pour upon the patriot, must with their alternate apparition afflict, affright, and hu- miliate you, still do I hope, that over this charnel- house of crime over this very sepulchre, where corruption sits enthroned upon the merit it has murdered, that voice is at length about to be heard, at which the martyred victim will arise to vindicate the ways of Providence, and prove that even in its worst adversity there is a might and immortality in virtue. The Plaintiff, Gentlemen, you have heard, is the Rev. Cornelius O'Mullan ; he is a clergyman 104 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF of tlie church of Rome, and became invested with that venerable appellation, so far back as Septem- ber, 1804. It is a title which you know, in this country, no rank ennobles, no treasure enriches, no establishment supports ; its possessor stands undisguised by any rag of this world's decoration, resting- all temporal, all eternal hope upon his toil, his talents, his attainments, and his piety doubt- less, after all, the highest honours, as well as the most imperishable treasures of the man of God. Year after year passed over my client, and each anniversary only gave him an additional title to these qualifications. His precept was but the handmaid to his practice ; the sceptic heard him, and was convinced ; the ignorant attended him, and were taught ; he smoothed the death-bed of too heedless wealth ; he rocked the cradle of the infant charity : oh, no wonder he walked in the sunshine of the public eye, no wonder he toiled through the pressure of the public benediction. This is not an idle declamation ; such was the re- sult his ministry produced, that within five years from the date of its commencement, nearly j2,000 of voluntary subscription enlarged the temple where such precepts were taught, and such piety exemplified. Such was the situation of Mr. O'Mul- lan, when a dissolution of parliament took place, and an unexpected contest for the representation of Deny, threw that county into unusual commo- tion. One of the candidates was of the Ponsonby family a family devoted to the interests, and dear to the heart of Ireland ; he naturally thought that his parliamentary conduct entitled him to the O'MULLAN . M'KORKILL. 105 vote of every Catholic in the land ; and so it did, not only of every Catholic, but of every Christian who preferred the diffusion of the Gospel to the ascendancy of a sect, and loved the principles of the constitution better than the pretensions of a party. Perhaps you will think with me, that there is a sort of posthumous interest thrown about that event, when I tell you, that the candidate on that occasion was the lamented Hero over whose tomb the tears, not only of Ireland, but of Europe, have been so lately shed ; he who, mid the blossom of the world's chivalry, died conquering a deathless name upon the field of Waterloo. He applied to Mr. O'Mullan for his interest, and that interest was cheerfully given, the concurrence of his bishop having been previously obtained. Mr. Ponsonby succeeded ; and a dinner, to which all parties were invited, and from which all party spirit was expected to absent itself, was given to commemo- rate one common triumph the purity and the privileges of election. In other countries, such an expectation might be natural ; the exercise of a noble constitutional privilege, the triumph of a great popular cause, might not unaptly expand itself in the intercourse of the board, and unite all hearts in the natural bond of festive commemora- tion. But, alas, Gentlemen, in this unhappy land, such has been the result, whether of our faults, our follies, or our misfortunes, that a detestable disunion converts the very balm of the bowl into poison, commissioning its vile and harpy offspring, to turn even our festivity into famine. My client was at this dinner ; it was not to be endured that a Catholic should pollute with his presence the 105 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF civic festivities of the loyal Londonderry ! such an intrusion, even the acknowledged sanctity of his character could not excuse ; it became necessary to insult him. There is a toast, which, perhaps, few in this united county are in the habit of hear- ing, but it is the invariable watch-word of the Orange orgies ; it is briefly entitled " The glori- ous, pious, and immortal memory of the great and good King William." I have no doubt the sim- plicity of your understandings is puzzled how to discover any offence in the commemoration of the Revolution Hero. The loyalists of Derry are more wise in their generation. There, when some Bacchanalian bigots wish to avert the intrusive visitations of their own memory, they commence by violating the memory of King William*. Those who happen to have shoes or silver in their frater- nity no very usual occurrence thank His Ma- jesty that the shoes are not wooden, and that the silver is not brass, a commodity, by the bye, of which any legacy would have been quite super- fluous. The Pope comes in for a pious benedic- tion : and the toast concludes with a patriotic wish, for all of his persuasion, by the consumma- tion of which, there can be no doubt, the hempen manufactures of this country would experience * This loyal toast, handed down by Orange tradition, is lite- rally as follows we give it for the edification of the sister island : " The glorious, pious, and immortal memory of the great and good King William, who saved us from Pope and Popery, James and slavery, brass money and wooden shoes: here is bad luck to the Pope, and a hempen rope to all Papists " It is drank kneeling, if they cannot stand, nine times nine, amid various mysteries which none but the elect can comprehend. O'MULLAN v. M'KORKILL. 107 a very considerable consumption. Such, Gentle- men, is the enlightened, and liberal, and social sentiment of which the first sentence, all that is usually given, forms the suggestion. I must not omit that it is generally taken standing, always providing it be in the power of the company. This toast was pointedly given to insult Mr. O'Mul- lan. Naturally averse to any altercation, his most obvious course was to quit the company, and this he did immediately. He was, however, as immediately recalled by an intimation, that the Catholic question, and might its claims be consi- dered justly and liberally, had been toasted as a peace-offering by Sir George Hill, the City Re- corder. My client had no gall in his disposition ; he at once clasped to his heart the friendly over- ture, and in such phrase as his simplicity sup- plied, poured forth the gratitude of that heart to the liberal Recorder. Poor O'Mullan had the wisdom to imagine that the politician's compli- ment was the man's conviction, and that a table toast was the certain prelude to a parliamentary suffrage. Despising all experience, he applied the adage, Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currant, to the Irish patriot. I need not paint to you the consternation of Sir George, at so unusual and so unparliamentary a construction. He indignantly disclaimed the intention imputed to him, denied and deprecated the unfashionable inference, and acting on the broad scale of an impartial policy, gave to one party the weight of his vote, and to the other, the (no doubt in his opinion) equally valuable acquisition of his elo- SPEECH The Defendant, Gentlemen, cannot complain that I put it thus to you. If, in place of seduc- ing, he had assaulted this poor girl if he had attempted by force what he has achieved by fraud, his life would have been the forfeit ; and yet how trifling in comparison would have been the pa- rent's agony ! He has no right, then, to complain, if you should estimate this outrage at the price of his very existence ! lam told, indeed, this gen- tlemen entertains an opinion, prevalent enough in the age of a feudalism, as arrogant as it was barbarous, that the poor are only a species of pro- perty, to be treated according to interest or ca- price ; and that wealth is at once a patent for crime, and an exemption from its consequences. CONNAGHTON v. DILLON. 143 Happily for this land, the clay of such opinions has passed over it the eye of a purer feeling and more profound philosophy now beholds riches but as one of the aids to virtue, and sees in oppressed poverty only an additional stimulus to increased protection. A generous heart cannot help feel- ing, that in cases of this kind the poverty of the injured is a dreadful aggravation. If the rich suf- fer, they have much to console them ; but when a poor man loses the darling of heart the sole pleasure with which nature blessed him how ab- ject, how cureless is the despair of his destitu- tion ! Believe me, Gentlemen, you have not only a solemn duty to perform, but you have an awful responsibility imposed upon you. You are this day, in some degree, trustees for the morality of the people perhaps of the w 7 hole nation ; for, de- pend upon it, if the sluices of immorality are once opened among the lower orders, the frightful tide, drifting upon its surface all that is dignified or dear, will soon rise even to the habitations of the highest. I feel, Gentlemen, I have discharged my duty I am sure you will do your's. I repose my client with confidence in your hands; and most fervently do I hope, that when evening shall find you at your happy fire-side, surrounded by the sacred circle of your children, you may not feel the heavy curse gnawing at your heart, of having let loose, unpunished, the prowler that may devour them. SPEECH OF MR. PHILLIPS IN THE CASE OF CREIGHTON v. TOWNSEND; IN THE COURT OF COMMON PLEAS, DUBLIN. My Lord and Gentlemen, I am with my learned brethren Counsel for the Plaintiff. My friend Mr. Curran has told you the nature of the action. It has fallen to my lot to state more at large to you the aggression by which it has been occasioned. Believe me, it is with no paltry affectation of under-valuing my very humble powers that I wish he had selected some more experienced, or at least less credulous advocate. I feel I cannot do my duty ; I am not fit to address you, I have incapacitated myself; I know not whether any of the calumnies which have so industriously anticipated this trial, have reached your ears ; but I do confess they did so wound and poison mine, that to satisfy my doubts I visited the house of misery and mourning, and the scene which set scepticism at rest, has set des- CREIGHTON . TOWNSfeND. 145 Cription at defiance. Had I not yielded to those interested misrepresentations, I might from my brief have sketched the fact, and from my fancy drawn the consequences ; but as it is, reality rushes before my frighted memory, and silences the tongue and mocks the imagination. Believe: nie, Gentlemen, you are impannelled there upon no ordinary occasion ; nominally, indeed, you are to repair a priyate wrong*, and it is a wrong as deadly as human wickedness can inflict as hu- man weakness can endure ; a wrong which anni- hilates the hope of the parent and the happiness of the child ; which in one moment blights the fondest anticipations of the heart, and darkens the social hearth, and worse than depopulates the ha- bitations of the happy ! But, Gentlemen, high as it is, this is far from your exclusive duty. You are to do much more. You are to say whether an example of such transcendant turpitude is to stalk forth for public imitation whether national mo- rals are to have the law for their protection, Or imported crime is to feed upon impunity whe* ther chastity and religion are still to be permitted to linger in this province, or it is to become one loathsome den of legalized prostitution whether the sacred volume of the Gospel, and the venera- ble statutes of the law are still to be respected, or converted into a pedestal on which the mob and the military are to erect the idol of a drunken adoration. Gentlemen, these are the questions you are to try ; hear the facts on which your de- cision must be founded. It is now about five-and-twenty years since the L 146 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF plaintiff, Mr. Creighton, commenced business as a slate merchant in the city of Dublin. His vo- cation was humble, it is true, but it was neverthe- less honest ; and though, unlike his opponent, the heights of ambition lay not before him, the path of respectability did he approved himself a good man and a respectable citizen. Arrived at the age of manhood, he sought not the gratification of its natural desires by adultery or seduction. For him the home of honesty was sacred ; for him the poor man's child was unassailed ; no domestic desolation mourned his enjoyment ; no anniver- sary of woe commemorated his achievements; from his own sphere of life naturally and honourably he selected a companion, whose beauty blessed his bed, and whose virtues consecrated his dwelling. Eleven lovely children blessed their union, the darlings of their heart, the delight of their even- ings, and as they blindly anticipated, the prop and solace of their approaching age. Oh! SACRED WEDDED LOVE ! how dear ! how delightful ! how divine are thy enjoyments! Contentment crowns thy board, affection glads thy fire-side ; pas- sion, chaste but ardent, modest but intense, sighs o'er thy couch, the atmosphere of Paradise ! Surely, surely, if this consecrated right can ac- quire from circumstances a factitious interest, 'tis when we see it cheering the poor man's home, or shedding over the dwelling of misfor- tune the light of its warm and lovely consolation. That capricious power which often dignifies the worthless hypocrite, as often wounds the indus- trious and the honest. The late ruinous contest, CREIGHTON . TOWNSEND. 147 having* in its career confounded all the propor- tions of society, and with its last gasp sighed fa- mine and misfortune on the world, has cast my industrious client, with too many of his compa- nions, from competence to penury. Alas, alas, to him it left worse of its satellites behind it ; it left the invader even of his misery the seducer of his sacred and unspotted innocent. Mysterious Providence ! was it not enough that sorrow robed the happy home in mourning was it not enough that disappointment preyed upon its loveliest prospects was it not enough that its little in- mates cried in vain for bread, and heard no an- swer but the poor father's sigh, and drank no sus- tenance but the wretched mother's tears ? Was this a time for passion, lawless, conscienceless, licentious passion, with its eye of lust, its heart of stone, its hand of rapine, to rush into the mourn- ful sanctuary of misfortune, casting crime into the cup of woe, and rob the parents of their last wealth, their child, and rob the child of her only charm, her innocence ! ! That this has been done I am instructed we shall prove : what requital it deserves, Gentlemen, you must prove to mankind. The defendant's name I understand is TOWNS- END. He is of an age when every generous blos- som of the spring should breathe an infant fresh- ness round his heart ; of a family which should inspire not only high but hereditary principles of honour ; of a profession whose very essence is a stainless chivalry, and whose bought and bounden duty is the protection of the citizen. Such are the advantages with which he appears before you L2 148 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF fearful advantages, because they repel all possible suspicion; but you will agree with me, most damning adversaries, if it shall appear that the ge- nerous ardour of his youth was chilled that the noble inspiration of his birth was spurned that the lofty impulse of his profession was despised and that all that could grace, or animate, or en- noble, was used to his own discredit and his fellow-creature's misery. It was upon the first day of June last, that on the banks of the canal, near Portobello, Lieutenant Townsend first met the daughter of Mr. Creighton, a pretty, interesting girl, scarcely sixteen years of age. She was accompanied by her little sister, only four years old, with whom she was permitted to take a daily walk in that retired spot, the vicinity of her residence. The Defendant was attracted by her appearance he left his party, and attempted to converse with her ; she repelled his advances he immediately seized her infant sister by the hand, whom he held as a kind of hostage for an intro- duction to his victim. A prepossessing appearance, a modesty of deportment apparently quite incom- patible with any evil design, gradually silenced her alarm, and she answered the common-place ques- tions with which, on her way home, he addressed her. Gentlemen, I admit it was an innocent im- prudence ; the rigid rules of matured morality should have repelled such communication ; yet, perhaps, judging even by that strict standard, you will rather condemn the familiarity of the intru- sion in a designing adult than the facility of access in a creature of her age and her innocence. They CREIGHTON r. TOWNSEND. 149 thus separated, as she naturally supposed, to meet, no more. Not such, however, was the deter- mination of her destroyer. From that hour until her ruin, he scarcely ever lost sight of her he followed her as a shadow he way-laid her in her walks he interrupted her in her avocations he haunted the street of her residence ; if she refused to meet him, he paraded before her window at the hazard of exposing her first comparatively in- nocent imprudence to her unconscious parents. How happy would it have been had she conquered the timidity, so natural to her age, and appealed at once to their pardon and their protection ! Gentlemen, this daily persecution continued for three months for three successive months, by every art, by every persuasion, by every appeal to her vanity and her passions, did he toil for the de- struction of this unfortunate young creature. I leave you to guess how many during that interval might have yielded to the blandishments of manner, the fascinations of youth, the rarely resisted tempta*- tions of opportunity. For three long months she did resist them. She would have resisted them for ever but for an expedient which is without a model but for an exploit which I trust in God will be without an imitation. Oh yes, he might have returned to his country, and did he but re- flect, he would rather have rejoiced at the virtuous triumph of his victim, than mourned his own soul- redeeming defeat; he might have returned to his country, and told the cold-blooded libellers of this land that their speculations upon Irish chastity were prejudiced and proofless ; that in the wreck of 150 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF all else we had retained our honour ; that though the national luminary had descended for a season, the streaks of its loveliness still lingered on our horizon ; that the nurse of that genius which abroad had redeemed the name, arid dignified the nature of man, was to be found at home in the spirit without a stain, and the purity without a suspicion. He might have told them truly that this did not result, as they would intimate, from the absence of passion or the want of civilization ; that it was the combined consequence of education, of example, and of impulse; and that, though in all the revelry of enjoyment, the fair floweret of the Irish soil exhaled its fragrance and expanded its charms in the chaste and blessed beams of a virtuous affection, still it shrunk with an in-* stinctive sensitiveness from the gross pollution of an unconsecrated contact ! Gentlemen, the common artifices of the seducer failed ; the syren tones with which sensuality awakens appetite and lulls purity had wasted them- selves in air, and the intended victim, deaf to their fascination, moved along safe and untransformed. He soon saw, that young as she was, the vulgar expedients of vice were ineffectual ; that the at- tractions of a glittering exterior failed : and that before she could be tempted to her sensual dam- nation, his tongue must learn, if not the words of wisdom, at least the speciousness of affected purity. He pretended an affection as virtuous as it was violent ; he called God to witness the sincerity of his declarations ; by all the vows which should for ever rivet the honourable, and could not fail to CREIGHTON v. TOWNSEND. 151 convince even the incredulous, he promised her marriage; over and over again he invoked the eternal denunciation if he was perfidious. To her acknowledged want of fortune, his constant reply was, that he had an independance ; that all he wanted was beauty and virtue ; that he saw she had the one, that he had prored she had the other. When she pleaded the obvious disparity of her birth, he answered that he was himself only the son of an English fanner ; that happiness was not the mono- poly of rank or riches; that his parents would receive her as the child of their adoption; that he would cherish her as the charm of his existence. Specious as it was, even this did not succeed ; she determined to await its avowal to those who had given her life, and who hoped to have made it im- maculate by the education they had bestowed and the example they had afforded. Some days after this he met her in her walks, for she could not pass her parental threshold without being intercepted. He asked her where she wasgoing she said, afriend knowing her fondness for books had promised her the loan of some, and she was going to receive them. He told her that he had abundance, that they were just at his home, that he hoped after what had passed she would feel no impropriety in accepting them. She was persuaded to accompany him. Arrived, however, at the door of his lodgings, she positively refused to go any farther ; all his former artifices were redoubled ; he called God to witness he considered her as his wife, and her cha- racter as dear to him as that of one of his sisters ; he affected mortification at any suspicion of his SPEECH IN THE CASE OP purity ; he told her if she refused her confidence to his honourable affection, the little infant who accompanied her was an inviolable guarantee for her protection. Gentlemen, this wretched child did suffer her credulity to repose on his professions. Her theory taught her to respect the honour of a soldier ; her love repelled the imputation that debased its ob- ject; and her youthful innocence rendered her as incredulous as she was unconscious of criminar lity. At first his behaviour corresponded with his professions ; he welcomed her to the home of which he hoped she would soon become the inseparable companion; he painted the future joys of their domestic felicity, and dwelt with peculiar com- placency on some heraldic ornament which hung over his chimney-piece, and which, he said, was the armorial ensign of his family ! Oh ! my Lord, how well would it have been had he but retraced the fountain of that document ; had he recalled to mind the virtues it rewarded, the pure train of honours it associated, the line of spotless ancestry it distinguished, the high ambition its bequest inspired, the moral imitation it imperatively com- manded ! But when guilt once kindles within the human heart, all that is noble in our nature becomes parched and arid ; the blush of modesty fades before its glare, the sighs of virtue fan its lurid flame, and every divine essence of our being but swells and exasperates its infernal conflagration. Gentlemen, I will not disgust this audience ; I will not debase myself by any description of the CREIGHTON v. TOWNSEND. 153 scene that followed ; I will not detail the arts, the excitements, the promises, the pledges with which deliberate lust inflamed the passions, and finally overpowered the struggles of innocence and of youth. It is too much to know that tears could not appease that misery could not affect that the presence and the prayers of an infant could not awe him; and that the wretched victim, between the ardour of passion and the repose of love, sunk at length, inflamed, exhausted, and confiding, beneath the heartless grasp of an un- sympathising sensuality. The appetite of the hour thus satiated, at a tem- poral, perhaps an eternal hazard, he dismissed the sisters to their unconscious parents, not, however, without extorting a promise, that on the ensuing night Miss Creighton would desert her home for ever for the arms of a fond, affectionate, and faith- ful husband. Faithful, alas ! but only to his appe- petites, he did seduce her from that " sacred home/' f;o deeper guilt, to more deliberate cruelty. After a suspense comparatively happy, her pa- rents became acquainted with her irrecoverable ruin. The miserable mother, supported by the mere strength of desperation, rushed half phrenzied to the castle, w^here Mr. Townsend was on dutv. " Give me back my child !" was all she could ar- ticulate. The parental ruin struck the spoiler almost speechless. The few dreadful words, " / have your child, 3 ' withered her heart up with the horrid joy that death denied its mercy, that her daughter lived, but lived, alas, to infamy. She could neither speak nor hear ; she sunk down con- 154 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF vulsed and powerless. As soon as she could recover to any thing of effort, naturally did she turn to the residence of Mr. Townsend ; his orders had an- ticipated her the sentinel refused her entrance. She told her sad narration, she implored his pity; with the eloquence of grief she asked him, had he home, or wife, or children. " Oh, Holy Nature! thou didst not plead in vain !" even the rude soldier's heart relented. He admitted her by stealth, and she once more held within her arms the darling hope of many an anxious hour ; duped, desolate, degraded it was true but still but still "her child." Gentlemen, if the parental heart cannot suppose what followed, how little adequate am I to paint it. Home this wretched creature could not return ; a seducer's mandate and a father's anger equally forbade it. But she gave whatever consolation she was capable ; she told the fatal tale of her undoing the hopes, the pro- mises, the studied specious arts that had seduced her ; and with a desperate credulity still watched the light that, glimmering in the distant vista of her love, mocked her with hope, and was to leave her to the tempest. To all the prophecies of ma- ternal anguish she would still reply, "Oh, no in the eye of Heaven he is my husband ; he took me from my home, my happiness and you, but still he pledged to me a soldier's honour but he as- sured me with a Christian's conscience ; for three long months I heard his vows of love ; he is ho- nourable and will not deceive ; he is human and cannot desert me." Hear, Gentlemen, hear, I be- seech you, how this innocent confidence was CREIGHTON v. TOWNSEND. 155 returned. When her indignant father had re- sorted to Lord Forbes, the commander of the forces, and to the noble and learned head of this Court, both of whom received him with a sym- pathy that did them honour, Mr. Townsend sent a brother officer to inform her she must quit his residence and take lodgings. In vain she remon- strated, in vain she reminded him of her former purity, and of the promises that betrayed it. She was literally turned out at nightfall to find what- ever refuge the God of the shelterless might pro- vide for her. Deserted and disowned, how na- turally did she turn to the once happy home, whose inmates she had disgraced, and whose protection she had forfeited ! how naturally did she think the once familiar and once welcome avenues looked frowning as she passed ! how na- turally did she linger like a reposeless spectre round the memorials of her living happiness ! Her heart failed her : where a parent's smile had ever cheered her, she could not face the glance of shame, or sorrow, or disdain. She returned to seek her seducer's pity even till the morning. Good God ! how can I disclose it ! the very guard had orders to refuse her access : even by the rabble soldiery she was cast into the street, arnid the night's dark horrors, the victim of her own credulity, the outcast of another's crime, to seal her guilty woes with suicide, or lead a living death amid the tainted sepulchres of a promiscuous prostitution ! Far, far am I from sorry that it was so. Horrible beyond thought as is this ag- gravation, I only hear in it the voice of Deity in 156 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF thunder upon the crime. Yes, yes ; it is the present God arming the vicious agent against the vice, and terrifying from its conception by the turpitude to which it may lead. But what aggra- vation does seduction need ! Vice is its essence, lust its end, hypocrisy its instrument, and inno- cence its victim. Must I detail its miseries ? Who depopulates the home of virtue, making the child an orphan, and the parent childless? Who wrests its crutch from the tottering helplessness of piteous age ? Who wrings its happiness from the heart of youth ? Who shocks the vision of the public eye ? Who infects your very thoroughfares with disease, disgust, obscenity, and profaneness ? Who pollutes the harmless scenes where modesty re-^ sorts for mirth, and toil for recreation, with sights that stain the pure and shock the sensitive ? Are these the phrases of an interested advocacy ? Is there one amongst you but has witnessed their verification ? Is there one amongst you so fortu- nate, or so secluded, as not to have wept over the wreck of health, and youth, and loveli- ness, and talent, the fatal trophies of the seducer's triumph some form, perhaps, where every grace was squandered, and every beauty paused to waste its bloom, and every beam of mind and tone of melody poured their profusion on the pub- lic wonder; all that a parent's prayer could ask, or lover's adoration fancy ; in whom even pollu- tion looked so lovely, that virtue would have made her more than human ? Is there an epithet too vile for such a spoiler ? Is there a punish- ment too severe for such depravity ? I know not CREIGHTON . TOWNSEND. 157 upon what complaisance this English seducer may calculate from a jury of this country ; I know not indeed, whether he may not think he does your wives and daughters some honour by their conta- mination. But I know well what reception he would experience from a jury of his own country. I know that in such general execration do they view this crime, they think no possible plea a palliation ; no, not the mature age of the seduced ; not her previously protracted absence from her parents ; not a levity approaching almost to abso- lute guilt ; not an indiscretion in the mother, that bore every colour of connivance : and in this opinion they have been supported by all the vene- rable authorities with whom age, integrity, and learning have adorned the judgment-seat. Gentlemen, I come armed with these autho- rities. In the case of Tullidge against Wade, my Lord, it appeared the person seduced was thirty years of age, and long before absent from her home ; yet, on a motion to set aside the verdict for excessive damages, what was the language of Chief Justice Wilmot ? " I regret," said he, "that they were not greater ; though the Plaintiff's loss did not amount to twenty shillings, the jury were right in giving ample damages, because such actions should be encouraged for example's sake," Justice Clive wished they had given twice the sum, and in this opinion the whole bench con- curred. There was a case were the girl was of mature age, and living apart from her parents : here, the victim is almost a child, and was never for a moment separated from her home. Again, SPEECH IN THE CASE OF in the case of " Bennet against Alcot," on a si- milar motion, grounded on the apparently over- whelming fact, that the mother of the girl had had actually sent the Defendant into her daugh- ter's bed-chamber, where the criminality occurred, Justice Buller declared, " he thought the parent's indiscretion no excuse for the Defendant's culpa- bility ;" and the verdict of 200 damages was confirmed. There was a case of literal connivance: here, will they have the hardihood to hint even its suspicion ? You all must remember, Gentle- men, the case of our own countryman, Captain Gore, against whom, only the other day, an Eng- lish jury gave a verdict of 1,500 damages, though it was proved that the person alleged to have been seduced was herself the seducer, going even so far as to throw gravel up at the windows of the Defendant ; yet Lord Ellenborough refused to dis- turb the verdict. Thus you may see I rest not on my own proofless and unsupported dictum. I rely upon grave decisions and venerable authorities not only on the indignant denunciation of the mo- ment, but on the deliberate concurrence of the enlightened and the dispassionate. I see my learned opponent smile. I tell him I would not care if the books were an absolute blank upon the subject. I would then make the human heart my authority ; I would appeal to the bosom of every man who hears me, whether such a crime should grow unpunished into a precedent ; whe- ther innocence should be made the subject of a brutal speculation ; whether the sacred seal of filial obedience, upon which the Almighty Parent CREIGHTON v. TOWNSEND. 15J) lias affixed his eternal fiat, should be violated by a blasphemous and selfish libertinism ! Gentlemen, if the cases I have quoted, palli- ated as they were, have been humanely marked by ample damages, what should you give here where there is nothing to excuse where there is every thing to aggravate ! The seduction was deliberate, it was three months in progress, its victim was almost a child, it was committed un- der the most alluring promises, it was followed by a deed of the most dreadful cruelty ; but, above all, it was the act of a man commissioned by his own country, and paid by this, for the enforce- ment of the laws and the preservation of society. No man more respects than I do the well-earned reputation of the British army ; " It is a school Where every principle tending to honour Is taught if followed" But in the name of that distinguished army, I here solemnly appeal against an act, which would blight its greenest laurels, and lay its trophies prostrate in the dust. Let them war, but be it not on domestic happiness ; let them invade, but be their country's hearths inviolable ; let them achieve a triumph wherever their banners fly, but be it not over morals, innocence, and virtue. I know not by w hat palliation the Defendant means to mi- tigate this enormity ; will he plead her youth ? it should have been her protection ; will he plead her levity ? I deny the fact ; but even were it true, what is it to him ? what rig-lit has any man to ft/ speculate on the temperature of your wives and SPEECH IN THE CASE OF daughters, that he may defile your bed, or deso* late your habitation ? Will he plead poverty ? I never knew a seducer or an adulterer that did not. He should have considered that before. But is poverty an excuse for crime ? Our law says, he who has not a purse to pay for it, must suffer for it in his person. It is a most wise declaration ; and for my part, I never hear such a person plead poverty, that my first emotion is not a thanksgiv- ing, that Providence has denied, at least, the in- strumentality of wealth to the accomplishment of his purposes. Gentlemen, I see you agree with me. I wave the topic ; and I again tell you, that if what I know will be his chief defence were true, it should avail him nothing. He had no right to speculate on this wretched creature's le^ vity to ruin her, and still less to ruin her family^ Remember, however, Gentlemen, that even had this wretched child been indiscreet, it is not in her name we ask for reparation ; no, it is in the name of the parents her seducer has heart-broken ; it is in the name of the poor helpless family he has desolated; it is in the name of that misery, whose sanctuary he has violated ; it is in the name of law, virtue, and morality ; it is in the name of that country whose fair fame foreign envy will make responsible for this crime ; it is in the name of nature's dearest, tenderest sympathies ; it is in the name of all that gives your toil an object, and your ease a charm, and your age a hope I ask from you the value of this poor man's child. SPEECH CASE OF BLAKE v. WILKINS DELIVERED IN THE COUNTY COURT-HOUSE, GALWAY. May it please Your Lordship, THE Plaintiff's Counsel tell me, Gentlemen, most unexpectedly, that they have closed his case, and it becomes my duty to state to you that of the Defendant. The nature of this action you have already heard. It is one which, in my mind, ought to be very seldom brought, and very spar- ingly encouraged. It is founded on circumstances of the most extreme delicacy, and it is intended to visit with penal consequences the non-observ- ance of an engagement, which is of the most pa- ramount importance to society, and which of all others, perhaps, ought to be the most unbiassed an engagement which, if it be voluntary, judici- ous, and disinterested, generally produces the happiest effects ; but which, if it be either unsuit- able or compulsory, engenders not only indivi- dual misery, but consequences universally perni- cious. There are few contracts between human M 162 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF being's which should be more deliberate than that O of marriage. I admit it should be very cautiously promised, but, even when promised, I am far from conceding that it should invariably be per- formed ; a thousand circumstances may form an impediment, change of fortune may render it im- prudent, change of affection may make it culpa- ble. The very party to whom the law gives the privilege of complaint has perhaps the most rea- son to be grateful ; grateful that its happiness has not been surrendered to caprice, grateful that Religion has not constrained an unwilling acqui- escence, or made an unavoidable desertion doubly criminal, grateful that an offspring has not been sacrificed to the indelicate and ungenerous en- forcement, grateful that an innocent secret disin- clination did not too late evince itself in an irre- sistible and irremediable disgust. You will agree with me, however, that if there exists any excuse for such an action, it is on the side of the female, because every female object being more exclu- sively domestic, such a disappointment is more severe in its visitation ; because the very circum- stance concentrating their feelings renders them naturally more sensitive of a wound ; because their best treasure, their reputation, may have suf- fered from the intercourse ; because their chances of reparation are less, and their habitual seclu- sion makes them feel it more ; because there is something in the desertion of their helplessness which almost merges the illegality in the un- manliness of the abandonment. However, if a man seeks to enforce this enirasrement, every one BLAKE . WILKIN ? S. 163 feels some indelicacy attached to the requisition. I do not enquire into the comparative justness of the reasoning 1 , but does not every one feel that there appears some meanness in forcing a female into an alliance ? Is it not almost saying 1 , " I will expose to public shame the credulity on which I practised, or you must pay to me in monies num- bered, the profits of that heartless speculation ; I have g-ambled with your affections, I have se- cured your bond, I will extort the penalty either from your purse or your reputation!" I put a case to you where the circumstances are recipro- cal, where age, fortune, situation, are the same, where there is no disparity of years to make the supposition ludicrous, where there is no disparity of fortune to render it suspicious. Let us see whether the present action can be so palliated, or whether it does not exhibit a picture of fraud and avarice, and meanness and hypocrisy, so laugh- able, that it is almost impossible to criticise it, and yet so debasing, that human pride almost forbids its ridicule. It has been left to me to defend my unfortunate old client from the double battery of Love and of Law, which at the age of sixty-five has so unex- pectedly opened on her. Oh, Gentlemen, how vain-glorious is the boast of beauty ! How mis- apprehended have been the charms of youth, if years and wrinkles can thus despoil their con- quests, and depopulate the navy of its prowess, and beguile the bar of its eloquence ! How mis- taken were all the amatory poets from Anacreon downwards, who preferred the bloom of the rose M 2 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF and the thrill of the nightingale, to the saffron hide and dulcet treble of sixty-five ! Even our own sweet bard has had the folly to declare, that " He once had heard tell of an amorous youth Who was caught in his grandmother's bed ; But owns he had ne'er such a liquorish tooth, As to wish to be there in his stead." Royal wisdom has said, that we live in a " New ./Era." The reign of old women has commenced, and if Johanna Southcote converts England to her creed, why should not Ireland, less pious perhaps, but at least equally passionate, kneel before the shrine of the irresistible WIDOW WILKINS. It appears, Gentlemen, to have been her happy fate to have subdued particularly the death-dealing professions. Indeed, in the love-episodes of the heathen mythology, Mars and Venus were consi- dered as inseparable. I know not whether any of you have ever seen a very beautiful print re- presenting the fatal glory of Quebec, and the last moments of its immortal conqueror if so, you must have observed the figure of the Staff physi- cian, in whose arms the hero is expiring that identical personage, my Lord, was the happy swain, who, forty or fifty years ago, received the reward of his valour and his skill in the virgin hand of my venerable client ! The Doctor lived some- thing more than a century, during a great part of which Mrs. \\ilkins was his companion alas, Gentlemen, long as he lived, he lived not long enough to behold her beauty " That beauty, like the Aloe flower, But bloom'd and blossom'd at fourscore/' BLAKE . WILKINS. He was, however, so far fascinated as to bequeath to her the legacies of his patients, when he found he was predoomed to follow them. To this cir- cumstance, very far be it from me to hint, that Mrs. W. is indebted for any of her attractions. Rich, however, she undoubtedly was, and rich she would still as undoubtedly have continued, had it not been for her intercourse with the family of the Plaintiff. I do not impute it as a crime to them that they happened to be necessitous, but I do impute it as both criminal and ungrateful, that after having lived on the generosity of their friend, after having literally exhausted her most prodigal liberality, they should drag her infirmities before the public gaze, vainly supposing that they could hide their own contemptible avarice in the more prominent exposure of her melancholy dotage. The father of the Plaintiff, it cannot be unknown to you, was for many years in the most indigent situation. Perhaps it is riot a matter of conceal- ment either, that he found in Mrs. Wilkins a ge- nerous benefactress. She assisted and supported him, until at last his increasing necessities re- duced him to take refuge in an act of insolvency. During their intimacy, frequent allusion was made to a son whom Mrs. W ilk ins had never seen since he was a child, and who had risen to a lieu- tenancy in the navy, under the patronage of their relative, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield. In a parent's panegyric, the gallant lieutenant was of course all that even hope could picture. Young, gay, heroic, and disinterested, the pride of the navy, the prop of the country, independent as the gale 16(5 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF that wafted, and bounteous as the wave that bore him. I am afraid that it is rather an anti-climax to tell you after this, that he is the present Plain- tiff. The eloquence of Mrs. Blake was not ex- clusively confined to her encomiums on the lieu- tenant. She diverged at times into an episode on the matrimonial felicities, painted the joy of pas- sion and delights of love, and obscurely hinted that Hymen, with his torch, had an exact personi- fication in her son Peter bearing a match-light in His Majesty's ship the Hydra ! While these con- trivances were practising on Mrs. Wilkins, a bye- plot was got up on board the Hydra, and Mr. Blake returned to his mourning' country, influ- enced, as he says, by his partiality for the Defend- ant, but in reality compelled by ill health and disappointments, added, perhaps, to his mother's very absurd and avaricious speculations. What a loss the navy had of him, and what a loss he had of the navy ! Alas, Gentlemen, he could not resist his affection for a female he never saw. Al- mighty love eclipsed the glories of ambition Trafalgar and St. Vincent flitted from his me- mory he gave up all for woman, as Mark Antony did before him, and, like the Cupid in Hudi- bras, he " took his stand Upon a Widow's jointure land- His tender sigh and trickling tear Long'd for five hundred pounds a year; And languishing desires were fond Of Statute, Mortgage, Bill, and Bond ! " Oh, Gentlemen, only imagine him on the lakes of North America ! Alike to him the varieties of BLAKE t. WILKINS. 167 season or the vicissitudes of warfare. One sove- reign image monopolizes his sensibilities. Does the storm rage ? the Widow Wilkins outsighs the whirlwind. Is the ocean calm ? its mirror shows him the lovely Widow Wilkins. Is the battle won ? he thins his laurel that the Widow Wilkins may interweave her myrtles. Does the broadside thun- der ? he invokes the Widow Wilkins ! " A sweet little Cherub she sits up aloft To keep watch for the life of poor Peter !" Alas, how much he is to be pitied ! How amply he should be recompensed ! Who but must mourn his sublime, disinterested, sweet-souled patriotism ! Who but must sympathise with his pure, ardent, generous affection ! affection too confiding to re- quire an interview ! affection too warm to wait even for an introduction ! Indeed, his Amanda herself seemed to think his love was most desirable at a distance, for at the very first visit after his return he was refused admittance. His captivating charmer was then sick and nurse-tended at her brother's house, after a winter's confinement, reflecting, most likely, rather on her funeral than her wedding'. Mrs. Blake's avarice instantly took the alarm, and she wrote the letter, which I shall now proceed to read to you. [Mr. VANDELEUR. My Lord, unwilling as I am to interrupt a statement which seems to create so universal a sensation, still I hope your Lordship will restrain Mr. Phillips from reading a letler which cannot hereafter be read in evidence. Mr. O'CoNNELL rose for the purpose of sup- SPEECH IN THE CASE OF porting the propriety of the course pursued by the Defendant's Counsel, when] Mr. PHILLIPS resumed My Lord, although it is utterly impossible for the Learned Gentleman to say, in what manner hereafter this letter might be made evidence, still my case is too strong to require any cavilling upon such trifles. I am con- tent to save the public time and wave the perusal of the letter. However, they have now given its suppression an importance which perhaps its pro- duction could not have procured for it. You see, Gentlemen, what a case they have when they in- sist on the witholding of the documents which originated with themselves. I accede to their very politic interference. I grant them, since they en- treat it, the mercy of my silence. Certain it is, however, that a letter was received from Mrs. Blake ; and that almost immediately after its receipt, Miss Blake intruded herself at Brownville, where Mrs. Wilkins was remained two days lamented bit- terly her not having appeared to the lieutenant, when he called to visit her said that her poor mother had set her heart on an alliance that she was sure, dear woman, a disappointment would be the death of her ; in short, that there was no alternative but the tomb or the altar ! To all this Mrs. Wilkins only replied, how totally ignorant the parties interested were of each other, and that were she even inclined to connect herself with a stranger (poor old fool !) the debts in which her generosity to the family had already involved her, formed, at least for the present, an insurmountable impediment. This was not sufficient. In less than BLAKE 0.WILKINS. 100 a week, the indefatigable Miss Blake returned to the charge, actually armed with an old family-bond to pay off the incumbrances, and a renewed re- presentation of the mother's suspense and the brother's desperation. You will not fail to observe, Gentlemen, that while the female conspirators were thus at work, the lover himself had never seen the object of his idolatry. Like the maniac in the farce, he fell in love with the picture of his grandmother. Like a prince of the blood, he was willing to woo and to be wedded by proxy. For the gratification of his avarice, he was contented to embrace age, disease, infirmity, and widowhood to bind his youthful passions to the carcase for which the grave was opening to feed by anticipation on the un- cold corpse, and cheat the worm of its reversionary corruption. Educated in a profession proverbially generous, he offered to barter every joy for money! Born in a country ardent to a fault, he advertised his happiness to the highest bidder ! and he now solicits an honourable jury to become the panders to this heartless cupidity ! Thus beset, harassed, conspired against, their miserable victim entered into the contract you have heard a contract con- ceived in meanness, extorted by fraud, and sought to be enforced by the most profligate conspiracy. Trace it through every stage of its progress, in its origin, its means, its effects from the parent contriving it through the sacrifice of her son, and forwarding it through the indelicate instrumen- tality of her daughter, down to the son himself unblushingly acceding to the atrocious combina- tion by which age was to be betrayed and youth 170 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF degraded, and the odious union of decrepid lust and precocious avarice blasphemously consecrated by the solemnities of Religion ! Is this the ex- ample which as parents you would sanction ? Is this the principle you would adopt yourselves ? Have you never witnessed the misery of an un- matched marriage ? Have you never worshipped the bliss by which it has been hallowed, when its torch, kindled at affection's altar, gives the noon of life its warmth and its lustre, and blesses its evening with a more chastened, but not less lovely illumination ? Are you prepared to say, that this rite of heaven, revered by each country, cherished by each sex, the solemnity of every Church and the SACRAMENT of one, shall be profaned into the ceremonial of an obscene and soul-degrading 1 avarice ! No sooner was this contract, the device of their covetousness and the evidence of their shame, swindled from the wretched object of this con- spiracy, than its motive became apparent ; they avowed themselves the keepers of their melancholy victim ; they watched her movements ; they dic- tated her actions ; they forbade all intercourse with her own brother ; they duped her into ac- cepting bills, and let her be arrested for the amount. They exercised the most cruel and ca- pricious tyranny upon her, now menacing her with the publication of her follies, and now with the still more horrible enforcement of a contract that thus betrayed its anticipated inflictions ! Can you imagine a more disgusting exhibition of how weak and how worthless human nature may be, BLAKE r. WILKINS. 171 than this s^ne exposes ? On the one hand, a combination of sex and age, disregarding the most sacred obligations, and trampling on the most tender ties, from a mean greediness of lucre, that neither honour nor gratitude nor nature could appease, " Lucri bonus est odor cxrcqualibet." On the other hand, the poor shrivelled relic, of what once was health, and youth, and animation, sought to be embraced in its infection, and caressed in its infirmity crawled over and corrupted by the human reptiles, before death had shovelled it to the less odious and more natural vermin of the grave ! ! What an object for the speculations of avarice ! What an angel for the idolatry of youth ! Gentlemen, when this miserable dupe to her own doting vanity and the vice of others, saw how she was treated when she found herself controlled by the mother, beset by the daughter, beggared by the father, and held by the son as a kind of windfall, that, too rotten to keep its hold, had fallen at his feet to be squeezed and trampled ; when she saw the intercourse of her relatives prohibited, the most trifling remembrances of her ancient friendship denied, the very exercise of her habitual charity denounced ; when she saw that all she was worth was to be surrendered to a family confisca- tion, and that she was herself to be gibbetted in the chains of wedlock, an example to every superan- nuated dotard, upon whose plunder the ravens of the world might calculate, she came to the wisest determination of her life, and decided that her fortune should remain at her own disposal. Acting upon this decision, she wrote to Mr. Blake, com- 172 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF plaining of the cruelty with which she had been treated, desiring the restoration of the contract of which she had been duped, and declaring, as the only means of securing respect, her final determi- nation as to the control over her property. To this letter, addressed to the son, a verbal answer (mark the conspiracy) was returned from the mother, withholding all consent, unless the property was settled on her family, but withholding the contract at the same time. The wretched old woman could not sustain this conflict. She was taken seriously ill, confined for many months in her brother's house, from whom she was so cruelly sought to be separated, until the debts in which she was involved and a recommended change of scene transferred her to Dublin. There she was received with the utmost kindness by her relative, Mr. Mac Namara, to whom she confided the delicacy and distress of her situation. That gentleman, acting at once as her agent and her friend, instantly re- paired to Gal way, where he had an interview with Mr. Blake. This was long before the commence- ment of any action. A conversation took place between them on the subject, which must, in my mind, set the present action at rest altogether ; because it must show that the non-performance of the contract originated entirely with the Plaintiff himself. Mr. Mac Namara enquired, whether it was not true, that Mr. Blake's own family declined any connection, unless Mrs. Wilkins con- sented to settle on them the entire of her property ? Mr. Blake replied it was. Mr. Mac Namara re- joined, that her contract did not bind her to any BLAKE r. WILKINS. 173 such extent. " No," replied Mr. Blake, " I know- it does not ; however, tell Mrs. Wilkins that I un- derstand she has about 580 a year, and I will be content to settle the odd 80 on her by way of pocket money." Here, of course, the conversation ended, which Mr. Mac Namara detailed, as he was de- sired, to Mrs. Wilkins, who rejected it with the disdain, which, I hope, it will excite in every honourable mind. A topic, however, arose during the interview, which unfolds the motives and illus- trates the mind of Mr. Blake more than any ob- servation which I can make on it. As one of the inducements to the projected marriage, he ac- tually proposed the prospect of a 50 annuity as an officer's widow's pension, to which she would be entitled in the event of his decease ! I will not stop to remark on the delicacy of this induce- ment I will not dwell on the ridicule of the an- ticipation I Avill not advert to the glaring- dotage on which he speculated, when he could seriously hold out to a woman of her years the prospect of such an improbable survivorship. But I do ask you, of what materials must the man be composed who could thus debase the national liberality ! What ! was the recompense of that lofty heroism which has almost appropriated to the British navy the monopoly of maritime renown was that grate- ful offering which a weeping country pours into the lap of its patriot's widow, and into the cradle of its warrior's orphan was that generous conso- lation with which a nation's gratitude cheers the last moments of her dying hero, by the portraiture of his children sustained and ennobled by the le- 174 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF gacy of his achievements, to be thus deliberately perverted into the bribe of a base, reluctant, un- natural prostitution ! Oh ! I know of nothing to parallel the self-abasement of such a deed, except the audacity that requires an honourable Jury to abet it. The following letter from Mr. Anthony Martin, Mr. Blake's attorney, unfolded the future plans of this unfeeling consptracy. Perhaps the Gentlemen would wish also to cushion this docu- ment? They do not. Then I shall read it. The Letter is addressed to Mrs. Wilkins. " MADAM, Galway, Jan. 9. 1817. " I have been applied to professionally by Lieu- tenant Peter Blake to take proceedings against you on rather an unpleasant occasion; but, from every letter of your's, and other documents, toge- ther with the material and irreparable loss Mr. Blake has sustained in his professional prospects, by means of your proposals to him, makes it indis- pensably necessary for him to get remuneration from you. Under these circumstances, I am obliged to say, that I have his directions to take immediate proceedings against you, unless he is in some measure compensated for your breach of contract and promise to him. I should feel happy that you would save me the necessity of acting 1 V \1 professionally by settling the business [You see, Gentlemen, money, money, money, runs through the whole amour], and not suffer it to come to a public investigation, particularly, as 1 conceive from the legal advice Mr. Blake has Gfot, together o o ' o with all I have seen, it will ultimately terminate BLAK . \TILKINS. 175 most honourably to his advantage, and to your pecuniary loss. " I have the honour to remain, " Madam, " Your very humble Servant, " ANTHONY MARTIN.'' Indeed, I think Mr. Anthony Martin is mis- taken. Indeed, I think no twelve men upon their oaths will say (even admitting the truth of all he asserts) that it was honourable for a British officer to abandon the navy on such a speculation to de- sert so noble a profession to forfeit the ambition it ought to have associated the rank to which it leads the glory it may confer, for the purpose of extorting from an old woman he never saw the purchase-money of his degradation! But I rescue the Plaintiff from this disgraceful imputation. I cannot believe that a member of a profession not less remarkable for the valour than the generosity of its spirit a profession as proverbial for its pro- fusion in the harbour as for the prodigality of its life-blood on the wave a profession ever willing to fling money to the winds, and only anxious that they should waft through the world its immortal banner crimsoned witJi the record of a thousand vie* tories! No, no, Gentlemen ; notwithstanding the great authority of Mr. Anthony Martin, I cannot readily believe that any man could be found to make the high honour of this noble service a base, mercenary, sullied pander to the prostitution of his youth ! The fact is, that increasing ill health, and the improbability of promotion, combined to 176 SPEECH IX THE CASE OF induce his retirement on half-pay. You will find this confirmed by the date of his resignation, which was immediately after the battle of Waterloo, which settled (no matter how) the destinies of Europe. His constitution was declining, his ad- vancement was annihilated, and, as a forlorn hope, he bombarded the Widow Wilkins ! " War thoughts had left their places vacant ; In their room came, thronging, soft and amorous desires; All telling him how fair Young Hero was." He first, Gentlemen, attacked her fortune with herself, through the artillery of the Church, and having- failed in that, he now attacks her fortune without herself, through the assistance of the law. However, if I am instructed rightly, he has nobody but himself to blame for his disappointment. Ob- serve, I do not vouch for the authenticity of this fact ; but I do certainly assure yon, that Mrs. Wil- kins was persuaded of it. You know the pro- verbial frailty of our nature. The gallant Lieu- tenant was not free from it ! Perhaps you imagine that some younger, or, according to his taste, some older fair one, weaned him from the widow. Indeed they did not. He had no heart to lose, and yet (can you solve the paradox ?) his infirmity was LOVE. As the Poet says " Love still Love." No, it was not to VENUS, it was to BACCHUS, he sacrificed. With an eastern idolatry he com- menced at day-light, and so persevering was his piety till the shades of night, that when he was BLAKE t>. WILKINS. 177 not on Ins knees, he could scarcely be said to be on his legs! When I came to this passage, I could not avoid involuntarily exclaiming, Oh, Peter, Peter, whether it be in liquor or in love " None but thyself can be thy parallel !"- I see by your smiling, Gentlemen, that you cor- rect my error. I perceive your classic memories recurring to, perhaps, the only prototype to be found in history. I beg his pardon. I should not have overlooked " the immortal Captain Wattle, Who was all for love and a little for the bottle."" Ardent as our fair ones have been announced to be, they do not prefer a flame that is so exclu- sively spiritual. Widow Wilkins, no doubt, did not choose to be singular. In the words of the bard, and, my Lord, I perceive you excuse my dwelling so much on the authority of the muses, because really on this occasion the minstrel seems to have combined the powers of poetry with the spirit of prophecy in the very words of the bard, " He asked her, would she marry him Widow Wilkins answer'd, No Then said he, I'll to the Ocean rock, I'm ready for the slaughter, Oh ! I'll shoot at my sad image, as its sighing in the water Only think of Widow Wilkins, saying Go Peter Go ! " But, Gentlemen, let us try to be serious, and se- riously give me leave to ask you, on what grounds does he solicit your verdict ? Is it for the loss of his profession ? Does he deserve compensation if N 178 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF he abandoned it for such a purpose if he de- serted at once his duty and his country to trepan the \veakness of a wealthy dotard ? But did he (base as the pretence is), did he do so ? Is there nothing to cast any suspicion on the pretext? no- thing in the aspect of public aifairs ? in the uni- versal peace? in the uncertainty of being- put in commission? in the downright impossibility of advancement ? Nothing to make you suspect that he imputes as a contrivance, what was the mani- fest result of an accidental contingency ? Does he claim on the ground of sacrificed affection.? Oh, Gentlemen, only fancy what he has lost if it were but the blessed raptures of the bridal night ! Do not suppose I am going to describe it ; I shall leave it to the learned Counsel * he has selected, to com- pose his epithalamium. I shall not exhibit the venerable trembler at once a relic and a relict ; with a grace for every year, and a Cupid in every wrinkle affecting to shrink from the flame of his impatience, and fanning it with the ambrosial sigh of sixty-five ! ! I cannot paint the fierce me- ridian transports of the honeymoon, gradually melting into a more chastened and permanent af- fection every nine months adding a link to the chain of their delicate embraces, until, too soon, Death's broadside lays the Lieutenant low, con- soling, however, his patriarchal charmer, (old enough at the time to be the last wife of Methu- salem] with a fifty pound annuity, being the ba- * This gentleman was what disappointed maidens call, an old Itti'fie/or. BLAKE i\ WILKINS. 179 lance of his glory against His Majesty's Skip, the Hydra ! ! Give me leave to ask you, Is this one of the cases, to meet which, this very rare and delicate action was intended ? Is this a case where a re- ciprocity of circumstances, of affection, or of years, throw even a shade of rationality over the con- tract? Do not imagine I mean to insinuate, that under no circumstances ought such a proceeding to be adopted. Do not imagine, though I say this action belongs more naturally to a female, its adoption can never be justified by one of the other sex. Without any great violence to my imagina- tion, I can suppose a man in the very spring of life, when his sensibilities are most acute, and his passions most ardent, attaching himself to some object, young, lovely, talented, and accomplished, concentrating 1 , as he thought, every charm of per- sonal perfection, and in whom those charms were only heightened by the modesty that veiled them ; perhaps his preference was encouraged ; his affec- tion returned ; his very sigh echoed, until he was conscious of his existence but by the soul-creat- ing sympathy until the world seemed but the re- sidence of his love, and that love the principle that gave it animation until, before the smile of her affection, the whole spectral train of sorrow vanished, and this world of Avoe, with all its cares and miseries and crimes, brightened as by en- chantment into anticipated paradise ! ! It might happen that this divine affection might be crush- ed, and that heavenly vision wither into air at the hell-engendered pestilence of parental avarice, SPEECH IN THE CASE OF leaving youth and health, and worth and happi- ness, a sacrifice to its unnatural and mercenary caprices. Far am I from saying, that such a case would not call for expiation, particularly u here the punishment fell upon the very vice in which the ruin had originated. Yet even there perhaps an honourable mind would rather despise the mean, unmerited desertion. Oh, I am sure a sen- sitive mind would rather droop uncomplaining into the grave, than solicit the mockery of a worldly compensation ! But in the case before you, is there the slightest ground for supposing any affection ? Do you believe, if any accident bereft the Defendant of her fortune, that her per- secutor would be likely to retain his constancy? Do you believe that the marriage thus sought to be enforced, was one likely to promote morality and virtue? Do you believe that those delicious fruits by which the struggles of social life are sweetened, and the anxieties of parental care al- leviated, were ever once anticipated ? Do you think that such an union could exhibit those re- ciprocities of love and endearment by which this tender rite should be consecrated and recom- mended ? Do you not rather believe that it orisfi- ' O nated in avarice that it was promoted by conspi- racy and that it would not perhaps have linger- ed through some months of crime, and then ter- minated in an heartless and disgusting abandon- ment ? Gentlemen, these are the questions which you will discuss in your .fury-room. 1 am not afraid of yotir decision, Kcniciiibcr I ask YOU for i ;( , BLAKE r. WILKINS. 181 mitigation of damages, Nothing- less than your verdict will satisfy me. 13y that verdict you will sustain the dignity of your sex by that verdict you will uphold the honour of the national cha- racter hy that verdict you will assure, not only the immense multitude of both sexes that thus so unusually crowds around you, but the whole rising generation of your country, That Marriage can never be attended with Honour or blessed with Happiness, if it has not its origin in mutual affection. I surrender with confidence my case to your decision. [The Damages were laid at 5,000, and the Plaintiffs Coun- sel were, in the end, contented to withdraw a Juror, and let him pay his own Costs.] A CHARACTER OF NAPOJLEON BUONAPARTE, DOWN TO THE PERIOD OF HIS EXILE TO ELBA. HE is FALLEN ! We may now pause before that splendid pro- digy, which towered amongst us like some anci- ent ruin, whose frown terrified the glance its mag- nificence attracted. Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne, a sceptered hermit, wrapt in the solitude of his own originality. A mind bold, independent, and decisive a will, despotic in its dictates an energy that dis- tanced expedition, and a conscience pliable to every touch of interest, marked the outline of this extraordinary character the most extraordi- nary, perhaps, that, in the annals of this world, ever rose, or reigned, or fell. Flung into life, in the midst of a Revolution, that quickened every energy of a people who ac- knowledged no superior, he commenced his CHARACTER OP N. BUONAPARTE. 183 flourse, a stranger by birth, and a scholar by charity ! With no friend but his sword, and no fortune but his talents, he rushed into the lists where rank, and wealth, and genius had arrayed themselves, and competition fled from him as from the glance of destiny. He knew no motive but interest he acknowledged no criterion but success he worshipped no God but ambition, and with an eastern devotion he knelt at the shrine of his ido- latry. Subsidiary to this, there was no creed that he did not profess, there was no opinion that he did not promulgate ; in the hope of a dynasty, he upheld the crescent ; for the sake of a divorce, he bowed before Cross: the orphan of St. Louis, he became the adopted child of the Republic : and with a parricidal ingratitude, on the ruins both of the throne and the tribune, he reared the fabric of his despotism. A professed Catholic, he imprisoned the Pope; a pretended patriot, he impoverished the country ; and in the name of Brutus*, he grasped without remorse, and wore without shame, the diadem of the Caesars ! Through this pantomime of his policy, Fortune played the clown to his caprices. At his touch, crowns crumbled, beggars reigned, systems va- nished, the wildest theories took the colour of his whim, and all that was venerable, and all th.it was novel, changed places with the rapidity of a drama. Even apparent defeat assumed the appearance of * In his hypocritical cant after Liberty, in the commencement of the Revolution, be assumed the name of Brutus, Proh Pudor ! 184 CHARACTER OF N. BUONAPARTE. of victory his flight from Egypt, confirmed his destiny ruin itself only elevated him to empire. But if his fortune was great, his genius was transcendent; decision flashed upon his councils; and it was the same to decide and to perform. To inferior intellects, his combinations appeared perfectly impossible, his plans perfectly impracti- cable ; but, in his hands, simplicity marked their developement, and success vindicated their adop- tion. His person partook the character of his mind if the one never yielded in the cabinet, the other never bent in the field. Nature had no obstacles that he did not sur- mount space no opposition that he did not spurn ; and whether amid Alpine rocks, Arabian sands, or polar snows, he seemed proof against peril, and empowered with ubiquity ! The whole continent of Europe trembled at beholding the audacity of his designs, and the miracle of t eir execution. Scepticism bowed to the prodigies of his perform- ance ; romance assumed the air of history; nor was there aught too incredible for belief, or too fanciful for expectation, when the world saw a subaltern of Corsica waving his imperial flag over her most ancient capitals. All the visions of an- tiquity became common places in his contempla- tion ; kings were his people nations uere his outposts; and he disposed of courts, and crowns, and camps, and churches, and cabinets, us if they were the titular dignitaries of the chess-board ! Amid all these changes he stood immutable as ndamant. It mattered little whether in the field CHARACTER OF N. BUONAPARTE. 185 or the drawing-room with the mob or the levee- wearing the jacobin bonnet or the iron crown banishing a Braganza, or espousing a Hapsburgh dictating peace on a raft to the Czar of Russia, or contemplating defeat at the gallows of Leipsic he was still the same military despot ! Cradled in the camp, he was to the last hour the darling of the army; and whether in the camp or the cabinet he never forsook a friend or forgot a favour. Of all his soldiers, not one abandoned him, till affection was useless, and their first sti- pulation was for the safety of their favourite. They knew well that if he was lavish of them, lie was prodigal of himself; and that if he exposed them to peril, he repaid them with plunder. For the soldier, he subsidized every body ; to the peo- ple he made even pride pay tribute. The victo- rious veteran glittered with his gains ; and the ca- pital, gorgeous with the spoils of art, became the miniature metropolis of the universe. In this wonderful combination, his affectation of litera- ture must not be omitted. 'i he gaoler of the press, he affected the patronage of letters the proscriber of books, he encouraged philosophy the persecutor of authors, and the murderer of printers, he yet pretended to the protection of learning! the assassin of Palm, the silencer of De Stael, and the denouncer of Kotzebue, he was the friend of David, the benefactor of De Lille, and sent his academic prize to the philosopher of England *. * Sir Humphry Davy was transmitted the first prize of thr Academy of Sciences. 186 CHARACTER OF N. BUONAPARTE. Such a medley of contradictions, and at the same time such an individual consistency, were never united in the same character. A Royalist a Republican and an Emperor a Mahometan a Catholic and a patron of the Synagogue a Su- baltern and a Sovereign a Traitor and a Ty- rant a Christian and an Infidel he was, through all his vicissitudes, the same stern, impatient, in- flexible original the same mysterious incom- prehensible self the man without a model, and without a shadow. His fall, like his life, baffled all speculation. In short, his whole history was like a dream to the world, and no man can tell how or why he was awakened from the reverie. Such is a faint and feeble picture of NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE, the first (and it is to be hoped the last) Emperor of the French. That lie has done much evil there is little doubt; that he has been the origin of much good, there is just as little. Through his means, intentional or not, Spain, Portugal, and France have risen to the blessings of a Free Constitution ; Superstition has found her grave in the ruins of the Inquisi- tion *; and the Feudal system, with its whole train of tyrannic satellites, has fled for ever. Kings may learn from him that their safest study, as well as their noblest, is the interest of the people ; the * What melancholy reflections does not this sentence awaken! But three years have elapsed since it was written, and in that short space all the good effected by Napoleon has been erased by the Legitimates, and Hie most questionable parts of his cha- racter badly imitated! His Successors want nothing but his genius. CHARACTER OF N. BUONAPARTE. people are taught by him that there is no des- potism so stupendous against which they have not a resource ; and to those who would rise upon the ruins of both, he is a living lesson that if ambition can raise them from the lowest station, it can also prostrate them from the highest. SPEECH At a Meeting of the LONDON AUXILIARY BIBLE SOCIETY, HELD AT THE MANSION HOUSE. MY LORD MAYOR, I beg" leave to say a few words. Although, my Lord, 1 had not the honour of being selected either to propose or to ^econd any Resolution, yet as your report has alluded to my country, I may be permitted to come forward in her name, and offer my sentiments on this interesting occasion. Indeed, u y Lord, when we see the omens which are every day rising- when we see the scriptures audaciously ridiculed when in this Christian monarchy the den of the Republican and the Deist yawns for the unwary in your most pub- lic thoroughfare when marts are ostentatiously opened where the moral poison may be purchased, TV hose subtle venom enters the very soul when infidelity has become an article of commerce and man's perdition may be cheapened at the stall of every pedlar, no friend of society should continue silent ; it is no longer a question of political pri- AT THE MANSION HOUSE. vilege, of sectarian controversy, of theological discussion ; it is become a question, whether Christianity itself shall stand, or whether we shall let go the firm anchor of our faith, and drift, without chart, or helm, or compass, into the shoreless ocean of infidelity and blood ! I despise as much as any man the cant of bigotry. I will go as far as any man for rational liberty ; but I will not depose my God to deify the infidel, or tear in pieces the Charter of the State to grope for a Constitution amongst the murky pigeon- holes* of every creedless, lawless, infuriated re- gicide. When I sa\v, the other day, my Lord, the chief bacchanal of these orgiest, the man ac- cording to whose modest estimate, the Apostles were cheats, and the Prophets liars, and Moses a murderer, and Jesus an impostor, on his memo- rable trial, withering hour after hour with the most horrid blasphemies, surrounded by the vo- taries of every sect, and the heads of every creed, the Christian Archbishop, the Jewish Rabbi, the men most eminent for their piety and learning whom he had purposely collected to hear his infidel ridicule of all they reverenced. U hen I saw him raise the Holy Bible in one hand, and the Age of /{cason in the other, as it were con- fronting the Almig'hty with a rebel worm till the pious Judge grew pale, aiu! the patient Jury in- terposed, and the self-convicted wretch himself, * The reader will, doubtless, recollect the pigeon-holes of Hie Abbe Sycyes, in which he kept, ?. rcady-:n?.de Constitution for every State in Europe. -f- Mr. IT. Carlisle. 190 SPEECH after having raved away all his original impiety, was reduced to a mere machine for the re-pro- duction of the ribald blasphemy of others, I could not help exclaiming " Infatuated man ! if all your impracticable madness could be realized, what would you give us in exchange for our establishments ? What would you substitute for that august tribunal ? for whom would you dis- place that independent Judge and that impartial Jury ? or would you really burn the gospel, and erase the statutes, for the dreadful equivalent of the crucifix and the guillotine!" Indeed, if I was asked for a practical panegyric on our con- stitution, 1 would adduce the very trial of that criminal, and if the legal annals of any country upon earth furnished an instance not merely of such justice but of such patience, such forbear- ance, such almost culpable indulgence, I would concede to him the triumph. I hope too in what I say I shall not be considered as forsaking that illustrious example; 1 hope I am above an insult on any man in his situation perhaps had I the power I would humble him into an evidence of the very spirit he spurned, and as our creed was reviled in his person, and vindicated in his con- viction, so I would give it its noblest triumph in his sentence, and merely consign him to the punishment of its mercy. But, indeed, my Lord, the fate of this half-infidel, half-trading martyr, matters very little in comparison of that of the thousands he has corrupted. He has literally disseminated a moral plague against which even tfie nation's quarantine can scarce avail us. It AT THE MANSION HOUSE. has poisoned the fresh hlood of infancy, it lias disheartened the last hope of age ; if his own ac- count of its circulation he correct, hundreds of thousands must be this instant tainted with the infectious venom, whose sting dies not with the destruction of the body Imagine not because the pestilence does not strike at once, that its fatality is the less certain ; imagine not because the lowest orders are the earliest victims, that the more elevated will not suffer in their turn. The most mortal dullness begins at the extremities, and you may depend upon it nothing but time and apathy is wanting to change this healthful land into a charnel-house, where murder, anar- chy, prostitution, and the whole hell brood of infidelity will quaff the heart's blood of the con- secrated and the noble. My Lord, 1 am the more indignant at these designs, because they are sought to be concealed in the disguise of Liberty. It is the duty of every real friend to liberty to tear her mask from the fiend who has usurped it. No, no ; this is not our island god- dess, bearing the mountain's freshness on her cheek, and scattering the valley's bounty from her hand, known by the lights that herald her fair presence, the peaceful virtues that attend her path, and the long blaze of glory that lingers in her train it is a demon speaking* fair indeed, tempting our faith with airy hopes and visionary realms, but even within the foldings of its mantle hiding* the bloody symbol of its purpose. Hear not its sophistry guard your child against it- draw round vour home the consecrated circle 192 SPEECH which it dare not enter. You will find an amulet in the religion of your country it is the great mound raised by the Almighty for the protection of humanity it stands between you and the lava of human passions ; and, oh, believe me, if you stand tamely bv while it is baselv undermined, / */ / the fiery deluge will roll on, before which, all that\ou hold dear, or venerable, or sacred, will wither into ashes. Believe no one who tells you that the friends of freedom are now, or ever were, the enemies of religion they know too well that rebellion against God cannot prove the basis of government for man, and that the proudest struc- ture impiety can raise, is but the Babel monument of its impotency and its pride, mocking the builders with a moment's strength, and then covering them with inevitable confusion. Do you want an example, only look to Trance the microscopic vision of your rabble blasphemers has not sight enough to contemplate the mighty minds which commenced her revolution the wit, the sage, the orator, the hero, the whole family of genius furnished forth their treasures, and gave ihem nobly to a nation's exigence. They had great provocation they had a glorious cause they had all that human potency could give them ; but they relied too much on this human potency they abjured their God, and as a na- tural consequence they murdered their King; they culled their polluted deities from the brothel, arid the fall of the idol extinguished the flame of the altar they crowded the scaffold with all that their country held of genius or of virtue, and AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 198 when the peerage and the prelacy were ex- hausted, the mob executioner of to-day became the mob victim of to-morrow. No sex was spared no age respected no suffering pitied ; and all this they did in the sacred name of liberty ; though, in the deluge of human blood, they left not a mountain-top for the ark of liberty to rest on. But Providence was neither " dead nor sleeping ;" it mattered not that for a moment their impiety seemed to prosper that victory panted after their ensanguined banners that as their insatiate eagle soared against the sun, he seemed but to replume his wing and to renew his vision it was only for a moment, and you see at last that in the very banquet of their triumph the Almighty's vengeance blazed upon the wall, and the diadem fell from the brow of the idolater. My Lord, I will not abjure the altar, the throne, and the constitution, the substantial blessings which ages have at once matured and consecrated, for the bloody tinsel of this revo- lutionary pantomime. I prefer my God even to the impious democracy of their pantheon. I will not desert my King even for the political equality of their pandemonium. I must see some better authority than the Fleet Street temple* before I forego the principles which I imbibed in my youth, and to which I look forward as the con- solation of my age those all-protecting princi- * It was in Fleet Street that the shop of Carlisle was situated. Over the door were emblazoned in gold letters, " Temple of the Republican and the Deist," and within was a full length statue of Paine, leaning on a globe. O 194 SPEECH pies which at once guard, and consecrate, and sweeten the social intercourse, which give life, happiness, and death, hope ; which constitute man's purity his best protection, and place the infant's cradle and the female's couch beneath the sacred shelter of the national morality. Neither Mr. Paine nor Mr. Palmer*, nor all the venom- breathing brood shall swindle from me the book where I have learned these precepts. In despite of all their scoff and scorn, and menacing', I say of the sacred volume they would obliterate, that it is a book of facts as well authenticated as any heathen history a book of miracles, incontestibly avouched a book of prophecy, confirmed by past as well as present fulfilment a book of poetry, pure, and natural, and elevated, even to inspiration a book of morals, such as human wisdom never formed for the perfection of human happiness. My Lord, I will abide by the pre- cepts, admire the beauty, revere the mysteries, and, as far as in me lies, practise the mandates of this sacred volume; and, should the ridicule of earth and the blasphemy of hell assail me, I shall console myself by the contemplation of those blessed spirits who in the same holy cause have toiled, and shone, and suffered. In " the goodly fellowship of the saints," in " the noble army, of the martyrs," in the society of the great and good and wise of every nation, if my sinful- ness be not cleansed, and my darkness illumined, at least my pretensionless submission may be excused. If I err with the luminaries I have chosen for my guide, I confess myself captivated * An American liilvsoJter. AT THE MANSION HOUSE. 195 by the loveliness of their aberrations if they wander, it is in fields of light; if they aspire, it is, at all events, a glorious daring ; and, rather than sink with infidelity into the dust, I am con- tent even to cheat myself with their vision of eternity. Jt may, indeed, be nothing but delu- sion, but then I err with the disciples of philo- sophy and of virtue with men who have drank deep at the fountain of human knowledge, but who dissolved not the pearl of their salvation in the draught. I err with Bacon the great con- fidant of nature, fraught with all the learning of the past, and almost prescient of the future, yet too wise not to know his weakness, and too phi- losophic not to feel his ignorance. I err with Milton rising on an angel's wing to heaven, and like the bird of morn soaring out of sight amid the music of his grateful piety. I err with Locke, whose pure philosophy only taught him to adore its source whose warm love of genuine liberty was never chilled into rebellion against its au- thor. I err with Newton, whose star-like spirit shooting athwart the darkness of this sphere, too soon re-ascended to the home of his nativity. With men like these, my Lord, I shall remain in error, nor shall I desert those errors even for the drunken death-bed of a Paine, or the delirious war-whoop of the surviving fiends who would erect his altar on the ruins of society. In my opinion it is difficult to say, whether their tenets are more ludicrous or more detestable; they will not obey the king, or the parliament, or the con- stitution, but they will obey anarchy. They will o 2 196 SPEECH. not believe in the Prophets, in Moses, in the Apostles, nor in Christ ; but they believe Tom Paine. With no government but confusion, and no creed but scepticism, I believe, in my soul, they would abjure the one, if it became legiti- mate, and rebel against the other if it was once established. Holding, my Lord, opinions such as these, I should consider myself culpable at such a crisis if I did not declare them. A lover of my country, I yet draw a line between pa- triotism and rebellion a warm friend to liberty of conscience, I will not extend my toleration to the diffusion of infidelity ; with all its imputed am- biguity I shall die in the doctrines of the Christian faith, and with all its errors I am M 7 ell contented to live beneath the glorious safeguard of the British Constitution. SPEECH DELIVERED AT A SPLENDID COMPLIMENTARY DINNER GIVEN TO THE IRISH LEGION BY THE FRIENDS OF SOUTH AMERICAN FREEDOM, AT ZIORRISON'S HOTEL, DUBLIN. My Lord and Gentlemen, I sincerely thank you : to be remembered when my countrymen are celebrating 1 the cause of free- dom and humanity, cannot fail to be grateful ; to be so remembered, when a personal and valued friend is the object of the celebration, carries with it a double satisfaction ; and you will allow me to say, that if any thing- could enhance the pleasure of such feelings, it is the consciousness that our meeting can give just offence to no one. Topics too often have risen up amongst us, where the best feelings were painfully at variance: where silence w r ould have been guilt, and utter- ance was misery. But surely here, at length, is 196 SPEECH ON an occasion where neither sect nor party are opposed ; where every man in the country may clasp his brother by the hand, and feel and boast the electric communication. To unmanacle the slave, to unsceptre the despot, to erect an altar on the Inquisition's grave, to raise a people to the attitude of freedom, to found the temples of science and of commerce, to create a constitution, beneath whose ample arch every human creature, no matter what his sect, his colour, or his clime, may stand sublime in the dignity of manhood these are the glorious objects of this enterprise ; and the soul must be imbruted, and the heart must be ossified, which does not glow with the ennobling sympathy. Where is the slave so ab- ject as to deny it ? Where is the statesman who can rise from the page of Spanish South America, and affect to commisserate the fall of Spain ? Her tyranny, even from its cradle to its decline, has been the indelible disgrace of Christianity and of Europe ; it was born in fraud, baptized in blood, and reared by rapine ; it blasphemed all that was holy it. cankered all that was happy ; the most simple habits the most sacred institutions the most endeared and inoffensive customs, escaped not inviolate the accursed invader ; the hearth, the throne, the altar, lay confounded in one com- mon ruin ; and when the innocent children of the sun confided for a moment in the Christian's promise, what! oh, shame to Spain ! oh, horror to Christianity ! oh, eternal stigma on the name of Europe! what did they behold? the plunder of their fortunes the desolation of their houses SOUTH AMERICAN FREEDOM. 199 the ashes of their cities their children mur- dered without distinction of sex the ministers of their faith expiring- amid tortures the person of their Ynca, their loved, their sacred, their heroic Ynca, quivering 1 in death upon a burning fur- nace ; and the most natural and the most excu- sable of all idolatries, their consecrated sun-beam, clouded by the murky smoke of an inquisition steaming with human gore, and raised upon the ruins of all that they held holy ! These were the feats of Spain in South America ! This is the fiery and despotic sway, for which an execrable tyrant solicits British neutrality. Ireland, at least, has given her answer. An armed legion of her chosen youth bears it at this hour in thunder on the waters, and the sails are swelling for their brave companions. I care not if his tyranny was ten thousand times more crafty, more vigilant, more ferocious than it is when a people will it, their liberation is inevitable their very inflictions will be converted into the instru- ments of their freedom they will write its char- ter even in the blood of their stripes they will turn their chains into the weapons of their eman- cipation. If it were possible still more to animate them, let them only think on the tyrant they have to combat that odious concentration of qualities at once the most opposite, and the most con- temptible timid and sanguinary effeminate and ferocious impious and superstitious now em- broidering a petticoat, now imprisoning an. hero to-day kneeling to a God of mercy, to-morrow lighting the hell of inquisition at noon embra- 200 SPEECH ON cing his ministerial pander, at midnight starting from a guilty dream, to fulminate his banishment the alternate victim of his fury and his fears faithful only to an infidel priestcraft, which ex- cites his terrors and fattens on his crimes, and affects to worship the anointed slave as he trem- bles enthroned on the bones of his benefactors. Who can sympathize with such a monster? Who can see unmoved a mighty empire writhing in the embraces of this human Boa ? My very heart grows faint within me when I think how many thousands of my gallant countrymen have fallen to crown him with that ensanguined diadem when I reflect that genius wrote, and eloquence spoke, and valour fought, and fidelity died for him, while he was tasting the bitterness of cap- tivity ; and that his ungrateful restoration has literally withered his realm into a desert, where the widow and orphan w eep his sway, and the sceptre waves, not to govern but to crush ! Never, my Lord, never, whether we contem- plate the good they have to achieve, the evil they have to overcome, or the wrongs they have to avenge never did warriors march in a more sacred contest. Their success may be uncertain, but it is not uncertain that every age and clime will bless their memories, for their sword is gar- landed with freedom's flowers, patriotism gives them an immortal bloom, and piety breathes on them an undying fragrance. Let the tyrant me- nace, and the hireling bark, wherever Chris- tianity kneels, or freedom breathes, their deeds shall be recorded ; and when their honoured dust SOUTH AMERICAN FREEDOM. 201 is gathered to its fathers, millions they have re- deemed will he their mourners, and an eman- cipated hemisphere their enduring monument. Go, then, soldiers of Ireland, " Go where glory waits you." The Ynca's spirit*, from his bed of coals, through the mist of ages calls to you for vengeance; the patriot Cortes, in their dungeon vaults, invoke your retribution ; the graves of your brave coun- trymen, trampled by tyranny, where they died for freedom, are clamorous for revenge ! Go plant the banner of green on the summit of the Andes. May victory guide, and mercy ever follow it ! If you should triumph, the consummation will he liberty ; and in such a contest should you even perish, it will be as martyrs perish, in the blaze of your own glory. Yes, you shall sink, like the sun of the Peruvians, whom you seek to liberate, amid the worship of a people, and the tears of a world ; and you will rise re*animate, refulgent, and immortal ! * Mr. Phillips here alludes to the fate of one of the most nnibrtunate and the most heroic of the sovereigns of Mexico. The Spaniards trepanned him into their power, and stretched him upon a bed of red hot coals ! When he was expiring, he turned to one of his followers, whose tortures made him shriek " Look at your Ynca, (said he mildly), do you think I am on a keel of roses I" SPEECH CASE OF BROWNE v. BLAKE. My Lord and Gentlemen, I AM instructed by the Plaintiff to lay this case before you, and little do I wonder at the great interest which it seems to have excited. It is one of those cases which come home to the " business and the bosoms" of mankind ; it is not confined to the individuals concerned ; it visits every circle from the highest to the lowest ; it alarms the very heart of the community, and commands the whole social family to the spot, where human nature, prostrated at the bar of justice, calls aloud for pity and protection. On my first addressing a jury on a subject of this nature, I took the high ground to which I deemed myself entitled ; I stood upon the purity of the national character; I relied upon that chas- tity which centuries had made proverbial, and almost drowned the cry of individual suffering in BROWNE v. BLAKE. the violated reputation of the country. Humbled and abashed, 1 must resign the topic indignation at the novelty of the offence, has given way to horror at the frequency of its repetition it is now becoming almost fashionable amongst us we are importing the follies, and naturalizing the vices of the continent scarcely a term passes in these courts, during which some abashed adulterer or seducer, does not announce himself, improving on the odiousness of his offence, by the profligacy of his justification, and, as it were, struggling to record, by crimes, the desolating progress of our barbarous civilization. Gentlemen, if this be suffered to continue, what home shall be safe ; what hearth shall be sacred ; what parent can for a moment calculate on the possession of his child; what child shall be secure against the orphanage that springs from prostitution ; what solitary right, whether of life, or liberty, or property in the land shall survive amongst us, if that hallowed couch which modesty has veiled, and love endeared, and religion consecrated, is to be invaded by a vulgar and promiscuous libertinism ? A time there was when that couch was inviolable in Ireland when conjugal infidelity was deemed but an invention when marriage was considered as a sacrament of the heart, and faith and affection sent a mingled flame together from the altar ! Are such times to dwindle into a legend of tra- dition ? Are the dearest rights of man, and the holiest ordinances of God, no more to be res- pected ? Is the marriage vow to become the prelude to perjury and prostitution? Shall our 2Q4 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF enjoyments debase themselves into an adulterous participation, and our children propagate an in- cestuous community ? Hear the case which I am fated to unfold, and then tell me whether that endearing confidence, by which the bitterness of this life is sweetened, is to become the instrument of perfidy beyond conception; and whether the protection of the roof, the fraternity of the board, the obligations of the altar, and the devotions of the heart, are to be so many panders to the hellish abominations they should have purified ! Hear the case which must go forth to the world, but which I trust in God your verdict will accompany, to tell that world, that if there was vice enough amongst us to commit the crime, there is virtue enough to brand it with an indignant punish- ment. Of the Plaintiff, Mr. Browne, it is quite im- possible but you must have heard much: his misfortune has given him a sad celebrit} T , and it does seem a peculiar incident to such misfortune that the loss of happiness is almost invariably suc- ceeded by the deprivation of character. As the less guilty murderer will hide the corpse that may lead to his detection, so does the adulterer, by obscuring the reputation of his victim, seek to diminish the moral responsibility he has incurred. Mr. Browne undoubtedly forms no exception to this system, betrayed by his friend and abandoned by his wife, his too generous confidence, his too tender love, have been slanderously perverted into the sources of his calamity; because he could not tyrannise over her whom he adored, he was BROWNE *. BLAKE. 205 careless ; because he could not suspect him in whom he trusted, he was conniving 1 ; and crime, in the infatuation of its cunning, founds its justifi- cation even on the virtues of its victim ! I am not deterred by the prejudice thus cruelly excited ; I appeal from the gossiping credulity of scandal to the grave decisions of fathers and of husbands, and I implore of you, as you value the blessings of your home, not to countenance the calumny which solicits a precedent to excuse their spoli- ation. At the close of the year 1809, the death of my client's father gave him the inheritance of an ample fortune. Of all the joys his prosperity created, there was none but yielded to the extacy of sharing it with her he loved, the daughter of his father's ancient friend, the respectable pro- prietor of Oran Castle. She was then in the very spring of life, and never did the sun of heaven unfold a lovelier blossom her look was beauty and her breath was fragrance the eye that saw her caught a lustre from the vision ; and all the virtues seem to linger round her, like so many spirits enamoured of her loveliness. " Yes, she was good, as she was fair, None, none on earth above her ; As pure in thought as angels are, To see her was to love her." What years of tongueless transport might not her happy husband have anticipated ! What one addition could her beauties gain to render them all perfect! In the connubial rapture there was only one, and she was blest with it. A lovelv 206 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF family of infant children gave her the consecrated name of mother, and with it all that heaven can give of interest to this world's worthlessness. Can the mind imagine a more delightful vision than that of such a mother, thus young, thus lovely, thus beloved, blessing a husband's heart, basking in a world's smile; and while she breathed into her little ones the moral life, shewing them that, robed in all the light of beauty, it was still possible for their virtues to be cast into the shade. Year after year of happiness rolled on, and every year but added to their love a pledge to make it happier than the former. Without ambition but for her husband's love, without one object but her children's happiness, this lovely woman cir- cled in her orbit all bright, all beauteous in the prosperous hour, and if that hour e'er darkened, only beaming the brighter and the lovelier. What human hand could mar so pure a picture ! What punishment could adequately visit its violation ! " Oh happy love, where love like this is found! Oh heart-felt rapture ! bliss beyond compare !" It was indeed the summer of their lives, and with it came the swarm of summer friends, that revel in the sunshine of the hour, and vanish with its splendour. High and honoured in that crowd; most gay, most cherished, most professing, stood the Defendant, Mr. Blake. He was the Plaintiff's dearest, fondest friend ; to every pleasure called, in every case consulted, his day's companion and his evening guest, his constant, trusted, bosom confidant, and under guise of all oh, human BROWNE v. BLAKfc. 207 .nature! he was his fellest, deadliest, final enemy ! Here on the authority of this brief, do I arraign him, of having- wound himself into my client's intimacy, of having encouraged that intimacy into friendship, of having counterfeited a sympathy in his joys and his sorrows; and when he seemed too pure even for scepticism to doubt him, of having, under the sanctity of his roof, perpetrated an adultery the most unprecedented and per- fidious ! If this be true, can the world's wealth defray the penalty of such turpitude ? Mr. Browne, Gentlemen, was a man of fortune, he had no pro- fession, was ignorant of every agricultural pursuit, and, unfortunately adopting the advice of his father-in-law, he cultivated the amusements of the Currah*. I say unfortunately for his own affairs, and by no means in reference for the pursuit itself. It is not for me to libel an occupation which the highest, and noblest, and most illustrious throughout the empire, countenance by their adoption ; which fashion and virtue grace by its attendance, and in which, peers, and legislators, and princes, are not ashamed to appear conspi- cuous. But if the morality that countenances it be doubtful, by what epithet shall we designate that which would make it an apology for the most profligate of offences? Even if Mr. Browne's pursuits were ever so erroneous, was it for his bosom friend to take the advantage of them to ruin him? On this subject it is sufficient to re- mark, that under no circumstance of prosperity or vicissitude, was their connubial happiness ever even remotely clouded. In fact, the Plaintiff dis- * Tlic Irish New market. 203 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF regarded even the amusements that deprived him of her society. He took a house for her in the vicinity of Kildare, furnished it with all that luxury could require, and afforded her the^greatest of all luxuries, that of enjoying and enhancing his most prodigal affection. From the hour of their marriage, up to the unfortunate discovery, they lived on terms of the utmost tenderness ; not a word, except one of love ; not an act, ex- cept of mutual endearment passed between them. Now, Gentlemen, if this be proved to you, here I take my stand, and I say, under no earthly cir- cumstances, can a justification of the adulterer be adduced. No matter with what delinquent so- phistry he may blaspheme through its palliation ; God ordained, nature cemented, happiness con- secrated that celestial union ; and it is compli- cated treason against God and man, and society, to intend its violation. The social compact, through every fibre trembles at its consequences ; not only policy but law, not only law but nature, not only nature but religion, deprecate and de- nounce it. Parent and offspring, youth and age ; the dead from their tombs, the child from its cradle; creatures scarce alive, and creatures still unborn ; the grandsire shivering on the verge of death, the infant quickening in the mother's womb ; all with one assent, re-echo God, and ex- ecrate adultery ! I say, then, where it is once proved that husband and wife live together in a state of happiness, no contingency on which the sun can shine, can warrant any man in attempting their separation. Did they do so ? This is im- BROWNE . BLAKE. 209 peratively your first consideration. I only hope that all the heart's religion joined together, may have enjoyed the happiness they did. Prosperous and wealthy, fortune had no charms for Mr. Browne, but as it blessed the object of his affec- tions. She made success delightful ; she gave his wealth its value. The most splendid equi- pages ; the most costly luxuries ; the richest re- tinue ; all that vanity could invent to dazzle all that affection could devise to gratify, were hers, and thought too vile for her enjoyment. Great as his fortune was, his love outshone it, and it seems as if fortune was jealous of the preference. Proverbially capricious, she withdrew her smile, and left him shorn almost of every thing except his love, and the fidelity that crowned it. The hour of adversity is woman's hour ; in the full blaze of fortune's rich meridian her modest beam retires from vulgar notice, but when the clouds of woe collect around us, and shades and darkness dim the wanderer's path, that chaste and lovely light shines forth to cheer him, an emblem and an emanation of the heavens ! It was then her love, her value, and her power was visible. No, it is not for the cheerfulness with which she bore the change 1 prize her ; it is not that without a sigh she surrendered all the baubles of prosperity ; but that she pillowed her poor husband's heart, welcomed adversitv to make V him happy, held up her little children as the wealth that no adversity could take away ; and when she found his spirit broken and his soul de- 210 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF jected, with a more than masculine understanding-, retrieved in some degree his desperate fortunes, and saved the little wreck that solaced their re- tirement. What was such a woman worth, I ask you ? If you can stoop to estimate by dross the worth of such a creature give me even a notary's calculation, and tell me then what was she worth to him to whom she had consecrated the bloom of her youth, the charm of her innocence, the splendour of her beauty, the wealth of her tender- ness, the power of her genius, the treasure of her fidelity ? She, the mother of his children ; the pulse of his heart; the joy of his prosperity; the solace of his misfortunes ; what was she worth to him ? Fallen as she is you may still estimate her; you may see her value even in her ruin. The gem is sullied ; the diamond is shivered ; but even in the dust you may see the magnificence of its ma- terial. After this they retired to Rockville, their seat in the county of Galway, where they resided in the most domestic manner, on the remnant of their once splendid establishment. The butterflies that in their noontide fluttered round them, va- nished at the first breath of their adversity ; but one early friend still remained faithful and affec- tionate, and that was the Defendant. Mr. Blake is a young gentleman of about eight and twenty ; of splendid fortune; polished in his manners ; interesting in his appearance ; with many qualities to attach a friend, and every qua- lity to fascinate a female. Most willingly do I pay the tribute which nature claims for him : BROWNE . BLAKE. most bitterly do I lament that he has been so un- grateful to so prodigal a benefactress. The more Mr. Browne's misfortunes accumulated, the more disinterestedly attached did Mr. Blake appear to him. He shared with him his purse ; he assisted him with his council ; in an affair of honour, he placed his life and character in his hands : he in- troduced his innocent sister, just arrived from an English nunnery, into the family of his friend ; he encouraged every reciprocity of intercourse between the females, and to crown all, that no possible suspicion might attach to him, he seldom travelled without his domestic chaplain ! Now, if it shall appear that all this was only a screen for his adultery that he took advantage of his friend's misfortunes to seduce the wife of hia bosom that he affected confidence only to betray it that he perfected the wretchedness he pre- tended to console, and that in the midst of poverty, he has left his victim, friendless, hopeless, com- panionless, a husband without a wife, and a father without a child gracious God ! is it not enough to turn mercy herself into an executioner ? You convict for murder here is the hand that mur- dered innocence ! You convict for treason here is the vilest disloyalty to friendship ! You con- vict for robbery here is one who plundered virtue of her purest pearl, and dissolved it even in the bowl that hospitality held out to him ! They pretend that he is innocent ! Oh, effrontery the most unblushing ! Oh, vilest insult, added to the deadliest injury ! Oh, base, detestable, p 2 SPEECH IN THE CASE OF and damnable hypocrisy ! Of the final testimony it is true enoug-h their cunning has deprived us ; but, under Providence, 1 will pour upon this baseness such a flood of light, that 1 will defy not the most honourable man merely, but the most charitable sceptic, to touch the Holy Evangelists, and to say, by their sanctity, it has not been com- mitted. Attend upon me now, Gentlemen, step by step, and with me rejoice that, no matter how cautious may be the conspiracies of guilt, there is a power above to confound and to discover them. On the 27th January last, Mary Hines, one of the domestics, received directions from Mrs. Browne, to have breakfast very early on the en- suing morning, as the Defendant, then on a visit at the house, expressed an inclination to go out to hunt. She was accordingly brushing down the stairs at a very early hour, when she observed the handle of her mistress's door stir, and fearing the noise had disturbed her, she ran hastily down stairs to avoid her displeasure. She remained below about three-quarters of an hour, when her master's bell ringing violently, she hastened to answer it. He asked in some alarm where her mistress was ? Naturally enough astonished at such a question at such an hour, she said she knew not, but would go clown and see whether or not she was in the parlour. Mr. Browne, how- ever, had good reason to be alarmed, for she was so extremely indisposed going to bed at night that an express stood actually prepared to brinoe, And feeds the source whence tears must ever flow. THE DESERTER'S LAMENTATION. 1. IF sadly thinking, And spirits sinking, Could more than drinking Our griefs compose A cure for sorrow From grief I'd borrow ; And hope to-morrow Might end my woes. 2. But since in wailing There's nought availing, For Death, unfailing, Will strike the blow ; c 2 22 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND Then, for that reason, And for the season, Let us be merry Before we go ! 3. A wayworn ranger, To joy a stranger, Through ev'ry danger My course I've run ; Now, Death befriending, His last aid lending, My griefs are ending, My woes are done. 4. No more a rover, Or hapless lover, Those cares are over " My cup runs low ;" Then, for that reason, And for the season, Let us be merry Before we go .' After he had eaten through his terms at the Temple,, he returned to Ireland,, where he formed a matrimonial connexion ; which I wish most sin- cerely I could pass over in silence. Another publication has,, however, no doubt very innocent- ly, revived the calamity, which, out of delicacy to SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 23 the living, I shall touch with as light a pen as pos- sible. It was indeed to him a fountain of perpe- tual bitterness, overflowing the fairest prospects of his life, and mingling itself with the sweetest cup of his prosperity. He often repeated the cir- cumstances often sadly lamented to me the con- sequences of that union ; but far be it from me to feed the malignant appetite of an heartless curio- sity with the melancholy detail which friendship must lament, and a generous enmity would mourn in silence. This was the unfortunate period of his life, upon which political antipathy and private envy gloated with a vile envenomed gratification. Facts were exaggerated falsehoods were in- vented and exposed malignity took refuge in the universality of the libel which it first framed and then circulated. But no matter what was the cause of this calamity, he was its victim and a more equitable tribunal than that of this world has already weighed his infirmities against his virtues. In the year 1775, with, as he said himself, no living possession but a pregnant wife, he was called to the bar of Ireland. To that enlightened body, as at that day constituted, the " future men" of this country may be allowed to turn with an ex- c 4 24 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND cusable and, in some sort,, a national satisfaction. There were to be found her nobles,, her aristo- cracy,, her genius, her learning, and her patriot- ism, all concentrated within that little circle. No insolent pretension in the high, frowned down the intellectual splendour of the humble education compensated the want of birth industry supplied the inferiority of fortune and the law, which in its suitors knew no distinction but of justice, in its professors acknowledged none except that of merit. In other countries, where this glorious profession is degraded into a trade where cun- ning supplies the place of intellect, and an handi- craft mechanism is the substitute for mind where, in Currants peculiar phrase, ' ' men begin to mea- sure their depth by their darkness, and to fancy themselves profound because they feel they are perplexed" no idea can be formed of that illus- trious body of the learning that informed, the genius that inspired, and the fire that warmed it ; of the wit that relieved its wisdom, and the wis- dom that dignified its wit; of the generous emu- lation that cherished while it contended ; of the spotless honour that shone no less in the heredi- tary spirit of the highly born, than in the native integrity of the more humble aspirant ; but, above all, of that lofty and unbending patriotism that at SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 25 once won the confidence and enforced the imita- tion of the country. It is not to be questioned that to the bar of that day the people of Ireland looked up in every emergency with the most per- fect reliance upon their talent and their integrity! It was then the nursery of the parliament and the peerage. There was scarcely a noble family in the land that did not enrol its elect in that body, by the study of law and the exercise of eloquence to prepare them for the field of legislative exer- tion ; and there not unfrequently there arose a genius from the very lowest of the people,, who won his way to the distinctions of the senate, and wrested from pedigree the highest honours and offices of the constitution. It was a glorious spec- tacle to behold the hope of the peerage entering such an intellectual arena with the peasant's off- spring ; all difference merged in that of mind, and merit alone deciding the superiority. On such contests, and they were continual, the eye of every rank in the community was turned : the highest did not feel their birth debased by the victories of intellect ; and the humblest expected, seldom in vain, to be ennobled in their turn. Many a per- sonage sported the ermine on a back that had been coatless ; and the garter might have glittered on a leg that, in its native bog, had been unencumbered 26 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND by a stocking. Amongst those who were most distinguished when Mr. Curran came to the bar, and with whom afterwards, as Chief Justice, he not unfrequently came in collision, was Mr. JOHN SCOTT, afterwards better known by the title of LORD CLONMELL. This person sprung from a very humble rank of life, and raised himself to his subsequent elevation, partly by his talents, partly by his courage, and, though last not least, by his very superior knowledge of the world. During the stormy administration of Lord Townsend, he, on the recommendation of Lord Lifford, the then Chancellor, was elected to a seat in the House of Commons, and from that period advanced gra- dually through the subordinate offices to his sta- tion on the bench. In the year 1770, and during the succeeding sessions, he had to encounter al- most alone an opposition headed by Mr. Flood, and composed of as much effective hostility as ever faced a Treasury bench. His powers were rather versatile than argumentative ; but when he failed to convince he generally succeeded in diverting ; and if he did not by the gravity of his reasoning dignify the majority to which he sedulously at- tached himself, he at all events covered their re- treat with an exhaustless quiver of alternate sar- casm and ridicule. Added to this, he had a SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 27 perseverance not to be fatigued and a personal intrepidity altogether invincible. When he could not overcome., he swaggered ; and when he could not bully, he fought. The asperities of his public conduct were, however., invisible in private. He was stored with anecdote ; seldom, it is true, very delicate in the selection : but his companionable qualities were well seconded by the fidelity of his friendships ; and it is recorded of him, that he never made an insincere profession or forgot a favour. On the bench, indeed, and in some in- stances with Mr. Curran, he was occasionally very overbearing; but a bar such as I have described was not easily to be overborne ; and for some as- perity to a barrister of the name of Hackett, he was, after a professional meeting of the body, at which, though Chief Justice, he had but one sup- porter, obliged to confess and apologize for his misconduct in the public papers ! The death of Lord Clonmell is said to have originated in a very curious incident. In the year 1792 Mr. John Magee, the spirited proprietor of the Dublin Evening Post, had a fiat issued against him in a case of libel for a sum which the defendant thought excessive. The bench and the press were directly committed; and in such a case had a judge ten- fold the power he has, he would be comparatively 28 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND harmless. The subj ect made a noise was brought before Parliament and was at last, at least poli- tically, set at rest by the defeat of the Chief Justice and the restriction of the judges in future in such cases to an inferior and a definite sum. Discom- fited and mortified, Lord Clonmell retreated from the contest; but he retreated like an harpooned leviathan the barb was in his back, and Magee held the cordage. He made the life of his enemy a burden to him : he exposed his errors ; denied his merits ; magnified his mistakes ; ridiculed his pretensions ; and, continually edging without overstepping the boundary of libel,, poured upon the Chief Justice from the battery of the press a perpetual broadside of sarcasm and invective. " The man/' says Dr. Johnson, challenging Ju- nius " the man who vilifies established autho- rity is sure to find an audience." Lord Clonmell too fatally verified the apophthegm. Wherever he went he was lampooned by a ballad-singer or laughed at by the populace. Nor was Magee's arsenal composed exclusively of paper ammuni- tion : he rented a field bordering his Lordship's highly improved and decorated demesne ; he ad- vertised month after month that on such a day he would exhibit in this field a grand olympic PIG hunt that the people, out of gratitude for their HOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 29 patronage of his newspaper, should be gratuitous spectators of this revived c/flsszca/ amusement, and that he was determined to make so amazing a pro- vision of whisky and porter, that if any man went home thirsty it should be his own fault. The plan completely succeeded hundreds and thousands assembled every man did justice to his enter- tainer's hospitality, and his Lordship's magnificent demesne,, uprooted and desolate, next day exhi- bited nothing but the ruins of the Olympic pig-hunt! The rebellion approached the popular exaspera- tion was at its height and the end of it was, that Magee went mad with his victory, and Lord Clon- mell died literally broken-hearted with his defeat and his apprehensions. Another, but a very different character, at that time in high eminence at the Irish bar, was the justly celebrated WALTER HUSSEY BURGH, a man reverenced by his profession, idolized by his friends, loved by the people, honoured by the crown, and highly respected even by those who differed from him. The history of no country perhaps hands down a character on its records upon which there exists less difference of opinion than on that of Hussey Burgh. As a man, bene- volent, friendly, sincere, and honest; as a bar- 30 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND rister, learned, eloquent, ardent, and disinterested ; as a senator, in power respected by the opposition and out of it by the ministry ; he was always allowed principle, and heard with delight. His life was one continued glow of intellectual splen- dour ; and when he sunk., the bar, the senate, and the country felt a temporary eclipse. Of his elo- quence, the reporters of that day were too igno- rant faithfully to transmit any fair memorial to posterity ; and the memory of his few remaining contemporaries rather retains the general admira- tion of its effect, than any particular specimen of his language. I have heard but of one sentence which has escaped unmutilated. Speaking of the oppressive laws which had coerced Ireland, and ended in the universal resistance of the people and the establishment of the volunteers, he warmed by degrees into the following fine classical allu- sion : " Yes," said he, " such laws were sown like the DRAGON'S TEETH in my country; but, thank God, the harvest has been armed men!" The fire of his manner, the silver tone of his voice, the inimitable graces of his action, all combined, gave such irresistible effect to this simple sentence so delivered, and addressed to an audience so pre- pared, that an universal burst of enthusiasm is SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 31 said to have issued from the house, and to have been echoed by the galleries. Another barrister who had immediately pre- ceded the period of Mr. Curran was the RIGHT HON. JOHN HELY HUTCHINSON, the founder of a very distinguished family. From every account, he must have been a most extraordinary person- age. After having amassed a large fortune at the bar, and held a distinguished seat in the senate, he accepted the provostship of Trinity College, and was, 1 believe, the first person promoted to that rank who had not previously obtained a fel- lowship. His appointment gave great offence to the university; but he little heeded the resent- ment which was the consequence of any pecuniary promotion ; and, indeed, such was his notoriety in this respect, that Lord Townsend, wearied out with his applications, is reported to have ex- claimed, " By G- ! if I gaveHutchinson England and Ireland for an estate, he would solicit the Isle of Man for a potatoe-garden !" The whole Col- lege combined against him, but it was only to prove the imbecility of mere bookworms when opposed to a man of the world. " The Provost," said Goldsmith, "stands like an arch every ad- ditional pressure only shows his strength/ 1 He 32 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND justified the observation withstood all his ene- mies and is said, when he was at the head of the university,, actually to have had one of his daugh- ters gazetted for a majority of horse, which com- mission she held for several days, until an oppor- tunity offered for her selling out to advantage ! It will readily be believed that the man who could thus captivate the court and command the univer- sity, must have been no very ordinary personage. Yet he owed his power much more to his genius than his servility. With no common influence at the Castle, he is well known to have differed with ministers upon the most important questions among the rest, the Catholic ; and to have re- seated himself upon the Treasury bench with an influence rendered more respectable by the proofs of his independence. It is very true that he pro- vided amply for his family ; and I am glad he did so, because on many occasions they have proved themselves ornaments to their country. If it was a weakness, it was at all events an amiable one; and few there were in political life who have had the good fortune to find in the merits of its ob- jects such a justification for their partiality. The Provost seemed to have been born a courtier. He had the power beyond almost all men of disguising his emotions; and when he chose, you might just SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 33 as easily have extorted from a mask as from his countenance what was passing- within him. Of this faculty there is a memorable instance given in his treatment of Dr. Magee, the present Bishop of Raphoe, and author of the celebrated work on the atonement. Hutchinson was Provost., and had proposed his son for the representation of the uni- versity. Magee was a fellow., and had a vote. The fellows after a certain time must be ordained, unless they obtain a dispensation from the Provost; and such dispensation was the wish next Magee's heart, as his rare talents must have raised him to the very highest station at the bar. He was given to understand it would be granted provided he voted for the Provost's son. This, however., a previous promise (which, of course, he was too honourable to violate) withheld him from doing. The Provost had just heard of the refusal, and was in a paroxysm of rage when Magee came to solicit the dispensation : his face was instantly all sun- shine ; with the most ineffable sweetness he took the offending applicant by the hand ee My dear Sir, consider,"' said he, "I am placed guardian over the youth of Ireland How could I answer it to my conscience or my country if I deprived the university of such a tutor !" " Never," said Magee, repeating the anecdote, " never did poli- D 34 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND tician look deceit so admirably." The three bar- risters whom I have thus indiscriminately selected were lost in a crowd of others equally eminent at the Irish bar at this interesting epoch in Mr. Cur- ran's life. Of the immediate contemporaries who commenced the race of competition along with him., we shall find many eminently distinguished both in the legal and parliamentary history of the country. Called, as we have thus seen him, to the bar, he was without friends, without connexions, with- out fortune, conscious of talents far above the mob by which he was elbowed, and cursed with sensi- bility which rendered him painfully alive to the mortifications he was fated to experience. Those who have risen to professional eminence and re- collect the impediments of such a commencement the neglect abroad the poverty perhaps at home the frowns of rivalry the fears of friend- ship the sneer at the first essay the prophecy that it will be the last discouragements as to the present forebodings as to the future some who are established endeavouring to crush the chance of competition, and some who have failed anxious for the wretched consolation of companionship those who recollect the comforts of such an ap- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 35 prenticeship may duly appreciate poor Curran's situation. After toiling- for a very inadequate recompense at the sessions of Cork, and wearing, as he said himself, his teeth almost to their stumps, he proceeded to the metropolis., taking for his wife and young children a miserable lodging upon Hog Hill. Term after term without either profit or professional reputation he paced the hall of the Four Courts. Yet even thus he was not altoge- ther undistinguished. If his pocket was not heavy, his heart was light; he was young and ardent, buoyed up not less by the consciousness of what he felt within, than by the encouraging comparison with those who were successful around him, and he took his station among the crowd of idlers, whom he amused with his wit or amazed by his eloquence. Many even who had emerged from that crowd did not disdain occasionally to glean from his conversation the rich and varied treasures which he squandered with the most unsparing prodigality ; and some there were who observed the brightness of the infant lu- minary struggling through the obscurity that clouded its commencement. Amons'st those who ~ had the discrimination to appreciate, and the heart to feel for him, luckily for Curran, was Mr. Ar- thur Wolfe, afterwards the unfortunate but re- 36 RECOLLECTIONS OP CURRAN AND spected Lord Kil warden. The first fee of any consequence which he received was through his recommendation ; and his recital of the incident cannot be without its interest to the young pro- fessional aspirant whom a temporary neglect may have sunk into dejection. " I then lived/' said he,, Cf upon Hog Hill; my wife and children were the chief furniture of my apartments ; and as to my rent,, it stood pretty much the same chance of liquidation with the national debt. Mrs. Cur- ran, however,, was a barrister's lady, and what she wanted in wealth she was well determined should be supplied by dignity. The landlady, on the other hand, had no idea of any gradation ex- cept that of pounds, shillings, and pence. I walked out one morning to avoid the perpetual altercations on the subject, with my mind, you may imagine, in no very enviable temperament. I fell into the gloom to which, from my infancy, I had been occasionally subject. I had a family for whom I had no dinner ; and a landlady for whom I had no rent. I had gone abroad in de- spondence 1 returned home almost in despera- tion. When I opened the door of my study, where Lavater alone could have found a library, the first object which presented itself was an im- mense folio of a brief, twenty golden guineas SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 37 wrapped up beside it, and the name of Old Bob Lyons marked upon the back of it. I paid my landlady bought a good dinner gave Bob Lyons a share of it and that dinner was the date of my prosperity." Such was his own exact account of his professional advancement : and perhaps the reader may feel some interest attached to the per- son of the man who thus held out to Curran the hand of encouragement when he was trembling upon the pivot of his destiny. A personal ac- quaintance has given me in some degree the means of gratifying his curiosity. BOB LYONS, the at- torney, was a perfect but indeed a very favourable specimen of a class of men now quite extinct in Ireland, and never perhaps known in any other country in creation. They were a kind of com- pound of the rack-rent squire and the sharp law practitioner careless and craving extravagant and usurious honourable and subtle just as their education or their nature happened to pre- dominate at the moment. They had too much ignorant conceit not to despise the profession, and too many artificial wants not at times to have recourse to its arcana. The solicitor of the morn- ing was the host of the evening; the invitation perhaps came on the back of the capias, and the gentleman of undoubted Milesian origin capped D 3 38 the climax of his innumerable bumpers with toast- ing- confusion to the gentleman by act of parlia- ment. This race of men, a genus in themselves distinct and peculiar, grew like an excrescence upon the system of the country : the Irish squire of half a century ago scorned not to be in debt ; it would be beneath his dignity to live within his income ; and next to not incurring a debt, the greatest degradation would have been voluntarily to pay one. The consequence necessarily of cre- ditors was law, and the indispensable consequence of law was an attorney : but those whom law es- tranged the table re-united the squire became reconciled to the attorney over a bottle to avoid his process he made him his agent,, and the estate soon passed from their alternate possession by the same course of ruinous prodigality. Such was the community of which old Bob Lyons was a most distinguished member ; but of which,, as I have said before., he was a most fa- vourable specimen. Plausible in his manners and hospitable in his habits, those who feared him for his undoubted skill as a practitioner, esteemed him for his convivial qualities as a companion. Nor had even his industry the ill favour of selfishness. If he gained all he could, still he spent all he gain- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 39 ed, and those who marvelled at the paverty of his neighbourhood, could easily have counted his per- sonal acquisitions. No matter who might be the poorer for him, he was the richer for no man in short,, it seemed to be the office of his left hand lavishly to expend what his right hand assiduously accumulated. When I became first acquainted with him he had reaped the harvest of two thirds of a century, and alternately sued and entertained two thirds of the province of Connaught, in which he resided. He had all the pleasantry of youth in his address, and art struggled hard to set off the lingering graces of his exterior. His clothes were always adjusted to a nicety a perennial Brutus rendered either baldness or greyness in- visible, and the jet black liquid that made his boot a mirror, renovated the almost traceless semicircle of his eyebrow ! Such to an iota, was old Bob Lyons ; and to him Curran has often told me he owed not merely much of the prosperity, but many of the pleasantest hours of his existence. The case in which he employed him first, was the Sligo Election Petition Cause, between Ormsby and Wynne ; a species of litigation from which, thanks to the Union, no young Irish barrister will ever date his prosperity in future. In this cause Mr. Curran eminently distinguished him- D 4 40 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND self ; and so grateful was Lyons for his exertions, that he gave him professional business afterwards in succession to the full amount of eleven hundred pounds. This, of course, quite established him in the world the landlady upon Hog Hill began to view him in altogether a different aspect, and an house of his own, fuinished at all points, re- warded his friend Lyons with no churlish hospi- tality. Lyons's country residence was situated on the sea-shore, about ten miles to the north- west of Sligo. The English reader can have no idea whatever of such a residence in such a country. Scenery rude, varied, and romantic rocks upon rocks tossed together in the most fan- tastic groupings and mountains of every height and every shape, frowning over the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, give rather shelter than ha- bitation to a people who have proclaimed eternal warfare with civilization. Half a century has since passed over them without introducing an innovation upon their ancient customs ; and the feats of their forefathers, too outrageous for per- petration and the articles of their superstition, too monstrous for credulity have now rooted themselves into a kind of prescriptive reverence. The seals that infest their coasts in great numbers, they believe to be animated by the souls of their SOME OP HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 4] antiquated maiden relatives, a supposition cer- tainly far more creditable to the chastity of the one sex than the gallantry of the other the rocks, that with their echoes " syllable men's names/' are the established residence of some rustic wi- zard and the fairies, numerous enough at the dawn of the morning, never fail to double their numbers towards the conclusion of the frequent holyday ! Such was the scene in Curran's early life of many a long vacation. Here the voice,, upon whose accents the senate and the people hung, was loud in the revelry of the village wake ; and the mind stored with every classic treasure and inspired with every sublime perception, ri- valled the peasant's mirth and wore familiarly the peasant's merriment. Nor was this idle jocularity without its value. Often afterwards in his pro- fessional circuit, the hearer, who stood entranced at an eloquence that seemed to flow from the very fount of inspiration, would see him suddenly, with some village witness, assume the vulgar air and attitude and accent, until his familiarity wheedled the confession which his ingenuity never could have extorted. Various were the anecdotes with which Mr. Curran used to exemplify the annals of Mulloghmore and the history of Bob Lyons. But many of them owed half their value to their local 42 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND interest,, and many of them were of a nature more suited to the table than the press. To me, who from my infancy had been familiar with all the localities of the scene, he delighted to repeat them; and as he sported in the retrospect of days so long gone by, the very spirit of the poet's ve- teran revived within him he lived over again the pleasures he was describing. In one of these excursions a very singular cir- cumstance had almost rendered this the period of his biography. He was on a temporary visit to the neighbouring town of Sligo, and was one morning standing at his bed-room window, which overlooked the street, occupied, as he told me, in arranging his portmanteau, when he was stunned by the report of a blunderbuss in the very cham- ber with him ; and the panes above his head were all shivered into atoms ! He looked suddenly around in the greatest consternation. The room was full of smoke the blunderbuss on the floor just discharged the door closed, and no human being but himself discoverable in the apartment ! If this had happened in his rural retreat, it could readily have been reconciled through the medium of some offended spirit of the village mythology ; but, as it was, he was in a populous town in a SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 43 civilized family amongst Christian doctrines, where the fairies had no power and their gambols no currency ; and to crown all, a poor cobler, into whose stall on the opposite side of the street the slugs had penetrated,, hinted in no very equi- vocal terms that the whole affair was a conspiracy against his life. It was by no means a pleasant addition to the chances of assassination, to be loudly declaimed against by a crazed mechanic as an assassin himself. Day after day passed away without any solution of the mystery, when one evening,, as the servants of the family were con- versing round the fire on so miraculous an escape, a little urchin, not ten years old, was heard so to wonder how such an aim was missed, that an uni- versal suspicion was immediately excited. He was alternately flogged and coaxed into a confes- sion, which disclosed as much precocious and ma- lignant premeditation as perhaps ever marked the annals of juvenile depravity. This little miscreant had received a box on the ear from Mr. Curran for some alleged misconduct a few days before the Moor's blow did not sink deeper into a mind more furious for revenge, or more predisposed by nature for such deadly impressions. He was in the bed-room by mere chance, when Mr. Curran entered. He immediately hid himself in the cur- 44 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND tains till he observed him too busy with his port- manteau for observation . He then levelled at him the old blunderbuss which lay charged in the cor- ner, the stiffness of whose trigger, too strong for his infant fingers, alone prevented the aim which he confessed he had taken, and which had so nearly terminated the occupations of the cobler. The door was a-jar, and mid the smoke and terror he easily slipped out without discovery. I had the story verbatim a few months ago from Mr. Curran's lips, whose impressions on the sub- ject it was no wonder that forty years had not ob- literated. From this period he began rapidly to rise in professional estimation. There was no cause in the metropolis of any interest in which he was not concerned, nor was there a county in the provinces which at some time or other he did not visit on a special retainer. It was an object almost with every one to pre-occupy so successful or so dan- gerous an advocate ; for, if he failed in inducing a jury to sympathize with his client, he at all events left a picture of his adversary behind him, which survived and embittered the advantages of victory. Nor was his eloquence his only weapon : at cross-examination, the most difficult and by tar SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 45 the most hazardous part of a barrister's profession, he was quite inimitable. There was no plan which he did not detect no web which he did not disentangle and the unfortunate wretch who commenced with all the confidence of precon- certed perjury, never failed to retreat before him in all the confusion of exposure. Indeed it was almost impossible for the guilty to offer a success- ful resistance. He argued he cajoled he ridi- culed he mimicked he played off the various artillery of his talent upon the witness he would affect earnestness upon trifles,, and levity upon subjects of the most serious import,, until at length he succeeded in creating a security that was fatal, or a sullenness that produced all the consequences of prevarication. No matter how unfair the to- pic, he never failed to avail himself of it ; acting upon the principle, that in law as well as in war, every stratagem was admissible. If he was hard pressed, there was no peculiarity of person no singularity of name no eccentricity of profession at which he would not grasp, trying to confound the self-possession of the witness in the, no matter how excited, ridicule of the audience. To a wit- ness of the name of Halfpenny he once began, ' Halfpenny, I see you 're a rap, and for that reason you shall be nailed to the counter." 46 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND Halfpenny is sterling," exclaimed the opposite counsel " No, no/' said he., " he 's exactly like his own conscience, only copper washed." To Lundy Foot, the celebrated tobacconist,, once hesitating- on the table " Lundy Lundy that's a poser a devil of a pinch." This was the gentleman who applied to Curran for a motto when he first established his carriage. ec Give me one, my dear Curran/' said he, ' ' of a serious cast., because I am afraid the people will laugh at a tobacconist setting up a carriage, and, for the scholarship's sake, let it be in Latin." " 1 have just hit on it," said Curran " it is only two words, and it will at once explain your profession, your elevation , and your contempt for their ridicule, and it has the advantage of being in two languages, Latin or English, just as the reader chooses put up ' Quid rides' upon your carriage." Inquiring his master's age from an horse- jockey's servant, he found it almost impossible to extract an answer, " Come, come, friend^has he not lost his teeth ?" " Do you think," retort- ed the fellow, (f that I know his ao*e as he does ~ his horse's, by the mark of mouth?" The laugh was against Curran, but he instantly recovered SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 47 " You were very right not to try, friend ; for you know your master's a great bite." He was just rising to cross-examine a witness before a Judge who could not comprehend any jest which was not written in black letter. Before he said a single word the witness began to laugh. " What are you laughing at, friend what are you laughing at? Let me tell you that a laugh with- out a joke is like is like " " Like what, Mr. Curran ?" asked the Judge, imagining he was nonplussed " Just exactly, my Lord, like a con- tingent remainder without any particular estate to support it." I am afraid none but my legal readers will understand the admirable felicity of the similitude, but it was quite to his Lordship's fancy, and rivalled with him all "" the wit that Rabelais ever scattered." Examining a country squire who disputed a collier's bill " Did he not give you the coals, friend?" " He did, Sir, but " " But what? on your oath was n't your payment slack ?" It was thus that in some way or other he con- trived to throw the witnesses off their centre, and he took care they seldom should recover it. 48 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURBAN AND ec My lard my lard" vociferated a peasant wit- ness, writhing under this mental excruciation " My lard my lard I can't answer yon little gentleman, he's putting me in such a doldrum." ft A doldrum ! Mr. Curran, what does he mean by a doldrum ?" exclaimed Lord Avonmore. " O ! my Lord, it's a very common complaint with per- sons of this description it's merely a confusion of the Head arising from a corruption of the heart." To the bench he was at times quite as uncere- monious ; and if he thought himself reflected on or interfered with, had instant recourse either to ridicule or invective. There is a celeb rated reply in circulation of Mr. Dunning to a remark of Lord Mansfield, who curtly exclaimed at one of his legal positions, ec O ! if that be law, Mr. Dunning, I may butrn my law books!" the Earl of Clare we find a man eminent- ly gifted with talents adapted either for a bles- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 143 sing- or a curse to the nation he inhabited ; but early enveloped in high and dazzling authority, he lost his way ; and considering his power as a victory, he ruled his country as a conquest: warm, but indiscriminate in his friendships equally indiscriminate and implacable in his ani- mosities he carried to the grave the passions of his childhood, and has bequeathed to the public a record*, which determines that trait of his varied character beyond the power of refutation. fc He hated powerful talents, because he feared them ; and trampled on modest merit, because it was incapable of resistance. Authoritative and peremptory in his address; commanding, able, and arrogant in his language; a daring contempt for public opinion seemed to be the fatal principle which misguided his conduct : and Ireland be- came divided between the friends of his patronage the slaves of his power and the enemies to his tyranny. cc His character had no medium, his manners no mediocrity the example of his extremes was * His Lordship's last will, now a record in the prerogative office of Dublin, a most extraordinary composition of hatred and affection, piety and malice, &c. 144 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND adopted by his intimates, and excited in those who knew him feelings either of warm attachment, or of rivetted aversion. ec While he held the seals in Ireland, he united a vigorous capacity with the most striking errors : as a judge, he collected facts with a rapid pre- cision, and decided on them with a prompt aspe- rity : depending too much on the strength of his own judgment and the acuteness of his own in- tellect., he hated precedent and despised the high- est judicial authorities, because they were not his own. Professing great control over others, he assum- ed but little over himself; he gave too loose a reign to his impressions, consequently the neu- trality of the judge occasionally yielded to the irritation of the moment; and equity at times became the victim of despatch, or a sacrifice to pertinacity. Cf The calm dignity of a high and elevated mind, deriving weight from its own purity, and consequence from its own example, did not seem the characteristic of the tribunal where he pre- sided ; and decorum was preserved, less by a re- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 145 spect for his person, than a dread of his observa- tion ; for he disliked presumption in every person but himself, and discountenanced it in every body, but those whom he patronized. "He investigated fraud with assiduity, and pu- nished it with rigour; yet it was obvious, that in doing- so he enjoyed the double satisfaction of de- tecting delinquency, and of gratifying the mis- anthropy of an habitual invective for never did he poise the scale, without also exercising the sword of justice. " Yet in many instances he was an able, and in many a most useful judge and though his ta- lents were generally overrated, and many of his decisions condemned, it may be truly said, that, with all his failings, if he had not been a vicious statesman, he might have been a virtuous chan- cellor. " Though his conversation was sometimes li- centious and immoral, and always devoid of refined wit and of genuine humour yet in domestic life he had many meritorious, and some amiable qua- lities an indefatigable and active friend, a kind and affectionate master; an indulgent landlord L 146 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND liberal,, hospitable, and munificent,, he possessed the seed of qualities very superior to those which he cultivated, and in some instances evinced him- self susceptible of those finer sensations, which, if their growth had been permitted in his vigorous and fertile mind, might have placed him on the very summit of private character: but, unfortu- nately, his temper, his ambition, and his power, seemed to unite in one common cause, to impede and stunt the growth of almost every principle which would have become a virtue. " As a politician and a statesman, the character of Lord Clare is too well known, and its effects are too generally experienced, to be mistaken or mis- represented the era of his reign was the downfall of his country his councils accelerated what his policy might have suppressed, and have marked the annals of Ireland with stains and miseries un- equalled and indelible. "In council, Lord Clare rapid, peremptory, and overbearing regarded promptness of execu- tion, rather than discretion of arrangement, and piqued himself more on expertness of thought than sobriety of judgment. Through all the ca- lamities of Ireland, the mild voice of conciliation SOME OP HIS CONTEMPORARIES. never escaped his lips ; and when the torrent of civil war had subsided in his country, he held out no olive, to show that the deluge had receded. " Acting- upon a conviction, that his power was but co-existent with the order of public establish- ments, and the tenure of his office limited to the continuance of Administration, he supported both with less prudence, and more desperation, than sound policy or an enlightened mind, should per- mit or dictate ; his extravagant doctrines of reli- gious intolerance created the most mischievous pretexts for his intemperance in upholding them; and under colour of defending the principles of one revolution, he had nearly plunged the nation into all the miseries of another. to secure the state by the conviction of the prison- er. I am less interested in the condition and po- litical happiness of this country than you are, for probably I shall be a less time in it. I have then the greater claim on your confidence,, when I caution you against the greatest and most fatal of revolutions that of the sceptre into the hands of the informer. These are probably the last words I shall ever speak to you, but these last are direct- ed to your salvation, and that of your posterity, when they tell you that the reign of the informer is the suppression of the law. My old friends, I tell you that if you surrender yourselves to the mean and disgraceful instrumentality of your own condemnation, you will make yourselves fitobjects for martial law. You will give an attestation to the British minister that you are fit for it, and your liberties will vanish, never, O never to return. Your country will become a desert or a gaol, un- til the informer, fatigued with slaughter and gorged with blood, will slumber upon the sceptre of his perjury ! It remains with you to say whe- ther four species shall comprise the population of your country the informer to accuse the jury to condemn the judge to sentence and the pri- soner to suffer. It regardeth not me what im- pression your verdict shall make on the fate of this SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 169 country, but you it much regardeth. With the solemnity of a last bequest, I offer you the warn- ing, and O ! may the acquittal of a worthy and virtuous citizen., who takes refuge in your verdict from the vampire who seeks to suck his blood, be the blessed promise of peace, confidence, and se- curity to this wretched, distracted, self-devouring population ! Yet such is the publicly delivered description of a man, who, it is said, has since been sent abroad as the diplomatic representative of his So- vereign ! The above character is much more strongly and more finely drawn, than that in the printed publication, which bears the name of Mr. Curran. It is not my intention to swell this vo- lume by a lengthened insertion of the various speeches with which, no doubt, the enlightened reader is already acquainted; however, I shall select the passages which appear to me the most highly finished, and the most characteristic, pre- facing each with such an account of its origin, as may produce some extrinsic interest in the peru- sal. By this, every one may form for himself an estimate of the peculiar powers of the orator in their highest state of preparation. It would not be quite fair to judge him by those casual effu- 170 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND sions which he flung off in the moment of hurry or of carelessness ; but the passages which I shall quote, he was accustomed to call his de bene esses, highly finished for the purposes of effect, and pre- pared to be dove-tailed into the less elaborate com- positions. At the same time, it would be doing Mr. Curran a gross injustice to assert that he never rose high except from previous reflection. The fact is otherwise. He seldom produced a more powerful impression, or blazed into a more cloudless meridian, than when he was inflamed or exasperated by the opposition of the moment. Of this, the reprisal upon Lord Clare, as above quoted, is a prominent instance. It is a very fool- ish, but a very favourite opinion of some, that the merit of a speech is much diminished by the cir- cumstance of its preparation. But it appears to me just as possible to produce a law argument upon the spur of the occasion, replete with intui- tive learning, and fortified by inspired authorities, as any of those sublime orations to which mankind have decreed the palm of eloquence. The great- est orators of antiquity were not ashamed to con- fess the industry of the closet. Demosthenes glo- ried in the smell of the lamp ; and it is recorded of Cicero, that he not only so laboriously prepared his speeches, but even so minutely studied the ef- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 171 feet of their delivery, that on one occasion, when he had to oppose Hortensius, the reiterated re- hearsals of the night before so diminished his strength as almost to incapacitate him in the morn- ing. Lord Erskine corrected his very eloquent orations, and Mr. Burke literally worried his print- er into a complaint against the fatigue of his con- tinual revisals. Indeed it is said that such was the fastidiousness of his industry, that the proof sheet not unfrequently exhibited a complete era- sure of the original manuscript! Such is the la- bour of those who write for immortality. The first speech of Mr. Curran of any consequence which I can find upon record, though he had un- doubtedly previously risen to great professional eminence, is the speech before mentioned on the right of the election of Lord Mayor, delivered in the year 1790. He was at that time a King's counsel. The following passages, after that on Lord Clare, appeared to me the most highly finish- ed and the most characteristic. On the Disadvantages arising to Ireland,from the rapid Change of her Administration. But, my Lords, how must these considerations have been enforced by a view of Ireland, as a con- nected country, deprived as it was of almost all RECOLLECTIONS OP CURRAN AND the advantages of an hereditary monarchy ; the father of his people residing at a distance, and the paternal beam reflected upon his children through such a variety of mediums, sometimes too languid- ly to warm them, sometimes so intensely as to con- sume ; a succession of governors differing from one another in their tempers,, in their talents, and in their virtues, and of course in their systems of administration ; unprepared in general for rule by any previous institution, and utterly unac- quainted with the people they were to govern, and with the men through whose agency they were to act. Sometimes, my Lords, 'tis true, a rare individual has appeared among us, as if sent by the bounty of Providence in compassion to hu- man miseries, marked by that dignified simplicity of manly character, which is the mingled result of enlightened understanding and an elevated in- tegrity ; commanding a respect that he laboured not to inspire ; and attracting a confidence which it was impossible he could betray. It is but eight years, my Lords, since we have seen such a man amongst us, raising a degraded country from the condition of a province, to the rank and conse- quence of a people, worthy to be the ally of a mighty empire ; forming the league that bound her to Great Britain, on the firm and honourable SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 173 basis of equal liberty and a common fate, " stand- ing and falling with the British nation/' and thus stipulating for that freedom which alone contains the principle of her political life, in the covenant of her federal connexion. But how short is the continuance of those auspicious gleams of public sunshine ! how soon are they passed, and perhaps for ever ! In what rapid and fatal revolution has Ireland seen the talents and the virtues of such men give place to a succession of sordid parade, and empty pretension of bloated promise and lank performance, of austere hypocrisy and peculating economy ! Hence it is, my Lords, that the admi~ nistration of Ireland so often presents to the read- er of her history, not the view of a legitimate go- vernment, but rather of an encampment in the country of a barbarous enemy ; where the object of the invader is not government but conquest ; where he is of course obliged to resort to the cor- rupting of clans, or of single individuals, pointed out to his notice by public abhorrence, and re- commended to his confidence only by a treachery so rank and consummate, as precludes all possi- bility of their return to private virtue or to public reliance, and therefore only put into authority over a wretched country, condemned to the tor- ture of all that petulant unfeeling asperity, with 174 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND which a narrow and malignant mind will bristle in unmerited elevation ; condemned to be betray- ed, and disgraced, and exhausted by the little trai- tors that have been suffered to nestle and grow within it, making it at once the source of their grandeur and the victim of their vices, reducing it to the melancholy necessity of supporting their consequence, and of sinking under their crimes, like the lion perishing by the poison of a reptile that finds shelter in the mane of the noble animal, while it is stinging him to death. Ludicrous Description of the Election by Ballot. But, my Lords, it seems all these defects, in point of accusation, of defence, of trial, and of judgment, as the ingenious gentlemen have ar- gued, are cured by the magical virtue of those beans, by whose agency the whole business must be conducted. If the law had permitted a single word to be exchanged between the parties, the learned counsel confesses that much difficulty might arise in the events which I have stated ; but they have found out all these difficulties are pre- vented or removed by the beans and the ballot. According to these gentlemen, we are to suppose one of those unshaven demagogues, whom the learned counsel have so humorously described, SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 175 rising in the Commons when the name of Alder- man James is sent down ; he begins by throwing out a torrent of seditious invective against the ser- vile profligacy and liquorish venality of the board of Alderman this he does by beans. Having thus previously inflamed the passions of his fellows, and somewhat exhausted his own, his judgment collects the reins that floated on the neck of his imagination, and becomes grave, compressed, sen- tentious, and didactic ; he lays down the law of personal disability, and corporate criminality, and corporate forfeiture, with great precision, with sound emphasis and good discretion, to the great delight and edification of the assembly and this he does by beans. He then proceeds, my Lords, to state the specific charge against the unfortunate candidate for approbation, with all the artifice and malignancy of accusation, scalding the culprit in tears of affected pity, bringing forward the black- ness of imputed guilt through the varnish of si- mulated commiseration, bewailing the horror of his crime, that he may leave it without excuse ; and invoking the sympathy of his judges, that he may steel them against compassion and this, my Lords, the unshaved demagogue doth by beans, The accused doth not appear in person, for he cannot leave his companions, nor by attorney, for 176 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND his attorney could not be admitted but he ap- pears by beans. At first, humble and depreca- tory., he conciliates the attention of his judges to his defence, by giving them to hope that it may be without effect ; he does not alarm them by any indiscreet assertion that the charge is false, but he slides upon them arguments to show it impro- bable ; by degrees, however, he gains upon the assembly, and deifies and refutes, and recrimi- nates and retorts all by beans until at last he challenges his accuser to a trial, which is accord- ingly had, in the course of which the depositions are taken, the facts tried, the legal doubts pro- posed and explained by beans. And in the same manner the law is settled with an exactness and authority that remains a record of jurisprudence for the information of future ages ; while at the same time the " harmony" of the metropolis is attuned by the marvellous temperament of jarring discord : and the " good will" of the citizens is secured by the indissoluble bond of mutual cri- mination and reciprocal abhorrence, By this happy mode of decision, one hundred and forty- six causes of rejection (for of so many do the Commons consist, each of whom must be entitled to allege a distinct cause) are tried in the course of a single day, with satisfaction to all parties, SOME OP HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 177 With what surprise and delight mtist the heart of the inventor have glowed, when he discovered those wonderful instruments of wisdom and elo- quence, which, without being obliged to commit the precious extracts of science, or persuasion, to the faithless and fragile vehicles of words or phrases, can serve every process of composition or abstraction of ideas, and every exigency of dis^ course o'r argumentation, by the resistless strength and infinite variety of beans, white or black, or boiled or raw ; displaying all the magic of their powers in the mysterious exertions of dumb inves- tigation and mute discussion ; of speechless ob- jection and tongue-tied refutation ! Nor should it be forgotten, my Lords, that this notable disco- very does no little honour to the sagacity of the present age, by explaining a doubt that has for so many centuries perplexed the labour of philoso- phic inquiry ; and furnishing the true reason, why the pupils of Pythagoras were prohibited the use of beans. It cannot, I think, my Lords, be doubted that the great author of the metempsy- choses found out that those mystic powers of per- suasion, which vulgar naturalists supposed to re- main lodged in minerals or fossils, have really transmigrated into beans ; and he could not, there- fore, but see that it would have been fruitless to 178 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRArf ANB preclude his disciples from mere oral babbling, unless he had also debarred them from the indul* gence of vegetable loquacity. His next recorded speech is in defence of Archibald Hamilton Rowan,, Esq. accused of the publication of a seditious libel addressed from the Society of United Irishmen, at Dublin, to the Volunteers of Ireland. This speech is one of the finest, and, as far as public effect went, one of the most efficient ever pronounced by him. Yet he has been censured by ignorant men, as losing sight of his client in defence of abstract doctrines. The truth is, Mr. Curran received his brief on that occasion on condition that he would attend rather to the justification of the principles of the publication than the acquittal of the author. Mr. Rowan was convicted, sen- tenced to a heavy fine and two years imprison- ment ; but through the affection of his lady, per- sonally, it is said, like Madame Lavalette, instru- mental in his escape, he eluded the vigilance of his enemies, and fled to America, the universal refuge of the virtuous and the oppressed. There he remained several years, subjected to many casualties, and chiefly subsisting by his own honourable exertions. After the political tern- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 179 pest in Ireland had subsided, he was permitted to return, pleaded the King's pardon, and now lives in the full enjoyment of his extensive estates, uni^ versally beloved, esteemed, and respected. A few minutes before Mr. Curran rose to ad- dress the jury, a band of armed men was intro- i duced into court, which drew from him the fol- lowing fine exordium. It bears a striking resem- blance to that of Cicero in his defence of Milo. GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY, When I consider the period at which this pro- secution is brought forward ; when I behold the extraordinary safeguard of armed soldiers resort- ed to, no doubt, for the preservation of peace and order ; when I catch, as I cannot but do, the throb of public anxiety, which beats from one end to the other of this hall; when 1 reflect on what may be the fate of a man of the most beloved per- sonal character, of one of the most respected families of our country; himself the only indivi- dual of that family, I may almost say of that country, who can look to that possible fate with unconcern ? Feeling, as I do, all these impres- sions, it is in the honest simplicity of my heart I speak, when I say, that 1 never rose in a court of 180 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND justice with so much embarrassment, as upon this occasion. I If, gentlemen,, I could entertain an hope of finding refuge for the disconcertion of my mind, in the perfect composure of yours ; if I could suppose that those awful vicissitudes of human events, which have been stated or alluded to, could leave your judgments undisturbed, and your hearts at ease, I know I should form a most erro- neous opinion of your character : I entertain no such chimerical hope ; I form no such unworthy opinion; I expect not that your hearts can be more at ease than my own ; I have no right to ex- pect it; but 1 have a right to call upon you in the name of your country, in the name of the living God, of whose eternal justice you are now pd- ministering that portion which dwells with us on this side the grave, to discharge your breasts, as far as you are able, of every bias of prejudice or passion ; that, if my client be guilty of the offence charged upon him, you may give tranquillity to the public by a firm verdict of conviction ; or if he be innocent, by as firm a verdict of acquittal; and that you will do this in defiance of the paltry artifices and senseless clamours that have been re- sorted to, in order to bring him to his trial with SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 181 anticipated coaviction. And, gentlemen, I feel an additional necessity of thus conjuring you to be upon your guard, from the able and imposing statement which you have just heard on the part of the prosecution. I know well the virtues and the talents of the excellent person who conducts that prosecution. I know how much he would disdain to impose upon you by the trappings of office ; but I also know how easily we mistake the lodgment which character and eloquence can make upon your feelings, for those impressions that reason and fact and proof only ought to work upon our understandings. Description of the Irish Volunteers. Gentlemen, Mr. Attorney General has thought proper to direct your attention to the state and circumstances of public affairs at the time of this transaction ; let me also make a few retrospective observations on a period, at which he has but slightly glanced; I speak of the events which took place before the close of the American war. You know, gentlemen, that France had espoused the cause of America, and we became thereby engaged in a war with that nation. Heu nescia mens hominum futuri, RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND Little did that ill-fated monarch know that he was forming the first causes of those disastrous events that were to end in the subversion of his throne, in the slaughter of his family, and the deluging of his country with the blood of his people. You cannot but remember that at a time when we had scarcely a regular soldier for our defence, when the old and young were alarmed and terrified with apprehensions of descent upon our coasts, Provi^- dence seemed to work a sort of miracle in our favour. You saw a band of armed men come forth at the great call of nature, of honour, and their country. You saw men of the greatest wealth and rank ; you saw every class of the com- munity give up its members, and send them armed into the field, to protect the public and private tranquillity of Ireland. It is impossible for any man to turn back to that period, without reviving those sentiments of tenderness and gratitude, which then beat in the public bosom : to recollect amidst what applause, what tears, what prayers, what benedictions, they walked forth amongst spectators, agitated by the mingled sensations of terror and reliance, of danger and of protection ; imploring the blessings of Heaven upon their heads, and its conquest upon their swords. That illustrious, and adored, and abused body of men, SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 183 stood forward and assumed the title, which, I trust, the ingratitude of their country will never blot from its history, " the Volunteers of Ireland." i On the popular Representation. Gentlemen, the representation of our people is the vital principle of their political existence. Without it they are dead, or they live only to ser- vitude. Without it there are two estates acting upon and against the third, instead of acting in co-operation with it. Without it, if the people are oppressed by their judges, where is the tribu- nal to which their judges can be amenable ? Without it, if they are trampled upon and plun- dered by a minister, where is the tribunal to which the offender shall be amenable? Without it, where is the ear to hear, or the heart to feel, or the hand to redress their sufferings ? Shall they be found, let me ask you, in the accursed bands of imps and minions that bask in their disgrace, and fatten upon their spoils, and flourish upon their ruin ? But let me not put this to you as a merely specu- lative question. It is a plain question of fact : rely upon it, physical man is every where the same ; it is only the various operation of moral causes that gives variety to the social or individual cha- racter and condition. How otherwise happens 184 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND it, that modern slavery looka quietly at the despot, on the very spot where Leonidas expired ? The answer is, Sparta has not changed her climate, but she has lost that government which her liberty could not survive. On universal Emancipation. I put it to your oaths ; do you think, that a blessing of that kind, that a victory obtained by justice over bigotry and oppression, should have a stigma cast upon it by an ignominious sentence upon men bold and honest enough to propose that measure? to propose the redeeming of religion from the abuses of the church, the reclaiming of three millions of men from bondage, and giving liberty to all who had a right to demand it; giving, I say, in the so much censured words of this paper, giving " universal emancipation \" I speak in the spirit of the British law, which makes liberty commensurate with and inseparable from British soil ; which proclaims even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of universal emancipation. No matter in what lan- guage his doom may have been pronounced ; no matter what complexion incompatible with free- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 185 dom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him ; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down ; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery ; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the God sink together in the dust ; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells be- yond the measure of his chains, that burst around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of univer- sal emancipation. On the Liberty of the Press. What then remains ? The liberty of the press only ; that sacred palladium, which no influence, no power, no minister, no government, which no- thing but the depravity, or folly, or corruption of a jury can ever destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from, by having public com- munication left open to them ? I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved from, and what the government is saved from. I will tell you also, to what both are exposed by shutting up that communication. In one case sedition speaks aloud, and walks abroad. The demagogue goes forth : the public eye is upon him : he frets his 186 RECOLLECTIONS OF (URBAN AND busy hour upon the stage; but soon either weari- ness,, or bribe, or punishment, or disappointment bears him down, or drives him off, and he ap- pears no more. In the other case, how does the work of sedition go forward ? Night after night the muffled rebel steals forth in the dark, and casts another and another brand upon the pile, to which, when the hour of fatal maturity shall ar- rive, he will apply the flame. If you doubt of the horrid consequences of suppressing the effu- sion of even individual discontent, look to those enslaved countries where the protection of despo-. tism is supposed to be secured by such restraints. Even the person of the despot there is never in safety. Neither the fears of the despot, nor the machinations of the slave, have any slumber ; the one anticipating the moment of peril, the other watching the opportunity of aggression. The fa- tal crisis is equally a surprise upon both ; the deci- sive instant is precipitated without warning, by folly on the one side or by frenzy on the other, and there is no notice of the treason till the traitor acts. In those unfortunate countries (one can- not read it without horror) there are officers whose province it is to have the water, which is to be drunk by their rulers, sealed up in bottles, lest some wretched miscreant should throw poison SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 187 into the draught. But, gentlemen, if you wish for a nearer and a more interesting example, you have it in the history of your own revolution : you have it at that memorable period, when the mo- narch found a servile acquiescence in the minis- ters of his folly ; when the liberty of the press was trodden under foot; when venal sheriffs re- turned packed juries to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against the many ; when the devoted benches of public justice were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune, who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom like drowned bodies, while sanity remained in them; but at length becoming buoyant by putrefaction they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they were drifted along, the objects of terror, and contagion, and abomination. In that awful moment of a nation's travail, of the last gasp of tyranny, and the first breath of freedom, how pregnant is the example ! The press extinguished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone. As the advocate of society, therefore, of peace, of domestic liberty, and the lasting union of the two countries, I conjure you to guard the liberty of the press, that great centinel of the state, 188 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND that grand detector of public imposture : guard it, because, when it sinks, there sink with it, in one common grave, the liberty of the subject and the security of the crown. Gentlemen, I am glad that this question has not been brought forward earlier : I rejoice for the sake of the court, of the jury, and of the public repose, that this question has not been brought forward till now. In Great Britain analogous circumstances have taken place. At the com- mencement of that unfortunate war which has de- luged Europe with blood, the spirit of the Eng- lish people was tremblingly alive to the terror of French principles; at that moment of general paroxysm, to accuse was to convict. The danger seemed larger to the public eye, from the misty medium through which it was surveyed. We measure inaccessible heights by the shadows which they project; where the lowness and the distance of the light form the length of the shade. There is a sort of aspiring and adventitious cre- dulity, which disdains assenting to obvious truths, and delights in catching at the improbability of circumstances, as its best ground of faith. To what other cause, gentlemen, can you ascribe that in the wise, the reflecting., and the philosophic nation of Great Britain, a printer has been found SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 189 guilty of a libel, for publishing those resolutions, to which the present minister of that kingdom had actually subscribed his name ? To what other cause can you ascribe, what in my mind is still more astonishing, in such a country as Scotland a nation cast in the happy medium between the * spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty, and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth ; cool and ardent adventurous and persevering winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires ; crowned as she is with the spoils of every art, and decked with the wreath of every muse ; from the deep and scrutinizing researches of her Humes, to the sweet and simple, but not less sublime and pathetic morality of her Burns how from the bosom of a country like that, genius, and character, and talents, should be banished to a distant barbarous soil ; condemned to pine un- der the horrid communion of vulgar vice and base- born profligacy, for twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life ? Description of Mr. Rowan. Gentlemen, let me suggest another observation or two, if still you have any doubt as to the guilt 190 RECOLLECTIONS OP CURRAN AND or innocence of the defendant. Give me leave to suggest to you, what circumstances you ought to consider, in order to found your verdict. You should consider the character of the person ac- cused ; and in this your task is easy. I will ven- ture to say, there is not a man in this nation, more known than the gentleman who is the subject of this prosecution, not only by the part he has taken in public concerns, and which he has taken in common with many, but, still more so, by that ex- traordinary sympathy for human affliction, which, I am sorry to think, he shares with so small a number. There is not a day that you hear the cries of your starving manufacturers in your streets, you do not also see the advocate of their sufferings that you do not see his honest and manly figure, with uncovered head, soliciting for their relief; searching the frozen heart of charity for every string that can be touched by compas- sion ; and urging the force of every argument and every motive, save that which his modesty sup- presses the authority of his own generous ex- ample. Or if you see him not there, you may trace his steps to the abode of disease, and famine, and despair ; the messenger of Heaven ; bearing with him food, and medicine, and consolation. Are these the materials, of which we suppose anarchy SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 191 and public rapine to be formed ? Is this the man, on whom to fasten the abominable charge of goad- ing on a frantic populace to mutiny and blood- shed ? Is this the man likely to apostatize from every principle that can bind him to the state ; his birth, his property, his education, his character, and his children ? Let me tell you, gentlemen of the jury, if you agree with his prosecutors, in thinking there ought to be a sacrifice of such a man, on such an occasion, and upon the credit of such evidence, you are to convict him. Never did you, never can you give a sentence, consign- ing any man to public punishment with less dan- ger to his person or to his fame ; for where could the hireling be found to fling contumely or ingra- titude at his head, whose private distresses he had not laboured to alleviate, or whose public condi- tion he had not laboured to improve ? Peroration. I cannot, however, avoid adverting to a circum- stance that distinguishes the case of Mr. Rowan from that of a late sacrifice in a neighbouring kingdom. The severer law of the country, it seems, and happy for them that it should, enables them to remove from their sight the victim of their infatuation. The more merciful spirit of our law 192 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND deprives you of that consolation; his sufferings must remain for ever before your eyes, a conti- nual call upon your shame and your remorse. But these sufferings will do more : they will not rest satisfied with your unavailing condition ; they will challenge the great and paramount inquest of so- ciety ; the man will be weighed against the charge, the witness, and the sentence; and impartial jus- tice will demand, Why has an Irish jury done this deed ? The moment he ceases to be regarded as a criminal, he becomes of necessity an accuser ; and let me ask you, what can your most zealous defenders be prepared to answer to such a charge ? When your sentence shall have sent him forth to that stage, which guilt alone can render infamous ; let me tell you, he will not be like a little statue upon a mighty pedestal, diminishing by elevation; but he will stand a striking and imposing object upon a monument, which, if it does not (and it cannot) record the atrocity of his crime, must re- cord the atrocity of his conviction. Upon this subject, therefore, credit me when I say, that I am still more anxious for you, than I can possibly be for him. I cannot but feel the peculiarity of your situation ; not the jury of his own choice, which the law of England allows, but which ours refuses : collected in that box by a person, cer- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 193 iainly no friend to Mr. Rowan, certainly not very deeply interested in giving hira a very impartial jury. Feeling this, as I am persuaded you do, you cannot be surprised, however you may be distressed at the mournful presage with which an anxious public is led to fear the worst from your possible determination. But I will not, for the justice and honour of our common country, suffer my mind to be borne away by such melancholy anticipation. I will not relinquish the confidence that this day will be the period of his sufferings ; and> however mercilessly he has been hitherto pursued, your verdict will send him home to the arms of his family and the wishes of his country. But if, which Heaven forbid ! it hath still been unfortunately determined, that because he has not bent to power and authority, because he would not bow down before the golden calf and wor- ship it, he is to be bound and cast into the fur- nace ; I do trust in God, that there is a redeem- ing spirit in the constitution, which will be seen to walk with the sufferer through the flame, and to preserve him unhurt by the conflagration." When Mr. Curran terminated this magnificent exertion, the universal shout of the audience tes- tified its enthusiasm. He used to relate a ludi- o 194 RECOLLECTIONS OP CURRAN AND crous incident which attended his departure from court after this trial. His path was altogether impeded by the populace, who wanted to chair him. He implored he entreated all in vain. At length^ pretending to assume an air of autho- rity, he addressed those nearest to him " I de- sire, gentlemen, you will desist." An immense- sized brawny Irish chairman, eying him with a kind of contemptuous affection from top to toe, immediately addressed his neighbour, who appear- ed to hesitate ff Arrah blood and ouns ! Pat never mind the little creature toss him up this minute upon my shoulder." Pat did as he was directed Curran was immediately, nolens, volens, tossed up upon his shoulder hurried to his carriage, and drawn home in triumph. The next trial of any consequence which I can find on record, was that of the unfortunate Wil- liam Jackson, a clergyman of the Church of Eng- land, accused and convicted of high treason in the year 1794. Mr. Curran and Mr. Ponsonby were his principal counsel. He was convicted on the testimony of a Mr. Cockayne, an English solici- tor, of whom, in his speech to the jury, Mr. Cur- ran ives the following description. It was re- ported by Mr. Sampson, then at the Irish bar, SOME OP HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 195 but who has since emigrated to America, where, I am glad to hear, he is practising with success. It is not to be found in the London Collection. GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY, " I am scarcely justified in having trespassed so long. It is a narrow case. It is the case of a man charged with the most penal offence, and by whom ? By one witness ; and who is he ? A man^ stating to you that he comes from another coun- try, provided with a pardon for treasons commit- ted, not in Great Britain, but in this kingdom here, of Ireland. Have you ever been upon a jury before? Did you ever hear of a man sacri- ficing his life to the law of the country upon the testimony of a single witness; and that single witness, by his own confession, an accomplice in the crime? What, is character made the subject of support? Take his own vile evidence for his character, he was the traitor to his client. And what think you of his character ? He was the spy that hovered round his friend, and snuffed his blood, and coveted the price that was to be given him for shedding it ! He was the man who yield- ed to the tie of three oaths of allegiance, to watch o * and be the setter of his client to earn the bribe 196 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND of Government secure with his pardon already in his pocket. He was to put letters in the post- office to do what he stated himself pressed upon his mind, the conviction that he was liable to the penalties of treason ; and this very act did he do from the obligation of three oaths of allegiance. Was he aware of his crime ? H'rs pardon tells it. Was he aware of the turpitude of his character? Yes; he brought a witness to support it know- ing that it was bad, he came provided with an an- tidote. Is it a man of that kind? His pardon in his pocket his bribe not yet within his pocket until you by your verdict shall say he is worthy of it! Is it such a man whose evidence shall take away his fellow-creature's life ? He came over to be a spy to be a traitor to get a pardon, and to get a reward although, if you believe him, it was to be all common agreeable work, to be paid for, like his other ordinary business, by the day, or by the sheet. He was to be paid so much a day for ensnaring and murdering his client and his friend ! Do you think the man deserving of credit who can do such things ? No, gentlemen of the jury; 1 have stated the circumstances by which in my opinion the credit of Mr. Cockayne should be as nothing in your eyes." SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 197 A motion was made by his counsel m arrest of judgment, and argued at great length by Mr. Curran and Mr. Ponsonby ; but while the latter gentleman was in the midst of his argument, a very serious change was observed to take place in the countenance of the prisoner. Lord Clonmell immediately ordered a medical investigation into the state of his health. The physician in attend- ance stated that there was every appearance of approaching dissolution, and the fact too fatally verified his prediction ; for the unforunate man expired in the dock, while preparations were making for his removal. It turned out afterwards, on the inquest, that he had taken poison, to avoid the attaint and other consequences of his sen- tence. .Curran was very angry with Lord Clon- mell upon this trial : a friend said to him * " Never mind it, Curran ; he'll soon follow your client he's dying." " He !" said Curran ; (C by the Lord, he's such a fellow, that he'll live or die, just as it happens to suit his own convenience." The next speech of any consequence reported of Mr. Curran's, is that upon the trial of Mr. Peter Pinnerty, fora libel upon Lord Camden's admi- nistration in the year 1797, immediately preceding- a very memorable rebellion in Ireland. Mr. Fin- 198 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND nerty was the publisher of a newspaper called The Press, to which the most distinguished literary characters of the Opposition of that day contri- buted. I have every reason to believe that Mr. Curran himself was amongst the number. The immediate circumstances in which this prosecu^- tion originated were these : a person of the name of William Orr had been tried and con- victed at a preceding assizes of Carrickfergus, before Lord Avonmore, for administering an un- lawful oath. Some of the jury who tried Orr were induced subsequently to make an affidavit, declaring that they were intoxicated when they agreed to their verdict,, and beseeching that mercy might be extended to the convict. The memorial was transmitted to the Castle Orr was several times respited ; but after the mature deliberation of the Privy Council, the law was allowed to take it course, and he was according executed. His fate excited great interest at the time, and the cir- cumstances attending it underwent much discus- sion. A letter bearing the signature of Marcus, appeared in the Press upon the subject, couched in very indignant and very eloquent language. Mr. Finnerty was indicted as publisher, tried, convicted, and pilloried in consequence. The re- sult, however, was considered very far from dis- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 199 creditable to him, and his punishment was regard- ed as a sort of penal triumph. He was accompa- nied by some of the most leading men in the country, and repeatedly and enthusiastically cheer- ed by tli populace. The political feeling of the day was strongly in his favour the trial on which his paper had descanted, was in the mild- est parlance a very singular one ; and more than all, it was generally, and, I believe, truly under- stood that Mr. Finnerty might have averted the prosecution frpm himself, by surrendering Marcus up to the vengeance of the government. This, however, his principles restrained him from do- ing; and his highly honourable determination converted, in the estimation of many, the convict into the martyr. Mr. Curran, who managed his defence, was not ashamed of his intimacy, and, to my knowledge, held him to the day of his death in a very high degree of estimation. Fin- nerty was one of the few admitted to his funeral, Curran's speech upon the trial of this gentleman, is a masterpiece of eloquence, and it is difficult to select one passage more splendid than another. The following, however, appear to me extreme- ly beautiful. 200 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND On the Liberty of the Press. GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY, " Other matters have been mentioned, which I must repeat for the same purpose ; that of show^ ing you that they have nothing to do with the question. The learned counsel has been pleased to say, that he comes forward in this prosecution as the real advocate for the liberty of the press, and to protect a mild and merciful government from its licentiousness; and he has been pleased to add, that the constitution can never be lost while its freedom remains, and that its licentiousness alone can destroy that freedom. As to that, gen- tlemen, he might as well have said, that there is only one mortal disease of which a man can die ; I can die the death inflicted by tyranny ; and when he comes forward to extinguish this paper in the ruin of the printer by a state prosecution, in order to prevent its dying of licentiousness, you must judge how candidly he is treating you, both in the fact and the reasoning. Is it in Ireland, gentlemen, that we are told licentiousness is the only disease that can be mortal to the press ? Has he heard of nothing else that has been fatal to the freedom of publication ? I know not whether the printer of SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 201 the Northern Star ever heard of such things in his captivity ; but I know that his wife and his chil- dren are well apprized that a press may be de- stroyed in the open day, not by its own licentious- ness, but by the licentiousness of a military force. As to the sincerity of the declaration, that the state has prosecuted in order to assert the freedom of the press, it starts a train of thought, of melan- choly retrospect and direful prospect, to which I did not think the learned counsel would have wished to commit your minds. It leads you na- turally to reflect at what times, from what motives, and with what consequences, the government has displayed its patriotism, by these sorts of prosecu- tions. As to the motives, does history give you a single instance in which the state has been pro- voked to these conflicts, except by the fear of truth, and by the love of vengeance ? Have you ever seen the rulers of any country bring forward a pro- secution from motives of filial piety, for libels upon their departed ancestors ? Do you read that Eli- zabeth directed any of those state prosecutions, against the libels which the divines of her times had written against her Catholic sister; or against the other libels which the same gentleman had written against her Protestant father ? No, gen- tlemen, we read of no such thing ; but we know 203 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND she did bring forward a prosecution from motives of personal resentment ; and we know that a jury was found, timeserving and mean enough to give a verdict, which she was ashamed to carry inta effect. I said, the learned counsel drew you back to the times that have been marked by these mi- serable conflicts. I see you turn your thoughts to the reign of the second James. 1 see you turn your eyes to those pages of governmental aban- donment, of popular degradation, of expiring li- berty, and merciless and sanguinary persecution ; to that miserable period, in which the fallen and abject state of man, might have been almost an argument in the mouth of the atheist and the blas-< phemer, against the existence of an all-just and an all-wise First Cause ; if the glorious aera of the re- volution that followed it, had not refuted the im- pious inference, by showing, that if man descends, it is not in his own proper motion ; that it is with labour and with pain ; and that he can continue to sink only, until, by the force and pressure of the descent, the spring of his immortal faculties ac- quires that recuperative energy and effort that hurries him as many miles aloft he sinks, but to rise again. It is at that period that the state seeks for shelter in the destruction of the press; it is in a period like that, that the tyrant prepares for SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. an attack upon the people,, by destroying the li- berty of the press ; by taking away that shield of wisdom and of virtue, behind which the people are invulnerable ; in whose pure and polished convex, ere the lifted blow has fallen, he beholds his own image, and is turned into stone. It is at these periods that the honest man dares not speak, be- cause truth is too dreadful to be told. It is then humanity has no ears, because humanity has no tongue. It is then the proud man scorns to speak, but, like a physician baffled by the wayward ex- cesses of a dying patient, retires indignantly from the bed of an unhappy wretch, whose ear is too fastidious to bear the sound of wholesome advice, whose palate is too debauched to bear the salutary bitter of the medicine that might redeem him ; and therefore leaves him to the felonious piety of the slaves that talk to him of life, and strip him before he is cold. I do not care, gentlemen, to exhaust too much of your attention, by following this sub- ject through the last century with much minute- ness ; but the facts are too recent in your mind not to show you that the liberty of the press, and the liberty of the people, sink and rise together ; that the liberty of speaking, and the liberty of acting, have shared exactly the same fate. You must have observed in England, that their fate has been 204: RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND the same in the successive vicissitudes of their late depression ; and sorry I am to add, that this coun^ try has exhibited a melancholy proof of their in^ separable destiny, through the various and further stages of deterioration down to the period of their final extinction ; when the constitution has given place to the sword, and the only printer in Ireland, who dares to speak for the people, is now in the dock." An Appeal to the Jury on the Facts which led to the Prosecution. " Gentlemen, Mr, Attorney General has been pleased to open another battery upon this publi- cation, which I do trust I shall silence, unless I flatter myself too much in supposing that hitherto my resistance has not been utterly unsuccessful. He abuses it for the foul and insolent familiarity of its address. I do clearlv understand his idea : he / considers the freedom of the press to be the license of offering that paltry adulation which no man ought to stoop to utter or to hear; he supposes the freedom of the press ought to be like the freedom of a king's jester, who, instead of reproving the faults of which majesty ought to be ashamed, is base and cunning enough, under the mask of servile and adulatory censure, to stroke down and pampev feOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 205 those vices of which it is foolish enough to be vain. He would not have the press presume to tell the Viceroy that the prerogative of mercy is a trust for the benefit of the subject, and not a gaudy feather stuck into the diadem to shake in the wind, and by the waving of the gay plumage to amuse the vanity of the wearer. He would not have it said to him, that the discretion of the Crown as to mercy, is like the discretion of a court of justice as to law ; and that in the one case, as well as the other, wherever the propriety of the exercise of it appears, it is equally a matter of right. He would have the press all fierceness to the people, and all sycophancy to power : he would have it con- sider the mad and phrenetic depopulations of au- thority, like the awful and inscrutable dispensa- tions of Providence, and say to the unfeeling and despotic despoiler in the blasphemed and insulted language of religious resignation "The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord !" But let me condense the generality of the learned gentleman's invec- tive into questions that you can conceive. Does he mean that the air of this publication is rustic and uncourtly ? Does he mean to say, that when Marcus presumed to ascend the steps of the Castle, and to address the Viceroy, he did not turn out his 206 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND toes as he ought to have done ? But, gentlemen^ you are not a jury of dancing-masters. Or does the gentleman mean that the language is coarse and vulgar? If this be his complaint, my client has but a poor advocate. I do not pretend to be a mighty grammarian, or'a formidable critic ; but I would beg leave to suggest to you in serious humility, that a free press can be supported only by the ardour of men who feel the prompting sting of real or supposed capacity ; who write from the enthusiasm of virtue, or the ambition of praise, and over whom, if you exercise the rigour of a grammatical censorship, you will inspire them with as mean an opinion of your integrity as your wisdom, and inevitably drive them from their post and if you do, rely upon it, you will reduce the spirit of publication, and with it the press of this country, to what it for a long interval has been, the register of births, and fairs, and funerals, and the general abuse of the people and their friends. But, gentlemen, in order to bring this charge of insolence and vulgarity to the test, let me ask you, whether you know of any language which could have adequately described the idea of mercy denied when it ought to have been granted, or of any phrase vigorous enough to convey the indigna- tion which an honest man would have felt upon SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 207 such a subject? Let me beg of you, for a mo- ment, to suppose that any one of you had been the writer of this very severe expostulation with the Viceroy, and that you had been the witness of the whole progress of this never-to-be-forgotten cata- strophe. Let me suppose that you had known the charge upon which Mr. Orr was apprehended, the charge of abjuring that bigotry which had torn and disgraced his country, of pledging himself to re- store the people of his country to their place in the constitution, and of binding himself never to be the betrayer of his fellow-labourers in that enterprise; that you had seen him upon that charge removed from his industry, and confined in a gaol; that through the slow and lingering progress of twelve tedious months you have seen him confined in a dungeon, shut out from the common use of air and of his own limbs; that day after day you had marked the unhappy captive, cheered by no sound but the cries of his family, or the clinking of chains ; that you had seen him at last brought to his trial ; that you had seen the vile and perjured informer deposing against his life ; that you had seen the drunken, and worn-out, and terrified jury give in a verdict of death ; that you had seen the jury, when their returning sobriety had brought back their con- sciences, prostrate themselves before the humanity 208 HECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND of the bench, and pray that the mercy of the Crown might save their characters from the reproach of an involuntary crime, their consciences from the torture of eternal self-condemnation, and their souls from the indelible stain of innocent blood. Let me suppose that you had seen the respite given, and that contrite and honest recommendation transmitted to that seat, where mercy was pre- sumed to dwell; that new and unheard-of crimes are discovered against the informer ; that the royal mercy seems to relent, and that a new respite is sent to the prisoner; that time is taken, as the learned counsel for the Crown has expressed it, to see whether mercy could be extended or not ! that after that period of lingering deliberation passed, a third respite is transmitted ; that the unhappy captive himself feels the cheering hope of being restored to a family he adored, to a character he had never stained, and to a country that he had ever loved ; that you had seen his wife and chil- ; dren upon their knees, giving those tears to gra- titude, which their locked and frozen hearts could not give to anguish and despair, and imploring the blessings of Providence upon his head, who had graciously spared the father, and restored him to his children ; that you have seen the olive-branch SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 209 sent into his little ark, but no sign that the waters had subsided. " Alas ! nor wife nor children more Shall he behold, nor friends, nor sacred home !" No seraph mercy unbars his dungeon, and leads him forth to light and life ; but the minister of death hurries him to the scene of suffering and of shame ; where, unmoved by the hostile array of artillery and armed men collected together, to se- cure, or to insult, or to disturb him, he dies with a solemn declaration of his innocence, and utters his last breath in a prayer for the liberty of his country. Let me now ask you, if any of you had addressed the public ear upon so foul and mon- strous a subject, in what language would you have conveyed the feelings of horror and indignation ? Would you have stooped to the meanness of qua- lified complaint would you have been mean enough But I entreat your forgiveness I do not think meanly of you. Had I thought so meanly of you, I could not suffer my mind to commune with you as it has done ; had I thought you that base and vile instrument, attuned by hope and by fear, into discord and falsehood, from whose vulgar string no groan of suffering could vibrate, no voice of honour or integrity could speak ; let 210 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND me honestly tell you, I should have scorned to string my hand across it I should have left it to a fitter minstrel. If I do not therefore grossly err in my opinion of you, I could use no language upon such a subject as this, that must not lag be- hind the rapidity of your feelings, and that would not disgrace these feelings, if attempting to de- scribe them. Gentlemen, I am not unconscious that the learned counsel for the Crown seemed to address you with a confidence of a very different kind; he seemed to expect a kind of respectful sympathy from you with the feelings of the Castle, and the griefs of chided authority. Perhaps, gen- tlemen, he may know you better than I do ; if he does, he has spoken to you as he ought; he has been right in telling you, that if the reprobation of this writer is weak, it is because his genius could not make it stronger ; he has been right in telling you that his language has not been braided and festooned as elegantly as it might; that he has not pinched the miserable plaits of his phraseology, nor placed his patches and feathers with that cor- rectness of millinery which became so exalted a person. If you agree with him, gentlemen of the jury; if you think that the man who ventures, at the hazard of his own life, to rescue from the deep the drowned honour of his country., must not pre- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. sume upon the guilty familiarity of plucking- it by the locks, I have no more to say. Do a courteous thing. Upright and honest jurors, find a civil and obliging verdict against the printer! And when you have done so, march through the ranks of your fellow-citizens to your own homes, and bear their looks as they pass along, retire to the bosom of your families ; and when you are pre- siding over the morality of the parental board, tell your children, who are to be the future men of Ireland, the history of this day. Form their young minds by your precepts, and confirm those precepts by our own example ; teach them how discreetly allegiance may be perjured on the table, or loyalty be forsworn in the jury-box ; and when you have done so, tell them the story of Orr; tell them of his captivity, of his children, of his crime, of his hopes, of his disappointments, of his cou- rage, and of his death ; and when you find your little hearers hanging upon your lips, when you see their eyes overflow with sympathy and sorrow, and their young hearts bursting with the pangs of anticipated orphanage, tell them that you had the boldness and the justice to stigmatize the monster who had dared to publish the transaction ! f /" p 2 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND On the Conduct of the Irish Government and the Employment of Informers. " I tell you therefore,, gentlemen of the jury, it is not with respect to Mr. Orr that your verdict is now sought ; you are called upon on your oaths to say, that the government is wise and merciful, that the people are prosperous and happy, that military law ought to be continued, that the Bri- tish constitution could not with safety be restored to this country, and that the statements of a con- trary import by your advocates in either country were libellous and false. I tell you these are the questions, and I ask you, can you have the front to give the expected answer in the face of a com- munity who know the country as well as you do ? Let me ask you, how could you reconcile it with such a verdict, the gaols, the tenders, the gibbets, the conflagrations, the murders, the proclamations that we hear of every day in the streets, and see every day in the country ? What are the proces- sions of the learned counsel himself circuit after circuit? Merciful God ! what is the state of Ire- land, and where shall you find the wretched inha- bitant of this land ? You may find him perhaps in a gaol, the only place of security, I had almost said, of ordinary habitation ; you may see him fly- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 213 ing by the conflagrations of his own dwelling; or you may find his bones bleaching in the green fields of his country ; or he may be found tossing upon the surface of the ocean,, and mingling his groans with those tempests, less savage than his persecutors, that drift him to a returnless distance from his family and his home. And yet with these facts ringing in the ears, and staring in the face of the prosecutor, you are called upon to say, on your oaths, that these facts do not exist. You are called upon, in defiance of shame, of truth, of honour, to deny the sufferings under which you groan, and to flatter the persecution that tramples you under foot. But the learned gentleman is further pleased to say that the traverser has charged the government with the encouragement of informers. This, gentlemen, is another small fact that you are to deny at the hazard of your souls, and upon the solemnity of your oaths. You are upon your oaths to say to the sister country, that the government of Ireland uses no such abo- minable instruments of destruction as informers. Let me ask you honestly, what do you feel, when in my hearing, when in the face of this audience, you are called upon to give a verdict that every man of us, and every man of you, know by the testimony of your own eyes to be utterly and abso- p 3 214 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND lutely false ? I speak not now of the public pro- clamation of informers, with a promise of secrecy and of extravagant reward ; I speak not of the fate of those horrid wretches who have been so often transferred from the table to the dock, and from the dock to the pillory ; I speak of what your own eyes have seen, day after day, during the course of this commission from the box where you are now sitting ; the number of horrid miscreants who avowed upon their oaths, that they had come from the seat of government from the Castle, where they had been worked upon by the fear of death and the hopes of compensation, to give evi- dence against their fellows; that the mild and wholesome councils of this government are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man, lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up a witness. Is this fancy, or is it fact ? Have you not seen him after his resurrection from that tomb, after having been dug out of the region of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and the supreme arbiter of both ? Have you not marked, when he entered., how the stormy wave of the multitude retired at his approach ? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 215 the supremacy of his power,, in the undissembled homage of deferential honour ? How his glance, like the lightning* of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused, and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and death; a death which no innocence can escape, no art elude, no force resist, no antidote prevent. There was an antidote a juror's oath but even that adamantine chain that bound the integrity of man to the throne of eternal justice, is solved and melted in the breath that issues from the informer's mouth ; conscience swings from her mooring, and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety in the surrender of the victim : Et quae sibi quisque timebat, Unius in raiseri exitium conversa tulere." Shortly after this trial, the year 1798, a year written in blood in the annals of Ireland, arrived. Whether the account of the proceedings of Go- vernment, as detailed by Mr. Curran in the pre- ceding speech, be true, or whether the natural spirit of the Irish people led them to an unjusti- fiable discontent against their rulers, it is not for me to decide ; but a rebellion was now engen- dered, quite unparalleled in the ferocity of its p4 216 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND character. The people rose in great strength in different quarters, and a French invasion in some degree organized the exasperated rabble. It would be revolting to repeat, and perhaps impos- sible to convince the English reader of all the miseries which the violence of one party, and the fierce, unsparing, and unpitying reprisals of the other, inflicted during this frightful period. Mi- litary tribunals superseded law summary execu- tions excluded mercy and rape, murder, torture, and conflagration, alternately depopulated and deformed the country. At such a season, Justice might be said not to have time to deliberate. Her victims were often denounced indiscriminately; often selected by personal hatred or religious pre- judice; and too often desperately flung upon the pile rebellion lighted, in the hope that blood might drown its conflagration ! It was a tremendous scene : Government, on the one hand, terrified into desperation ; sedition, on the other, prefer- ring death to endurance; and, in the few inter- vals which fatigue, rather than humanity, created, Religion waving aloft her " fiery cross," and ex- citing her clans to a renewal of the combat ! The animosity rose at last to such an height, that poli- tical differences were almost considered as revo- lutionary symptoms; and the man who dared be SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 217 liberal, seldom escaped the imputation of being 1 rebellious. The consequence was, that the prin- cipal political opponents of Government retired from the country. The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, and the slightest suspicious sur- mise was the prelude to a lingering imprison- ment. Mr. Curran's situation was at this period extremely critical. Many barristers were impli- cated in the political transactions of the day ; and his language, always constitutional, had b.een, however, always in a tone of high defiance. He was certainly marked out by the adherents of Government as peculiarly obnoxious ; and many there were who would with pleasure have seen him ascend that scaffold which he was every day despoiling of its almost predestined victims. It is said, indeed, that he was at this time indebted for his security to the good Lord Kilwarden, who, from the very infancy of his professional career, seems to have watched over him like a guardian angel. Be this as it may, however, he plainly proved that he was not to be intimidated. He stood boldly and even indignantly forward, com- mencing what might be called a system of defen- sive denunciation. He advocated the accused ; he arraigned the Government; he thundered against the daily exhibition of torture ; he held RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND up the informers to universal execration ; and, at the hourly hazard of the bayonet or the dungeon, he covered the selected victim with the shield of the constitution. It is at this period of his pro- fessional career that the friend of liberty must de- light to contemplate him. If he had not been, at least politically, as unstained as the ermine, he must have fallen a victim ; and, with this consci- ousness, how nobly does he appear, wielding all the energies of law and eloquence in defence of the accused ! Many there are who may well re- member him rising in the midst of his military audience, only excited by the manifest indigna- tion of their aspect to renewed and more undaunt- ed efforts. In every great case of high treason he was almost invariably assigned as counsel ; and those who have throbbed with delight over the eloquence he exhibited, will grieve to hear that at the very time he was oppressed by severe perso- nal indisposition, and obliged to submit, in a few months after, to a very severe surgical operation. On his way to London for that purpose, he paid a short visit to Donington Park, in Leicestershire, the seat of his noble friend, Lord Moira ; and the state of his mind may be inferred from the follow- ing beautiful relic, addressed by him, with a copy SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 219 of Carolan's Irish airs, to the Lady Charlotte Rawdon. of the law, nothing- that the party can do, can have any sort of retrospect, so as to purge that crimi- nality,, if once completed. It is out of the power of the expiring 1 victim of a death-blow, to give any release or acquittal to his murderer; it is out of the power of any human .creature, upon whom an illegal offence lias been committed, by any act of forgiveness to purge that original guilt ; and, therefore, the semblance of a marriage is entirely out of the case. In the case of the Misses Ken- nedy, the young ladies had been obliged to submit to a marriage, and cohabitation for a length of time; yet the offenders were -most justly con- victed, and suffered death. It is, therefore, neces- sary for you to keep your minds and understand* ings so fixed upon the material points of the charge, as that, in the course of the examination, no sidelong view of the subject may mislead or divert your attention. The point before you is, whether the crime was once committed ; and if so, nothing after happening can make any sort of dif- ference upon the subject. It has been, continued he, my most anxious wish to abstain, as far as was consistent witlumy duty, from every the remotest expression of contumely or disrespect to the un- happy prisoner at the bar ; or to say or to do any thing that might unhinge his mind or distract his Y3 336 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND recollection, so as to disable him from giving his whole undisturbed reflection to the consideration of his defence ; but it is also a sacred duty, which every man placed in my situation owes to public justice., to take care, under the affectation of false humanity, not to suffocate that charge which it is his duty to unfold, nor to frustrate the force of that evidence which it is his duty to develope. Painful must it be to the counsel, to the jury, and the Court, who are bound by their respective duties to prosecute, to convict, and to pronounce ; and to draw down the stroke of public justice, even upon the guilty head ; but despicable would they all be, if, instead of surrendering the criminal to the law, they could abandon the law to the criminal; if, instead of having mercy upon outraged justice and injured innocence, they should squander their dis- graceful sympathy upon guilt alone. Justice may weep ; but she must strike, where she ought not to spare. We too ought to lament; but, when we mourn over crimes, let us take care, that there be no crimes of our own, upon which our tears should be shed. Gentlemen, you cannot be surprised that I hold this language to you. Had this case no reference to any country but our own, the extraordinary circumstances attending it, which are known to the whole nation, would SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. well warrant much more than I have said. But you cannot forget, that the eyes of another coun- try also, are upon you: another country, which is now the source of your legislation. You are not ignorant of what sort of character is given of us there; by what sort of men, and from what kind of motive. Alas ! we have no power of contra- dicting the cruel calumnies that are there heaped upon us, in defiance of notorious truth, and of common mercy and humanity; but, when we are there charged with being 1 a barbarous race of savages, with whom no measures can be held, upon whose devoted heads legislation can only pour down laws of fire, we can easily by our own misconduct furnish proof that a much less will- ing belief may corroborate their evidence, and turn their falsehood into truth. Once more, and for the last time, let me say to you, you have heard the charge. Believe nothing upon my statement. Hear and weigh the evidence. If you doubt its truth, acquit without hesitation. By the laws of every country, because by those of eternal jus- tice, doubt and acquittal are synonymous terms. If, on the other hand, the guilt of the prisoner shall unhappily be clearly proved, remember what you owe to your fame, your conscience, and your country. I shall trouble you no further, but shall 328 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND call evidence in support of the indictment ; and I have not a doubt, that there will be such a verdict given, whether of conviction or acquittal, as may hereafter be spoken of without kindling any shame jn yourselves, or your country." From this period he continued in considerable practice in his profession, alternately devoted to its duties, and to the enjoyments of society en- joyments, indeed, which the business must have been very urgent that it could tempt him to relin- quish. An attention to the pleasures, to the ex- clusion of the labours of life, has been made a constant article of accusation against him, certainly not without some foundation, but one to which he always gave a most indignant denial. However, his notions of industry were very ludicrous. An hour to him, was a day to another man ; and in his natural capabilities his idleness found a powerful auxiliary. A single glance made him master of the subject; and though imagination could not supply him facts, still it very often became a suc- cessful substitute for authorities. He told me once, in serious refutation of what he called the professional calumnies on this subject, that he was quite as laborious as it was necessary for any Nisi Prius advocate to be : " For," said he, with the SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 339 utmost simplicity, "I always perused my briefs carefully when I was concerned for the plaintiff, and it was not necessary to do it for the defend- ant, because you know / could pick up the facts from the opposite counsel's statement." This was what Curran considered being- laborious ; and, to say the truth, it was at best but an industrious idleness. However, his natural genius never de- serted him the want of legal learning was com- pensated by eloquence, ingenuity, and wit ; and if it must be conceded that there were many men as lawyers his superiors, it may be maintained, with much more justice, that there was no one as advocate his equal. A distinction has, indeed, in almost all ages and all countries been attempted to be drawn, between the man of eloquence and the man of learning in this profession ; as if it were quite impossible for the same person to be at once brilliant and profound. The reason of this is very obvious. Genius is a gift but sparingly bestowed industry is in the power of every block- head; and therefore it is, that the multitude are interested in detracting from the excellence to which they aspire in vain. Pope's learned ser- jeants in Westminster Hall, who undervalued the learning, because they could not rival the genius of Lord Mansfield, were, in their own parlance, 330 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND human precedents for many of Curran's calum- niators Each had a gravity would make you split, And shook his head at Murray as a wit. It is, indeed, a very easy, but at the same time a very significant method of condemnation. Every barrister can " shake his head/' and too often, like Sheridan's Lord Burleigh, it is the only proof he vouchsafes of his wisdom. Curran used to call these fellows " legal pearl-divers" " You may observe them/' he would say, " their heads barely under watertheir eyes shut, and an in- dex floating behind them, displaying the precise degree of their purity and their depth." In his early day it is indisputable that black-letter learn - ing was not so much cultivated by the profession, as it is at present. The Parliament was local. A seat in it was the aim of every young barrister's ambition ; and to excel in that assembly, eloquence was much more necessary than learning. The consequence was, that most men calculated to shine in the courts, rather aimed at being advo- cates than lawyers ; and, indeed, the very highest forensic elevation too often depended upon poli- tical importance. That day has, however, now passed away ; and let us hope, that in the learn- SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 331 ing, the integrity, and the eloquence of her bench and her bar, Ireland may find some compensation for the loss of her Parliament, and the ruin of her independence. However, it is a great mistake to suppose, that Mr. Curran was universally in- dolent. It is quite impossible that any man, who had not, at some time or other, devoted himself seriously to study, could have attained his acqui- sitions and his accomplishments. He was a most admirable classical scholar with the whole range of English literature he was perfectly acquainted he not only spoke French like a native, but was familiar with every eminent author in that lan- guage ; and he had acquired a knowledge of music, that entitled him more to the character of a master than a proficient. His execution both on the violin and the violoncello was admirable, and the exquisite euphony of his sentences may perhaps be traced to his indefatigable attention to this study. Verbal discordance naturally enough offended the ear which had habituated itself to tones of harmony. He had also what I would rather call a propensity, than a taste for poetry. Whether it resulted from an affectation of singularity, or from the sincerity of judgment, his opinions upon this subject always struck me as very wild and whimsical. There are many, 332 perhaps, who may remember his table disserta- tions upon Milton ; and I choose to call them dis- sertations, although delivered in conversation ; because they were literally committed to memory. It was very easy, in vulgar phrase, to draw on him for the criticism ; and, to do him justice, he never refused acceptance. That criticism was certainly a finished specimen, at once of his want of taste and of his wonderful talents. He hated Milton like one of the inhabitants of his own pandemonium. His choice of a subject, which had so long perplexed the poet, he thought pecu- liarly injudicious. " If the theme was true," he would say, " it ought not to be the topic of pro- fane poetry ; and if it was not true, it would be very easy to have invented one more interesting." He would then run through the management of the poem, in a strain of alternate ridicule and sublimity, that was quite amazing. It was as impossible to hear his disbelief that the Almighty could wage war upon his angels, without an awful admiration ; as it was his description of primitive simplicity, without laughter. Adam and Eve he certainly treated with very little filial reverence. However, here I must be understood to repre- sent him rather as criticising the poet, than giv- ing his own opinions upon those awful subjects. SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 333 Whatever those opinions were, it was not for me to scrutinize ; but it is only an act of strict justice to his memory to say, that I never heard from his lips an irreverent word against religion. He was far too wise for any such impious merriment. He was far too witty to have recourse for ridicule to such solemnities ; and I am convinced, even if he had entertained any doubts upon the subject, he would have been horror-struck at the thought of unfixing faith by their communication. Indeed, so little idea had he of any real happiness in this world, without some religious reference to the next, that he had a two-fold recommendation which he advised every young man to adopt first, to marry a manageable wife ; and next, if he had no religion, by all means to adopt one. Upon this subject, as well as upon many others, the vi- lest calumnies were let loose against him ; but those who invented, and those who circulated such aspersions, knew him very little. It was the pitiful invention of defeated rivalry echoed by the gossipping of habitual scandal ; and the miserable intellect which could not emulate, resorted to the mean revenue of defamation. But it would ill o become the man he honoured with his friendship, not to shield him from the heaviness of such an imputation. His speeches are full of the most RECOLLECTIONS OF CURBAN AND sublime illustrations from the sacred writings, all expressed with a manifest sincerity, and evincing a far from common familiarity with the holy volume. Let, then, no polluted hand presume to add the name of Curran to the accursed list of infidelity. He is passed away to the tribunal alone competent either to interrogate or to adjudge him, and I have no doubt, that fully and perfectly could I have attested his religious faith, if, during his life, I had had the temerity to inquire it. But it has always struck me that those are matters be- tween man and his Creator, into which an inqui- sition is as impudent as it would be vain ; and the assumption of which has been the origin of un- utterable mischief. If Christians did not inter- fere with one another upon mysteries, perhaps the plain and indisputable essentials of Christia- nity might be more purely practised. But, where each man, in place of attending to his own salva- tion, employs his time in erecting some standard by which his neighbour's belief is to be adjudged, recrimination too often occupies the place of mu- tual forgiveness, and persecution follows the foot- steps of religion, effacing them with blood. On this subject, Mr. Curran had no idea of permitting human interference with regard to himself; and he would never have thought of exercising SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 335 it with respect to others. Provided the doc- trines of the Gospel were practised, he thought it a matter of very little consequence in what garb they were preached. Religion was divine its forms were human. There is no doubt there were times when he was subject to the most ex- treme despondency ; but the origin of this was visible enough, without having recourse to any mysterious inquiries. It was the case with him as it is with every person whose spirits are apt to be occasionally excited the depression is at in- tervals in exact proportion. Like a bow over- strained, the mind relaxes in consequence of the exertion. He was naturally extremely sensitive domestic misfortunes rendered his home un- happy he flew for a kind of refuge into public life ; and the political ruin of his country, leaving him without an object of private enjoyment or of patriotic hope, flung him upon his own heart- devouring reflections. He was at those times a striking instance of his own remark upon the dis- advantages attendant upon too refined a sensibi- lity. " Depend upon it, my dear friend," said he, (c it is a serious misfortune in life to have a mind more sensitive or more cultivated than common- it naturally elevates its possessor into a region which he must be doomed to find nearly uninha- 336 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND bited!" It was a deplorable thing- to see him in the decline of life,, when visited by this constitu- tional melancholy. I have not unfrequently ac- companied him in his walks upon such occasions, almost at the hour of midnight. He had gardens attached to the Priory, of which he was particu- larly fond : and into these gardens, when so affected, no matter at what hour, he used to ram- ble. It was then almost impossible to divert his mind from themes of sadness. The gloom of his own thoughts discoloured every thing, and from calamity to calamity he would wander on, seeing in the future nothing for hope, and in the past nothing but disappointment You could not re- cognise in him the same creature, who but an hour preceding had " set the table in a roar" his gibes, his merriment, his flashes of wit were all extinguished. He had a favourite little daugh- ter, who was a sort of musical prodigy. She had died at the age of twelve, and he had her buried in the midst of a small grove just adjoining this "arden. A little rustic memorial was raised over o her, and often and often have I seen him, the tears " chasing each other" down his cheeks, point to his daughter's monument, and "wish to be with her and at rest." Such at times was the man before \vliose very look, not merely gravity but SOME OP HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 337 sadness has often vanished who has given birth to more enjoyment, and uttered more wit, than, perhaps, any of his contemporaries in any country who had in him materials for social happiness, such as we cannot hope again to see combined in any one ; and whose death has cast, I fear, a per- manent eclipse upon the festivities of his circle. Yet even these melancholy hours were not with- out their moral. They proved the nothingness of this world's gifts the worse than inutility of this world's attainments they forced the mind into involuntary reflection they showed a fellow- creature enriched with the finest natural endow- ments, having acquired the most extensive repu- tation, without a pecuniary want or a professional rival ; yet weighed down with a constitutional depression that left the poorest wealthy, and the humblest happy in the comparison. Nor were they without a kind of mournful interest he spoke as under such circumstances no human be- ing but himself could have spoken his mind was so very strangely constituted such an odd medley of the romantic and the humorous now soaring into regions of light and sublimity for illustrations, and now burrowing under ground for such ludi- crous and whimsical examples drawing the most strange inferences from causes so remote, and ac- z 338 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND companied at times with gestures so comic, that the smile and the tear often irresistibly met dur- ing the recital. Perhaps, after one of those scenes of misery, when he had walked himself tired, and wept himself tearless, he would again return into the house, where the picture of some friend, or the contingency of some accident, recalling an early or festive association, would hurry him into the very extreme of cheerfulness ! His spirits rose his wit returned the jest, and the tale, and the anecdote pushed each other aside in an almost endless variety, and day dawned upom him, the happiest, the pleasantest, and the most fascinating of companions. The friends whom he admitted to an intimacy may perhaps recognise him, even in this hurried sketch, as he has often appeared to them in the hospitalities of the Priory : but, alas ! the look all-eloquent the eye of fire the tongue of harmony the exquisite address that gave a charm to every thing, and spell-bound those who heard him, are gone for ever ! In order, rather that as much as possible of him should be preserved, than that they should be considered as ostentatiously put forward, I have collected the following fragments of his poetry. They were written, it is true, more for SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 339 amusement than fame; but every thing left by such a man, no matter what may be its merit, deserves care as a curiosity. During his lighter hours, he was fond of employing himself in this laborious trifling, not wishing, as he said, like Judge Blackstone, to take leave of the Muses un- til he could be said to have formed some acquaint- ance with them. Such little efforts gave him the appearance of business and the relaxation of idle- ness ; and when he could not bring his mind to any serious study, he was willing to do any thing rather than it should be supposed he was doing nothing. There is do doubt, however, that if from his early years he had made poetry his pro- fession, for such, from modern copyrights, it may almost be called, he would have risen to very con- siderable eminence. I think no person who pe- ruses his speeches with attention will feel disposed to deny that he had the genuine elements of poetry in his mind the fire, the energy, the wild- ness of imagination the os mag.na soniturum, and all the requisites which criticism requires in the character. These are selected from a great many ; and no matter what may be their intrinsic merit, the composition of them had, no doubt, its use in matters of more importance. There are few studies which give the orator a greater co- 340 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND piousness, and at the same time a greater felicity of phrase, than poetry. To suit the rhyme or harmonize the metre, requires not merely genius but industry ; and the variety of words which must necessarily be rejected, gives at once a fa- miliarity with the language, and a fastidiousness in the use of it. Thus, it is a truth that many who have raised the greatest name in eloquence, commenced their career by the study of the Muses. Cicero himself did not disdain to be their votary, and in more modern times we find the names of Chatham, Fox, Lord Mansfield, and a number of other equally successful orators court- ing their inspiration. In this point of view it is, rather than as soliciting for him the name of a poet, that I have committed the following frauds upon the album of some fair one, now perhaps, like Waller's Sacharissa, grown too old for poetry. THE PLATE-WARMER. IN clays of yore, when mighty Jove With boundless sway rul'd all above, He sometimes chanc'd abroad to roam For comforts often miss'd at home : For Juno, though a loving wife, Yet lov'd the din of household strife; SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. Like her own peacocks, proud and shrill, She forc'd him oft against his will, Hen-peck' d and over-match 'd, to fly, Leaving her empress of the sky, And hoping on our earth to find Some fair, less vocal and more kind. But soon the sire of men and gods Grew weary of our low abodes ; Tir'd with his calendar of saints, . Their squalling loves, their dire complaints, For queen's themselves, when queens are frail, And forc'd for justest cause, to rail, To find themselves at last betray'd, Will scold just like a lady's maid ; And thus poor Jove again is driv'n, O sad resource ! again to heav'n. Downcast and surfeited with freaks, The cropsick Thund'rer upward sneaks, More like a loser than a winner, And almost like an earthly sinner: Half quench'd the lustre of his eyes, And lank the curl that shakes the skies ; His doublet button'd to his chin, Hides the torn tucker folded in. Scarce well resolv'd to go or stay, He onward takes his liug'ring way, For well he knows the bed of roses On which great Juno's mate reposes, At length to heaven's high portal come, No smile, no squeeze, to welcome home, With nose uptoss'd and bitter sneer, She scowls upon her patient dear : From mom till noon, from noon till ni^lil, Twas still a lecture to the wight ; z 3 RECOLLECTIONS OF dtFRRAN And yet the morning, sooth to say, Was far the mildest of the day ; For in those regions of the sky, The goddesses are rather shy To beard the nipping early airs, And therefore come not soon down stairs ; But, snugly wrapp'd, sit up and read, Or take their chocolate in bed. So Jove his breakfast took in quiet, Looks there might be, but yet no riot ; And had good store of list'ners come, It might have been no silent room ; But she, like our theatric wenches, Lov'd not to play to empty benches. Her brows close met in hostile form, She heaves the symptoms of the storm ; But yet the storm itself repress'd, Labours prelusive in her breast, Reserv'd as music for that hour When every male and female pow'r Should crowd the festive board around, With nectar and ambrosia crown'd, In wreathed smiles and garlands dress'd, With Jove to share the gen'rous feast. Twas then the snowy-elbow'd queen Drew forth the stores of rage and spleen ; 'Twas then the gather'd storm she sped Full-levell'd at the Thund'rer's head : In descant dire she chanted o'er The tale so often told before ; His graceless gambols here on earth, The secret meeting, secret birth ; His country freaks in dells and valleys, In town, o'er Stuuids and Craubourne Alleys SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 343 Here lifts his burglar hands the latch, There scrambles through the peasant's thatch : When such a prowling fox gets loose, What honest man can keep his goose ? Nor was the Theban feat untold, Trinoctial feat so fam'd of old; When Night the pandar vigil kept, And Phoebus snor'd as if he'd slept. And then Europa, hateful name ! A god, a bull ! O fie for shame ! When vagrant love can cost so dear, No wonder we've no nursery here ; No wonder, when imperial Jove Can meanly hunt each paltry love, Sometimes on land, sometimes on water, With this man's wife and that man's daughter, If I must wear a matron willow, And lonely press a barren pillow. When Leda, too, thought fit to wander, She found her paramour a gander ; And did his godship mount the nest, And take his turn to hatch and rest ? And did he purvey for their food, And mince it for their odious brood? The eagle wink'd and droop'd his wing, Scarce to the dusky bolt could cling, And look'd as if he thought his lord A captain with a wooden sword ; While Juno's bird display'd on high The thousand eyes of jealousy. Hermes look'd arch, and Venus leer'd, Minerva bridled, Momus sneer'd ; Poor Hebe trembled, simple lass, And split the wine, and broke the glass. z4 344 RECOLLECTIONS OF GURRAN AND Jove felt the weather rather rough, And thought long since't had blown enough. His knife and fork unus'd, were cross'd, His temper and his dinner lost ; For ere the vesper peal was done, The viands were as cold as stone. This Venus saw, and griev'd to see ; For though she thought Jove rather free, Yet at his idle pranks she smil'd, As wanderings of a beast beguil'd ; Nor wonder'd if astray he run, For well she knew her scape-grace son ; And who can hope his way to find, When blind, and guided by the blind ? Her finger to her brow she brought, And gently touch'd the source of thought, The unseen fountain of the brain, Where Fancy breeds her shadowy train : The vows that ever were to last, But wither ere the lip they've pass'd ; The secret hope, the secret fear, That heaves the sigh, or prompts the tear ; The ready turn, the quick disguise, That cheats the lover's watchful eyes : So from the rock, the sorc'rer's wand The gushing waters can command ; So quickly started from the mind The lucky thought she wish'd to find. Her mantle round her then she threw, Of twilight made, of modest hue : The warp by mother Night was spun And shot athwart with beams of sun, But beams first drawn through murky air, To spuage the gloss and dim the glare ; SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 345 Thus gifted with a double charm, Like love, 'twas secret and 'twas warm ; It was the very same she wore On Simois' banks, when, long before, The sage Anchises form'd the plan Of that so grave and godlike man, Whose fame o'ertop'd the topmost star, For arts of peace and deeds of war ; So fam'd for righting and for praying, For courting warm and cool betraying ; Who show'd poor Dido all on fire, That Cyprus was not far from Tyre ; The founder of Hesperian hopes, Sire of her demi-gods and popes. And now her car the Paphian queen Ascends, her car of sea-bright green. Her Graces slim, with golden locks, Sat smiling on the dicky-box, While Cupid wantons with a sparrow That perch'd upon the urchin's arrow. She gave the word, and through the sky Her doves th' according pinions ply ; As bounding thought, as glancing light, So swift they wing their giddy flight ; They pass the Wain, they pass the sun, The comet's burning train they shun ; Lightly they skim the ocean vast, And touch the Lemnian isle at last. Here Venus checks their winged speed, And sets them free to rest or feed, She bids her Graces sport the while, Or pick sweet posies round the isle, But cautions them against mishaps, For Lemnos is the isle of traps ; 346 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND Beware the lure of vulgar toys, And fly from bulls and shepherd boys. A cloud of smoke that climbs the sky, Bespeaks the forge of Vulcan nigh : Thither her way the goddess bends, Her darling son her steps attends, Led by the sigh that zephyr breathes, That round her roseate neck he wreathes. The plastic god of fire is found, His various labours scatter'd round ; Unfinish'd bars, and bolts, and portals, Cages for gods, and chains for mortals : 'Twas iron work upon commission, For a romance's first edition. Soon as the beauteous queen he spied, A sting of love, a sting of pride, A pang of shame, of faith betray'd, By turns his labouring breast invade ; But Venus quell'd them with a smile That might a wiser god beguile ; 'Twas mixed with shame, 'twas mixed with love, To mix it with a blush she strove. With hobbling steps he comes to greet The faithless guest with welcome meet: Pyracmon saw the vanquish'd god, And gives to Steropes the nod ; He winks to Brontes, as to say, We may be just as well away, They've got some iron in the fire : So all three modestly retire. " And now, sweet Venus, tell," he cries, " What cause has brought thee from the skies f Why leave the seat of mighty Jove? Alas! I fear it was not love. SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 347 What claim to love could Vulcan boast, An outcast on an exile coast, Condemn'd in this sequester'd isle, To sink beneath unseemly toil ? 'Tis not for me to lead the war, Or guide the day's refulgent car ; 'Tis not for me the dance to twine ; 'Tis not for me to court the Nine ; No vision whispers to my dream ; No muse inspires my wakeful theme ; No string responsive to my art, Gives the sweet note that thrills the heart; The present is with gloom o'ercast, And sadness feeds upon the past. Say then ; for, ah ! it can't be love, What cause has brought thee from above ?" So spoke the god in jealous mood ; The wily goddess thus pursued : " And canst thou, Vulcan, thus decline The meeds of praise so justly thine ? To whom, the fav'rite son of heav'n, The mystic powers of fire are giv'n : That fire that feeds the star of night, And fills the solar beam with light ; That bids the stream of life to glow Through air, o'er earth, and depths below : Thou deignest not to court the Nine, Nor yet the mazy dance to twine ; But these light gifts of verse and song To humbler natures must belong : Behold yon oak that seems to reign The monarch of the subject plain ; No flow'rs beneath his arms are found To bloom and fling their fragrance round : 348 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND Abash'd in his o'erwhelming shade, Their scents must die, their leaves must fade. Thou dost not love through wastes of war Headlong- to drive th' ensanguin'd car, That sweeps whole millions to the grave ; Thine is the nobler art to save : Form'd by thy hand, the temper'd shield Safe brings the warrior from the field ; Ah ! couldst thou but thy mother see, Her ev'ry thought attach'd to thee ! Not the light love that lives a day, Which its own sighs can blow away, But fix'd, and fervent in her breast, The wish to make the blesser blest. Then give thy splendid lot its due, And view thyself as others view. Great sure thou art, when from above I come a supplicant from Jove ; For Jove himself laments, like thee, To find no fate from suffering free : Dire is the strife when Juno rails, And fierce the din his ear assails ; In vain the festive board is crown'd, No joys at that sad board are found ; And when the storm is spent at last, The dinner's cold, and Jove must fast. Couldst thou not then with skill divine, For ev'ry cunning art is thine, Contrive some spring, some potent chain, That might an angry tongue restrain, Or find, at least, some mystic charm, To keep the suff'rer's viands warm ? Should great success thy toils befriend. What glory must the deed attend, SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 349 What joy through all the realms above, What high rewards from grateful Jove ! How bless'd ! could I behold thee rise To thy lost station in the skies ; How sweet ! should vows thou mayst have thought, Or lightly kept, or soon forgot, Which wayward fates had seem'd to sever, Those knots retie, and bind for ever !" She said, and sigh'd, or seem'd to sigh, And downward cast her conscious eye, To leave the god more free to gaze : Who can withstand the voice of praise ? By beauty charm'd, by flatt'ry won, Each doubt, each jealous fear is gone ; No more was bow'd his anxious head, His heart was cheer'd, he smil'd and said : " And couldst thou vainly hope to find A pow'r that female tongue can bind ? Sweet friend ! 'twere easier far to drain The waters from th' unruly main, Or quench the stars, or bid the sun No more his destin'd courses run. By laws as old as earth or ocean, That tongue is a perpetual motion, Which marks the longitude of speech ; To curb its force no power can reach ; Its privilege is rais'd above The sceptre of imperial Jove. Thine other wish, some mystic charm To keep the suff'rer's viands warm, I know no interdict of fate, Which says that art mayn't warm a plate. The model, too, I've got for that, I take it from thy gipsy hat; 350 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND I saw thee thinking o'er the past, I saw thine eye-beam upward cast, I saw the concave catch the ray, And turn its course another way ; Reflected back upon thy cheek, It glow'd upon the dimple sleek" The willing task was soon begun, And soon the grateful labour done : The ore, obedient to his hand, Assumes a shape to his command ; The tripod base stands firm below, The burnish 'd sides ascending grow ; Divisions apt th' interior bound, With vaulted roof the top is crown'd. The artist, amorous and vain, Delights the structure to explain ; To show how rays converging meet, And light is gather'd into heat. Within its verge he flings a rose, Behold how fresh and fair it glows ; O'erpower'd by heat, now see it waste, Like vanish'd love its fragrance past! Pleas'd with the gift, the Paphian queen Remounts her car of sea-bright green ; The gloomy god desponding sighs, To see her car ascend the skies, And strains its less'ning form to trace, Till sight is lost in misty space. Then sullen yields his clouded brain To converse with habitual pain. The goddess now arriv'd above, Displays the shining*gift of love, And shows fair Hebe how to lay The plates of gold in order gay, SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 351 The gods and goddesses admire The labour of the god of fire, And give it a high-sounding name, Such as might hand it down to fame, If 'twere to us, weak mortals, gtv'n To know the names of things in heav'n ; But on our sublunary earth We have no words of noble birth, And e'en our bards, in loftiest lays, Must use the populace of phrase. However call'd it may have been, For many a circling year 'twas seen To glitter at each rich repast, As long as heav'n was doom'd to last. But faithless lord and angry wife Repeated faults rekindled strife Abandon'd all domestic cares- To ruin sunk their own affairs Th' immortals quit the troubled sky, And down for rest and shelter fly : Some seek the plains, and some the woods, And some the brink of foaming floods ; Venus, from grief, religious grown, E.ndows a meetirig-house in town ; And Hermes fills the shop next door, With drugs far-brought, a healthful store ! What fate the Graces fair befel, The muse has learn'd, but will not tell. To try and make affliction sweeter, Momus descends and lives with Peter: Though scarcely seen th' external ray, With Peter all within is day ; For there the lamp, by nature giv'n, Was fed by sacred oil from heav'n. 352 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND Condemn'd a learned rod to rule, Minerva keeps a Sunday-school. With happier lot, the god of day To Brighton wings his minstrel way ; There come, a master-touch he flings, With flying hand, across the strings ; Sweet flow the accents, soft and clear, And strike upon a kindred ear ; Admitted soon a welcome guest, The god partakes the royal feast, Pleas'd to escape the vulgar throng, And find a judge of sense and song. Meantime, from Jove's high tenement, To auction every thing is sent ; O grief! to auction here below! The gazing crowd admire the show ; Celestial beds, imperial screens, Busts, pictures, lustres, bright tureens. With kindling zeal the bidders vie, The dupe is spurr'd by puffers sly, And many a splendid prize knock'd down, Is sent to many a part of town ; But all that's most divinely great Is borne to *s, in Street ; Th' enraptur'd owner loves to trace Each prototype of heav'nly grace, In ev'ry utensil can find Expression, gesture, action, mind ; Now burns with gen'rous zeal to teach That lore which he alone can reach, And gets, lest pigmy words might flag, A glossary from Brobdignag ; To teach in prose, or chant in rhyme, Of furniture the true sublime, SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 353 And teach the ravished world the rules For casting pans and building schools. Poor Vulcan's gift, among the rest, Is sold, and decks a mortal's feast, Bought by a goodly Alderman, Who lov'd his plate, and lov'd his can ; And when the feast his worship slew, His lady sold it to a Jew. From him, by various chances cast, Long time from hand to hand it past : To tell them all would but prolong The ling'ring of a tiresome song ; Yet still it look'd as good as new, The wearing prov'd the fabric true ; Now mine, perhaps, by Fate's decree, Dear Lady R , I send it thee ; And when the giver's days are told, And when his ashes shall be cold, May it retain its pristine charm, And keep with thee his mem'ry warm ! TO SLEEP. SLEEP, awhile thy power suspending, Weigh not yet my eyelid down, For Mem'ry, see ! with eve attending, Claims a moment for her own : 1 know her by her robe of mourning, 1 know her by her faded light, When faithful with the gloom returning, She comes to bid a sad good-night. A A 354 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND O ! let me hear, with bosom swelling, While she sighs o'er time that's past ; ! let me weep, while she is telling Of joys that pine, and pangs that last. And now, O Sleep, while grief is streaming, Let thy balm sweet peace restore ; While fearful Hope through tears is beaming, Soothe to rest that wakes no more. THE GREEN SPOT THAT BLOOMS ON THE DESERT OF LIFE. O'ER the desert of life where you vainly pursu'd Those phantoms of hope which their promise disown, Have you e'er met some spirit divinely endu'd, That so kindly could say, You don't suffer alone ? And however your fate may have smil'd or have frown'd, Will she deign still to share as the friend and the wife ? Then make her the pulse of your heart, for you've found The green spot that blooms o'er the desert of life. Does she love to recal the past moments so dear, When the sweet pledge of faith was confidingly giv'n, When the lip spoke in voice of affection sincere, And the vow was exchang'd and recorded in heav'n ? Does she wish to rebind what already was bound, And draw closer the claim of the friend and the wife ? Then mark, &c. SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 355 LINES WRITTEN IMPROMPTU ON THE MARBLE PILLAR AT BOULOGNE, AFTER NAPOLEONS FALL. WHEN Ambition attains its desire, How Fortune must smile at the joke ! You rose in a pillar of fire You sunk in a pillar of smoke. The time was now arrived when Mr. Curran was to resign for the j udicial robe, the gown which for so many years he had worn with dignity to himself, with advantage to his clients, and with honour to the country. This appointment to a seat in the Rolls,, unfortunately originated a dis- agreement between, him and Mr. George Pon- sonby,, the head of the party with which he had so long and so faithfully acted. The facts were simply these: In order to persuade Sir Michael Smith., the then Master of the Rolls, to resign, it was necessary not only to pension himself, but also his four inferior officers. This Mr. Ponsonby guaranteed upon the part of Government the Administration was short-lived they either for- got, or neglected to grant the pensions, and after their resignation had the modesty to expect that Mr. Curran would defray the eight hundred a year, to which amount either their design or their o A A 2 356 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND indolence had caused a deficiency. Mr. Curran, of course, refused, and Mr. Ponsonby was obliged to make his engagements good out of his own pri- vate fortune, or rather out of the four thousand a year pension, to which his six months' Chancellor- ship entitled him, from the country. Such an Irish cry was immediately raised by the Ponsonby partizans against Mr. Curran, that one would imagine his appointment was a mere eleemosy- nary gift granted out of their great bounty, and not the trifling reward of many a long year's toil- some fidelity. It is no exaggeration to say, that of the entire party there was no man who brought more talent to the cause, exerted it more zealously, or incurred more personal hazard and professional loss, than did Mr. Curran by his political consist- ency. For a long time he despised too much the clamour which had been raised, to condescend to reply. At length, however, he addressed a letter to Mr. Grattan on the subject, which was never answered, for the best of all reasons, because it was unanswerable. The defence was very sim- ple. Jn 1789, a party was formed, by whom it was agreed, that if ever they attained office, Mr. Ponsonby was to have the first and Mr. Curran the second place in professional advancement. Curran acted ably and honestly. The time came. SOME OP HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 357 Mr. Ponsonby got the Chancellorship without a shilling personal expense. Curran was promised the next, the Attorney Generalship he did not get it but after the most vexatious delays, he was thrust upon the Equity Bench, nolens, volens; a situation for which he was altogether unfit. Such an appointment was very far from being any foil* return to him, and was both an insult and an in- jury to the nation. In the letter alluded to, in- deed, Mr. Curran has had the candour to confess his own incompetency, while he naturally com- plains of the broken faith which thus exposed it to the profession. " As to the place itself," says he, "it was the last I should have chosen; it im- posed upon me a change of all my habits of life it forced my mind into a new course of thinking, and into new modes of labour, and that increased labour it removed me from that intellectual ex- ercise which custom and temper had rendered easy and pleasant; it excluded me from the en- joyment of the honest gratification of an official share of an Administration which I then thought would have consisted principally, if not altogether, of the tried friends of Ireland. When the party with which I had acted so fairly, had, after so long a proscription, come at last to their natural place, I did not expect to have been stuck into a window, AA3 358 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND a spectator of the procession. From the station which I then held at the bar, to accept the neu- tralized situation of the Rolls, appeared to me a descent and not an elevation. It had no allure- ment of wealth ; for, diminished as my income had been by the most remorseless persecution for years, by which I was made to expiate the crime of not being an alien to my country by birth or by trea- chery, it was still abundant when compared with my occasions, and was likely to continue so as long as those occasions should last/' Such was the place to which Mr.Curran was appointed, and for which judicial exposure it was expected he should pay eight hundred pounds a year, which Mr. Ponsonby had promised should be defrayed by the pension list, and even concerning which stipulation he had not previously consulted Mr. Curran. In truth, it was not necessary, for Mr. Curran had as little to say to the transaction as any other man in the community. His letter is simple and satisfactory. There is a passage in it so exceedingly characteristic, that I need offer no excuse for quoting it, particularly as the letter it- self was only printed for private circulation, and is therefore difficult of access. It is indeed a com- pendium of the entire defence, and is expressed in a strain of bitter jocularity, to which, when SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 359 Curran had recourse, he was as far as possible from any thing like good humour. He is sup- posing one of the party to have proposed to him the office under the conditions to which they pre- tended he should have acceded. (C They would speak to me, I suppose/' says he, ff something in the following manner : ' Sir, you have entered many years ago into a compact you have ob- served it faithfully you suffered deeply by that observance. When the time of performing it to you arrived, it was ratified in London ; in Dublin the substitution of something else, supposed to be a performance, was adopted without your privity or consent ; the substitution too was accompanied by collateral circumstances of much humiliation and disrespect towards you. By unforeseen events that substitution has been attended with some pe- cuniary charges ; it is hoped, that, having so pa- tiently borne this, you will take it cum onerc, and not think it unreasonable to defray those incidental expenses it is trusted you will have no objection to the mode proposed as unconstitutional or dis- honourable. You have a judicial office all that is required of you is, to accept a lease of that office from the deputy and three inferior officers of your predecessor, at the small rent of 800/. a year of these four landlords, there will be the former train- A A 4 360 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND bearer, tipstaff, and crier of your court. As the rent must be for their lives, you will see the ne- cessity of ensuring your own or you may re- deem the whole for a sum of 8000/. if so much personal fortune has escaped the wreck to which you were exposed by your political fidelity the entire emoluments of your office will then be ge- nerously left to your disposal." He sat upon the Rolls Bench about six years. Mr. Ponsonby and he were never after recon- ciled ; but on the former gentleman's last illness, Mr. Curran, who happened to be then in Lon- don, left a card at his house. Mr. Curran's place at the Irish Bar has not even been approached since his departure. There is no man, not merely next him, but near him. I have heard the best efforts of the ablest amongst them ; and though they were brilliant in their way, it was as the brilliancy of the morning star before the sun-beam. One, perhaps, is witty, sarcastic, argumentative another, fluent, polish- ed, plausible a third, blunt, vehement, and ener- getic but, there is not one like him, at once strong, persuasive, witty, eloquent, acute, and argumentative, giving to every argument the SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 361 charm of his imagery,, and to every image the magnificent simplicity of his manner not one, who, when he had touched all the chords of pity, could so wrinkle up the cheek with laughter, that the yet undried tear was impeded in it progress not one, who, when he had swept away the heart of his hearer, left at the same time such an im- pression upon his memory, that the judgment on reflection rather applauded the tribute which at the moment of delivery had been extorted from the feelings ! Who, at any bar, was ever like him at cross-examination ? This was considered the peculiar forte of one of the present Barons of the English Exchequer; but that natural shrewdness did not in him, as it did in Curran, act merely as a. pioneer for the brilliant and overpowering force that was to follow " The most intricate web," says the learned editor of his Speeches, " that fraud, malice, or corruption ever wove against the life, character, or fortune of an individual, lie could unravel. Let truth and falsehood be ever so ingeniously dovetailed into each other, he se- parated them with facility. He surveyed his ground like a skilful general, marked every avenue of approach, knew when to yield or attack, in- stantly seized the first inconsistency, and pursued his advantage till he completely involved perjury RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND in the confusion of its contradictions." His effect at times was electric and universal. The judge and the mob, the jury and the bar., were equally excited ; and Lord Clonmell himself, his bitter enemy, rising on the judgment-seat to restrain the popular enthusiasm, confessed himself over- come by the eloquence that had produced it. In our estimate of him as a barrister, we must not omit the noble and dignified intrepidity with which he resisted any judicial encroachment on the pri- vileges of the profession. In such instances the dock or the dungeon had for him no terrors, and to his antagonist neither talents nor authority gave protection. Nor was this spirit the result of any captiousness of disposition. To his fellow- labourers at the bar he was all amenity, but most particularly to the young and inexperienced. There was no young man of his time, of any promise, to whom he did not hold out the hand, not only of encouragement, but of hospitality ; and so far was he from indulging an ungenerous sally at their expense, that it would have been a dangerous experiment in another to have attempt- ed it in his presence. No person, who has not been educated to a profession, can estimate the value, or the almost peculiarity, of this trait of character. But his was a mind originally too SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 363 grand to found its distinction on the depreciation of his inferiors ; and were it even necessary, his spirit was too lofty to stoop to the expedient. He affected no importance from the miserable acci- dent of seniority or station, and laughed to scorn the pretensionless stupidity that sought, like the cynic, an enforced reverence to its rags and its dotage. During- the thirty two years of his pro- fessional life, there is not on record of him an un- kindness to a junior, an asperity to a senior, an undue submission to overweening- power, or a sin- gle instance of interested servility. Sincerely were itto be wished that all his contemporaries had acted towards him with the same generosity which he uniformly evinced. But, alas ! there were some who hated him for his talents, some who envied him for his fame ; and mean malignity too often led them to depreciate the one and under- mine the other. The faults and the foibles to which the very best are subject, were in him ob- served with an eagle's eye, and held with the te- nacity of an eagle's grasp. He was docile even to a fault, often relinquishing his own fine intel- lect to very inferior guidance. Did a casual in- discretion arise from such docility ? it was care- fully noted down, recalled periodically, and then religiously returned to the malignant register, to 364 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND be again declaimed upon, when any future exhi- bition of his genius provoked afresh the hostility of his enemies. Thus the most unfortunate oc- currence of his life, his domestic calamity, was made the theme of perpetual depreciation. Whereas the fact was, that a misguided and misjudging friendship forced it into publicity a- "ainst his own inclination. I have often heard a him dwell, painfully dwell, on the particulars of that melancholy transaction, and I can avouch it, that no bitterness of recollection ever led him in- to an ungenerous reflection even upon those who had acted towards him with, at least, the most effective hostility. I now take my leave of him as a barrister, nor can I do it better than in, let me hope, the prophetic words of the anonymous editor of his Speeches : " The Bar of Ireland will long hold in affectionate recollection the man who always lived in an ingenuous and honourable in- tercourse with his competitors for fame, as Cicero did with Hortensius who never, on any occa- sion, was frowned by power, or seduced by mean ambition, into an abandonment of his client, but in every situation intrepidly performed the duties of an advocate who, if he had been a man c (fuoque facinore propcrus darescere,' instead of disu. lining to acquire honours by means which SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 365 would have rendered him unworthy of wearing them, might early in life have attained the proud- est professional situation who cherished with the kindest notice every appearance of excellence in the junior part of the profession who never os- tentatiously displayed his superiority who, con- scious of his great talents, bestowed praise where- ever it was deserved and was incapable of mean- ly detracting from the merit of another to enhance his own. They will never forget him who on every occasion proudly asserted the dignity and independence of the advocate, and never servilely surrendered the least privilege of the profession. While his name will live for ever hallowed in the grateful remembrance of his country, unless the heart of man shall become so corrupt and his mind so perverted, that public virtue will neither be felt nor understood." Alienated from the bustle of the bar, and haying- resigned the occupations of the bench, Mr. Cur- ran's mind began to prey upon itself, and the de- jection, to which even his youth had been subject, grew with his years into confirmed hypochon- driasm. In the autumn of 1816, I accompanied him to Cheltenham, for the avowed purpose of consulting Sir Arthur Brooke Faulkener on the 366 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND state of his health. Mr. Curran had the highest possible opinion of this gentleman's professional abilities, and indeed he could not have recourse to any one who, both as a friend and a physician, was more competent to advise him. Sir Arthur prescribed for him a regimen to which I am afraid he did not very strictly adhere. However, in the hospitable welcome of his home, " the mind dis- eased" found at least a temporary remedy. The very appearance of friends who were deservedly most dear to him revived his spirits. I remember on the night of our arrival, the news of the vic- tory at Algiers was just announced at Chelten- ham it was of course the universal topic of con- versation Lady F. expatiating on the barbari- ties of the pirates with all the feeling natural to a good heart and a refined intellect, appeared to re- gret that the fortifications had not been totally ob- literated " Ah ! my dear Madam," replied Cur- ran, who had been travelling for two days and a night without intermission, cc ah ! my dear Ma- dam they have had enough of it sufficient unto the Dey has been the evil thereof." I had introduced him to two very lovely and accomplished sisters, who have since gone to in- crease the treasures of the East. After spending SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 367 an evening in the enjoyment of conversation but rarely to be met -with, he said to me " I never saw such creatures even to my old eyes, it is quite refreshing to see the sunshine of genius fly- ing over their beautiful countenances." A few days after this, observing a very pomp- ous and solemn blockhead, who endeavoured, with a most ludicrous gravity, to conceal his insigni- ficance, he suddenly stopped short " Observe that [fellow," said he : " if you dined and break- fasted with him for an hundred years, you could not be intimate with him. By heavens! he wouldn't even be seen to smile, lest the world should think he was too familiar with himself." Though at the hazard of turning my volume into a jest-book, I cannot refrain from giving a remark of his about this time, on an Irish gentle- man, who certainly preserved most patriotically all the richness of his original pronunciation. He had visited Cheltenham, and during his stay there acquired a most extraordinary habit of perpetually lolling his tongue out of his mouth ! " What can he mean by it ?" said somebody to Curran. " Mean by it," said Curran ; " why, he means, if he can, to catch the English accent." 368 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND The last winter which he was to pass in London now arrived, and there., however reluctantly., my professional avocations compelled me to leave him. In the course of the season he attended several public dinners, and spoke at some of them. But, alas ! quantum mutalus ab illo ! The mind was manifestly gone. His feeble efforts were but the flickerings of that glorious intellect which once shone so brightly and so steadily. In the sum- mer of 1817, he returned to Ireland for the last time ; and in the September of that year again joined me at Cheltenham, under what mental dis- quietude the following letter, written a few days before to a friend there, will evince much better than any words of mine. " MY DEAR FRIEND, " You'll think me a sad fellow so I think too. However, you are too clear-sighted in diagnostics not to see the causes of my being so low-pulsed a correspondent. The truth is, I was every day on the point of leaving a country where folly and suffering were lying like lead upon my heart, and in the mean time I could only make one communication the most unnecessary in the world., namely, that I never suspend the respect and solicitude which I always feel for you, and to which you are so well entitled. SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 369 * Now 1 think you may look to a call at least. I may not be able, perhaps, to linger long-, but I could not find myself within shot of you, without coming mechanically to a present and a snap, even though it should be no more than aflash in the pan. 1 had hopes of seeing your brother, but he has deceived my hope. As to Hope herself, I have closed my accounts altogether with her. Drawing perpetually upon my credulity, I now find her, too late, an insolvent swindler. Mean- time my entire life passed in a wretched futurity breathing I may say in the paulo post futurum : I have happily, however, found out the only re- medy, and that is, to give over the folly of breath- ing at all. I had some hope for this persecuted country, but that I fear is over. If our heads were curled like the Africans, I suppose we should go snacks with them in the justice and sympathy of that humane and philanthropic nation of yours ; but if her tears of commisseration should make the hair of the Africans lank like ours, I make no doubt but you would send a coxcomb or two po- litically and madly to * and like Ireland. Ever yours, J. P. CuRRAN. # I have left an hiatus here, out of my high respect for the A ttorney-General. B B 370 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND His sbort stay in Cheltenham could scarcely be be called existence. He constantly fell asleep in the daytime, and when he awoke, it was only to thoughts of sadness. He was perpetually fancy- ing things which never had existence, and misin- terpreting those which had. He told me he was dying ; and indeed, to show how firmly the pro- phetic presentiment was impressed upon his mind, the very night preceding his departure, he handed Lady Paulkener the following melancholy im- promptu written in pencil on a blank leaf of paper, which lay accidentally before him " For welcome warm for greeting kind, Its present thanks the tongue can tell But soon the heart no tongue nmyjind Then thank thee with a sad farewell /'' Poor fellow ! little did I think that in a few days afterwards I was to see him sadly verifying his 9 own prediction ! The heart, indeed, was beating, but the tongue was mute for ever. On Wednes- day, the 8th of October, I called on him at his lodgings, No. 7, Amelia Place, Brompton. He asked me to dine with him on the following day, to meet Mr. Godwin: at eleven o'clock at night, however, he wrote the annexed note to me, the last he ever wrote to any one. It is remarkable SOME OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 371 that there is not a superfluous word in it. In fact, lie was struck with apoplexy in two hours after. " DEAR PHILLIPS " Just got a note Mrs. Godwin is sick: he'll dine here Sunday. If you prefer an invalid, come to-morrow You'd be more gratified on Sunday. Utrum horum ? Yours, J. P. CURRIN. Wednesday. Early on Thursday, I was, of course, informed of the melancholy occurrence of the preceding night. I found him only just breath ing one eye closed, and one side quite inanimate. I asked him to take me by the hand if he knew me he took it, and faintly squeezed it in a day or two after, he similarly recognised his old and attached friend Serjeant Burton, and this was the only symptom of intelligence he exhibited during his illness. I saw him at seven o'clock in the evening of the 13th, and at nine he died. As it was imagined that his will, which was in Ireland, con- o * ' tained some directions as to his interment, the body was enclosed in a leaden coffin until the fact B B 2 372 RECOLLECTIONS OF CURRAN AND was ascertained : it appearing-, however, silent on the subject, he was conveyed to Paddington church, and deposited in the vault beneath it, on the 4th of November. His funeral was purposely kept as private as possible Mr. Godwin, Mr. Moore, Mr. Lyne an Irish barrister, Mr. Finnerty, Mr. Croly, some of his family, and myself, with one or two others whom I forget, attended it. It was at first in- tended to have had the ceremony public; but this design, upon reflection, was abandoned, and per- haps justly. Such men need not the ceremonials of the tomb history is their natural monument, and their country the most honourable mourner : to their care with a melancholy confidence I now consign him, fully assured, that when the slaves who revile him shall be neglected dust, the wisdom of posterity will respect the name, and its patriots weep over the memory of CURRAN. APPENDIX. MR. CURRAN'S SPEECH AGAINST THE MARQUIS OF HEADFORT. Referred to in Page 223. NEVER so clearly as in the present instance have I observed that safeguard of justice which Provi- dence has placed in the nature of man. Such is the imperious dominion with which truth and reason wave their sceptre over the human intellect, that no solicitation however artful, no talent how- ever commanding, can seduce it from its alle- giance. In proportion to the humility of our sub- mission to its rule, do we rise into some faint emu- lation of that ineffable and presiding Divinity, whose characteristic attribute it is to be coerced and bound by the inexorable laws of its own na- ture, so as to be all-wise and all just from neces- sity rather than election. You have seen it in the learned advocate who has preceded me most pecu- liarly and strikingly illustrated. You have seen even his great talents, perhaps the first in any country, languishing under a cause too weak to B B 3 374 APPENDIX. carry him, and loo heavy to be carried by him. He was forced to dismiss his natural candour and sincerity, and, having no merits in his case, to take refuge in the c^gnity of his own manner, the resources of his own ingenuity, from the over- whelming difficulties with which he was surround- ed. , Wretched client! unhappy advocate ! what a combination do you form ! But such is the con- dition of guilt its commission mean and tremu- Jous its defence artificial and insincere its pro- secution candid and simple its condemnation dignified and austere. Such has been the defend- o ant's guilt such his defence such shall be my address to you ; and such, I trust, your verdict. The learned counsel has told you that this unfor- tunate woman is not to be estimated at forty thou- sand pounds fatal and unquestionable is the truth of this assertion. Alas t gentlemen, she is no longer worth any thing ; faden, fallen, degraded, and disgraced, she is worth less than nothing I But it is for the honour, the hope, the expectation,, the tenderness, and the comforts that have been blasted by the defendant, and have fled for ever, that you are to remunerate the plaintiff by the punishment of the defendant. It is not her pre- sent value which you are to weigh but it is her value at that time when she sat backing in a hus- APPENDIX. 375 band's love, with the blessing of Heaven on her head, and its purity n her heart; when she sat amongst her family, and administered the morality of the parental board. Estimate that past value compare it with its present deplorable diminution and it may lead you to form some judgment of the severity of the injury, and the extent of the compensation. The learned counsel has told you, you ought to be cautious, because your verdict cannot be set aside for excess. The assertion is just, but has he treated you fairly by its application ? His cause would not allow him to be fair for, why is the rule adopted in this single action? Be- cause, this being peculiarly an injury to the most susceptible of all human feelings it leaves the in- jury of the husband to be ascertained by the sen- sibility of the jury, and does not presume to mea- sure the justice of their determination by the cold and chilly exercise of its own discretion. In any other action it is easy to calculate. If a trades- man's arm is cut off, you can measure the loss which he has sustained but the w r ound of feeling, and the agony of the heart, cannot be judged by any standard with which I am acquainted. And you are unfairly dealt with when you are called on to appreciate the present suffering of the husband B B 4 376 APPENDIX. by the present guilt, delinquency., and degrada- tion of his wife. As \vell might you, if called on to give compensation to a man for the murder of his dearest friend, find the measure of his in- jury by weighing the ashes of the dead. But it is not, gentlemen of the jury, by weighing the ashes of the dead, that you would estimate the loss of the survivor. The learned counsel has referred you to other cases, and other countries, for instances of mode- rate verdicts. I can refer you to some authentic instances of just ones. In the next county, 15,OG(M. against a subaltern officer. In Travers and McCarthy, 5000/. against a servant. In Tighe against Jones, 10,OCO/. against a man not worth a shilling. What then ought to be the rule, where rank, and power, and wealth, and station, have combined to render the example of his crime more dangerous to make his guilt more odious to make the injury to the plaintiff more grievous, because more conspicuous ? I affect no levelling familiarity, when 1 speak of persons in the higher ranks of society distinctions of orders are necessary, and I always feel disposed to treat them with respect but when it is my duty to speak of the crimes by which they are degraded, I am not so fastidious as to shrink from their APPENDIX. 377 contact, when to touch them is essential to their dissection. However, therefore, I should feel on any other occasion, a disposition to speak of the noble defendant with the respect due to his station, and perhaps to his qualities, of which he may have many, to redeem him from the odium of this transaction, I cannot so indulge myself here. I cannot betray my client, to avoid the pain of doing my duty. I cannot forget that in this action the condition, the conduct, and circumstances of the parties are justly and peculiarly the objects of your consideration. Who then are the parties ? The plaintiff, young, amiable, of family and education. Of the generous disinterestedness of his heart you can form an opinion even from the evidence of the defendant, that he declined an alliance which would have added to his fortune and consideration, and which he rejected for an unportioned union with his present wife : she too, at that time, young, beautiful, and accomplished ; and feeling her affection forher husband increase, in proportion as she remembered the ardour of his love, and the sincerity of his sacrifice. Look now to the defend- ant! Can you behold him without shame and indignation ? With what feelings can you regard a rank that he has so tarnished, and a patent that he has so worse than cancelled ? High in the 378 APPENDIX. army high in the state the hereditary coun- sellor of the King of wealth incalculable and to this last I advert with an indignant and contemp- tuous satisfaction, because, as the only instrument of his guilt and shame, it will be the means of his punishment, and the source of compensation for his guilt. But let me call your attention distinctly to the questions you have to consider. The first is the fact of guilt. Is this noble Lord guilty? His counsel knew too well how they would have mor- tified his vanity, had they given the smallest reason to doubt the splendour of his achievement. Against any such humiliating suspicion he had taken the most studious precaution, by the pub- licity of the exploit. And here, in this Court, and before you, and in the face of the country, has he the unparalleled effrontery of disdaining to resort even to a confession of innocence. His guilt established, your next question is, the damages you should give. You have been told that the amount of the damages should depend on circumstances. You will consider these cir- cumstances, whether of aggravation or mitigation . His learned counsel contend that the plaintill has been the author of his own suffering, an I ought to receive no compensation for the ill con- APPENDIX. 379 sequences of his own conduct. In what part of the evidence do you find any foundation for that assertion ? He indulged her,, it seems, in dress generous and attached, he probably indulged her in that point beyond his means ; and the defend- ant now impudently calls on you to find an excuse for the adulterer in the fondness and liberality of the husband. But you have been told that the husband connived. Odious and impudent aggra- vation of injury to add calumny to insult, and outrage to dishonour! From whom but a man hackneyed in the paths of shame and vice- from whom but a man having no compunctions in his own breast to restrain him, could you expect such brutal disregard for the feelings of others? from whom but the cold-blooded seducer from what, but from the exhausted mind the habitual community with shame from what, but the habi- tual contempt of virtue and of man, could you have expected the arrogance, the barbarity, and folly of so foul, because so false an imputation ? lie should have reflected, and have blushed, before he suffered so vile a topic of defence to have passed his lips. But, ere you condemn, let him have the benefit of the excuse, if the excuse be true. You must have observed how his counsel fluttered and vibrated between what they call 380 APPENDIX. connivance and injudicious confidence; and how, in affecting- to distinguish, they have confounded them both together. If the plaintiff has con- nived, I freely say to you, do not reward the wretch who has prostituted his wife, and surren- dered his own honour do not compensate the pander of his own shame, and the willing instru- ment of his own infamy. But as there is no sum so low, to which such a defence, if true, ought not to reduce your verdict; so neither is any so high, to which such a charge ought not to inflame it, if such a charge be false. Where is the single fact in this case on which the remotest suspicion of connivance can be hung? Odiously has the de- fendant endeavoured to make the softest and most amiable feelings of the heart the pretext of his slanderous imputations. - An ancient and respectable prelate, the husband of his wife's sister, chained down to the bed of sickness, per- haps to the bed of deathin that distressing situa- tion, my client suffered that wife to be the bearer of consolation to the bosom of her sister he had not the heart to refuse her and the softness of his nature is now charged on him as a crime. He is nov-- insolently told that he connived at his dishonour, and that he ought to have foreseen that the mansion of sickness, and of sorrow APPENDIX. 381 would have been made the scene of assignation and of guilt. On this charge of connivance I will not further weary you, or exhaust myself I will add nothing more than that it is as false as it is impudent that in the evidence it has not a colour of support and that by your verdict you should mark it with reprobation. The other subject, namely, that he was indiscreet in his confidence, does, I think, call for some discus- sion for, I trust, you see that 1 affect not any address to your passions, by which you may be led away from the subject. I presume merely to separate the parts of this affecting case, and to lay them, item by item, before you, with the cold- ness of detail, and not with any colouring or display of fiction or of fancy. Honourable to himself was his unsuspecting confidence, but fatal must we admit it to have been, when we look (o the abuse committed upon it; but where was the guilt of this indiscretion ? He did admit this noble Lord to pass his threshold as his guest. Now the charge which this noble Lord builds on this indis- cretion is "Thou fool thou hadst confidence in my honour and that was a guilty indiscretion thou simpleton, thou thoughtest that an admitted and a cherished guest would have respected the laws of honour and hospitality, and thy indiscretion 382 APPENDIX. was guilt. Thou though test that he would have shrunk from the meanness and barbarity of re- quiting kindness with treachery, and thy indis- cretion was guilt." Gentlemen, what horrid alternative in the treat- ment of wives would such reasoning recommend ! Are they to be immured by worse than heathen barbarity ? Are their principles to be depraved their passions sublimated every finer motive of action extinguished by the inevitable consequen- ces of thus treating them like slaves ? Or is a libe- ral and generous confidence in them to be the passport of the adulterer,, and the justification of his crimes ? Honourably, but fatally for his own repose, he was neither jealous., suspicious, nor cruel. He treated the defendant with the confidence of a friend, and his wife with the tenderness of a hus- band. He did leave to the noble Marquis the physical possibility of committing against him the greatest crime which can be perpetrated against a being of an amiable heart and refined education, and the noble defendant had the honour to avail himself of it In the middle of the day, at the moment of divine worship, when the miserable husband was on his knees, directing the prayers and thanksgivings of his congregation to their God APPENDIX. 383 thai moment did the remorseless adulterer choose to carry off the deluded victim from her husband from her child from her character from her happiness as if not content to leave his crime confined to its inseparable and miserable aggravations, unless he also gave it a cast and colour of factitious sacrilege and impiety. O ! how happy had it been when he arrived at the bank of the river with the ill-fated fugitive, ere yet he had committed her to that boat, of which, like the fabled bay of Styx, the exile was eternal ; how happy at that moment, so teeming with misery and with shame, if you, my Lord, had met him, and could have accosted him in the charac- ter of that good genius which had abandoned him ! How impressively might you have pleaded the cause of the father, of the child, of the mo- ther, and even of the worthless defendant him- self! You would have said, " Is this the requital that you are about to make for respect and kind- ness, and confidence in your honour? Can you deliberately expose this young man in the bloom of life, with all his hopes yet before him ? Can you expose him, a wretched outcast from society, to the scorn of a merciless world ? Can you set him adrift upon the tempestuous ocean of his own passions, at this early season, when they are most 384 APPENDIX. headstrong? and can you cut him out from the moorings of those domestic obligations, by whose cable he might ride in safety from their turbu- lence? Think, if you can conceive it, what a powerful influence arises from the sense of home, from the sacred religion of the heart, in quelling the passions, in reclaiming the wanderings, in correcting the disorders of the human heart : do not cruelly take from him the protection of these attachments. But if you have no pity for the fa- ther, have mercy at least upon his innocent and helpless child : do not condemn him to an educa* tion scandalous or neglected do not strike him into that most dreadful of all human conditions, the orphanage that springs not from the grave, that falls not from the hand of Providence, or the stroke of death ; but comes before its time, anti- cipated and inflicted by the remorseless cruelty of parental guilt." For the poor victim herself not yet immolated while yet balancing upon the pivot of her destiny, your heart could not be cold, nor your tongue be wordless. You would have said to him, " Pause, my Lord, while there is yet a moment for reflection. What are your motives, what your views, what your prospects, from what you are about to do ? You are a married^nan, the husband of the most amiable and respectable of APPENDIX. 385 women ; you cannot look to the chance of marry- ing- this wretched fugitive : between you and such an event there are two sepulchres to pass. What are your inducements ? Is it love, think you ? No do not give that name to any attraction you can find in the faded refuse of a violated bed. Love is a noble and generous passion ; it can be founded only on a pure and ardent friendship, on an exalted respect, on an implicit confidence in its object. Search your heart, examine your judgment (and, in the estimate of a woman's worth, the selection of your own incomparable wife shows that you are not without discernment) : do you find the semblance of any one of these sentiments to bind you to her ? What could de- grade a mind, to which nature or education had given port, or stature, or character, into a friend- ship for her? Could you repose upon her faith ? Look in her face, my Lord ; she is at this moment giving you the violation of the most sacred of human obligations as the pledge of her fidelity. She is giving you the most irrefragable proof, that as she is deserting her husband for you, so she would, without a scruple, abandon you for another. Do you anticipate any pleasure you might feel in the possible event of your becoming the parents of a common child ? She is at this c c 386 APPENMX. moment proving to you that she is as dead to the sense of parental as of conjugal obligation, and that she would abandon your offspring to-morrow with the same facility with which she now deserts her own. Look then at her conduct as it is, as the world must behold it, blackened by every aggravation that can make it either odious or con- temptible, and unrelieved by a single circumstance of mitigation that could palliate its guilt, or re- trieve it from abhorrence. fe Mean, however, and degraded as this woman must be, she will still (if you take her with you) have strong and heavy claims upon you. The force of such claims does certainly depend upon circumstances ; before, therefore, you expose her fate to the dreadful risk of your caprice or ingra- titude, in mercy to her, weigh well the confidence she can place in your future justice and honour. At that future time, much nearer than you think, by what topics can her cause be pleaded to a sated appetite, to an heart that repels her, to a just judgment, in which she never could have been valued or respected ? Here is not the case of an unmarried woman, with whom a pure and gene- rous friendship may insensibly have ripened into a more serious attachment, until at last her heart became too deeply pledged to be re-assumed : if APPENDIX.. 387 so circumstanced,, without any husband to betray, or child to desert, or motive to restrain, except what related solely to herself, her anxiety for your happiness made her overlook every other consi- deration, and commit her destiny to your honour; in such a case (the strongest and the highest that man's imagination can suppose), in which you at least could see nothing but the most noble and disinterested sacrifice ; in which you could find nothing but what claimed from you the most kind and exalted sentiment of tenderness, and devotion, and respect; and in which the most fastidious rigour would find so much more subject for sympathy than blame let me ask you, could you, even in that case, answer for your own jus- tice and gratitude ? I do not allude to the long and pitiful catalogue of paltry adventures, in which it seems your time has been employed the coarse and vulgar succession of casual connexions, joy- less, loveless, and unendeared : but do you find upon your memory any trace of any engagement of the character I have sketched ? Has your sense of what you would owe in such a case, and to such. a woman, been at least once put to the test of experiment ? Has it even once happened, that such a woman, with all the resolution of strong faith, flung her youth, her hope, her beauty, her cc 2 388 APPENDIX. talent, upon your bosorti, weighed you against the world, which she found but a feather in the scale, and took you as an equivalent ? and, if so, how did you then acquit yourself? Did you prove yourself worthy of the sacred trust reposed in you ? Did your spirit so associate with hers as to leave her no room to regret the splendid disinterested sacrifice she had made ? Did her soul find a pil- low in the tenderness of yours, and a support in its firmness? Did you preserve her high in her own consciousness, proud in your admiration and friendship, and happy in your affection ? You might have so acted ; and the man that was worthy of her would have perished, rather than not so act as to make her delighted with having confided so sacred a trust to his honour. Did you so act? Did she feel that, however precious to your heart, she was still more exalted and honoured in your reverence and respect ? Or did she find you coarse and paltry, fluttering and unpurposed, unfeeling and ungrateful ? You found her a fair and blush- ing flower, its beauty and its fragrance bathed in the dews of heaven. Did you so tenderly trans- plant it, as to preserve that beauty and fragrance unimpaired ? Or did you so rudely cut it, as to interrupt its nutriment, to waste its sweetness, to blast its beauty, to bow down its faded and sickly APPENDIX. 389 head ? And did you at last fling it, like ' a loath- some weed away ?' If then to such a woman, so- clothed with every title that could ennoble and exalt, and endear her to the heart of man, you could be cruelly and capriciously deficient, how can a wretched fugitive like this, in every point her contrast, hope to find you just ? Send her then away. Send her back to her home, to her child, to her husband, to herself." Alas ! there was none to hold such language to this noble de- fendant ; he did not hold it to himself. But he paraded his despicable prize in his own carriage, with his own retinue, his own servants this ve- teran Paris hawked his enamoured Helen from this western quarter of the island to a sea-port in the eastern, crowned with the acclamations of a senseless and grinning rabble, glorying and de- lighted, no doubt, in the leering and scoffing ad- miration of grooms, and ostlers, and waiters, as he passed. In this odious contempt of every personal feel- ing, of public opinion, of common humanity, did he parade this woman to the sea-port, whence he transported his precious cargo to a country where her example may be less mischievous than in her own ; where I agree with my learned colleague in heartily wishing he may remain with her for c c 3 390 APPENBIX.. ever. We are too poor, too simple^ too unadvanced a country, for the example of such achievements. When the relaxation of morals is the natural growth and consequence of the great progress of arts and wealth, it is accompanied by a refinement -that makes it less gross and shocking : but for such palliations we are at least a century too young. I advise you., therefore, most earnestly to rebuke this budding mischief, by letting the wholesome vigour and chastisement of a liberal verdict speak what you think of its enormity. In every point of view in which I can look at the subject., I see you are called upon to give a ver- dict of bold, and just, and indignant, and exemplary compensation. The injury of the plaintiff de- mands it from your justice. The delinquency of the defendant provokes it by its enormity. The rank on which he has relied for impunity calls up- on you to tell him, that crime does not ascend to the rank of the perpetrator, but the perpetrator sinks from his rank, and descends to the level of his delinquency. The style and mode of his de- fence is a gross aggravation of his conduct, and a gross insult upon you. Look upon the different subjects of his defence as you ought, and let him profit by them as he deserves : vainly presump- tuous upon his rank, he wishes to overawe you by APPENDIX. 391 the despicable consideration. He next resorts to a cruel aspersion upon the character of the un- happy plaintiff, whom he had already wounded beyond the possibility of reparation : he has ven- tured to charge him with connivance : as to that,, I will only say,, gentlemen of the jury, do not give this vain boaster a pretext for saying, that if the husband connived in the offence, the jury also connived in the reparation. But he has pressed another curious topic upon you : after the plaintiff had cause to suspect his designs, and the likelihood of their being fatally successful, he did not then act precisely as he ought. Gracious God ! what an argument for him to dare to advance ! It is saying this to him : " I abused your confidence, your hospitality ; I laid a base plan for the seduc- tion of the wife of your bosom ; I succeeded at last, so as to throw in upon you that most dreadful of all suspicions to a man fondly attached, proud of his wife's honour, and tremblingly alive to his own ; that you were possibly a dupe to confidence in the wife, as much as in thr jjuest : in this so pitiable distress, which I myself had studiously and deliberately contrived for you, between hope and fear, and doubt and love, and jealousy and shame ; one moment shrinking from the cruelty of your suspicion ; the next fired with indignation C 4 392 APPENDIX. at the facility and credulity of your acquittal ; iq this labyrinth of doubt, in this frenzy of suffering:, you were not collected and composed ; you did not act as you might have done, if I had not worked you to madness ; and upon that very mad- ness which I have inflicted upon you, upon the very completion of my guilt, and of your misery, I will build my defence. You did not act criti- cally right, and therefore are unworthy of com- pensation." Gentlemen, can you be dead to the remorseless atrocity of such a defence ? And shall not your honest verdict mark it as it deserves ? But let me go a little further ; let me ask you, for I confess I have no distinct idea of what should be the conduct of a husband so placed, and who is to act critically right ; shall he lock her up, or turn her out ? or enlarge or abridge her liberty of act- ing as she pleases ? O, dreadful Areopagus of the the tea-table ! How formidable thy inquests,, how tremendous thy condemnations ! In the first case he is brutal and barbarous, an odious eastern des- pot. " Lord, Ma'am, did you ever hear of any thing like this odious Parson ? His dear, pure, sweet, virtuous lady positively a prisoner ! A pad- lock, large enough for a church, on the outside of her chamber; and a trap-door to her chimney, as if the charming Marquis could make his way to APPENDIX. 393 her in the disguise of a sweep !" In the next : ft What ! turn an innocent woman out of his house, without evidence or proof, but merely be- cause he is vile and mean enough to suspect the wife of his bosom,, and the mother of his child !" Between these extremes, what intermediate de- gree is he to adopt ? I put this question to you : do you at this moment,, uninfluenced by any pas- sion,, as you now are., but cool and collected, and uninterested as you must be,, do you see clearly this proper and exact line., which the plaintilF should have pursued ? I much question if you do. But if you did or could,, must you not say, that he was the last man from whom you should expect the coolness to discover, or the steadiness to pursue it ? And yet this is the outrageous and insolent defence that is put forward to you. My miserable client, when his brain was on fire., and every fiend of hell was let loose upon his heart, he should then, it seems, have placed himself before his mirror, he should have taught the stream of agony to flow decorously down his forehead. He should have composed liis features to harmony, he should have writhed with grace, and groaned in melody. But look further to this noble de- fendant, and his honourable defence. The wretch- ed woman is to be successively the victim of se- 394 APPENDIX. duction, and of slander. She, it seems., received marked attentions here, I confess, I felt myself not a little at a loss. The witnesses could not de- scribe what these marked attentions were, or are. They consisted, not, if you believe the witness that swore to them, in any personal approach or contact whatsoever nor in any unwarrantable topics of discourse. Of what materials then were they composed ? Why, it seems, a gentleman had the insolence at table to propose to her a glass wine ; and she, O most abandoned lady ! instead of flying, like an angry parrot, at his head, and bescreeching and bescratching him for his inso- lence, tamely and basely replies, " Port, Sir, if you please." But, gentlemen, why do I advert to this folly, this nonsense ? Not surely to vindicate from censure the most innocent, and the most de- lightful intercourse, of social kindness, of harm- less and cheerful courtesy fe where virtue is, these are most virtuous." But I am soliciting your attention, and your feeling, to the mean and odious aggravation to the unblushing and re- morseless barbarity of falsely aspersing the wretch- ed woman he had undone. One good he has done, he has disclosed to you the point in which he can feel ; for, how imperious must that ava- rice be, which could resort to so vile an expedient APPENDIX. 395 of frugality ? Yes, I will say, that with the com- mon feelings of a man, he would rather have suf- fered his 30,000/. a year to go as compensation to the plaintiff, than save a shilling of it by so vile an expedient of economy. He would rather have starved with her in a jail, he would rather have sunk with her into the ocean, than have so vilified her than have so degraded himself. But it seems, gentlemen, and indeed you have been told, that long as the course of his gallantries has been, and he has grown grey in the service, it is the first time he has been called upon for damages. To how many might it have been fortunate if he had not that impunity to boast ! Your ver- dict will, 1 trust, put an end to that encouragement to guilt that is built upon impunity. The devil, it seems, has saved the noble Marquis harmless in the past ; but your verdict will tell him the term of that indemnity is expired, that his old friend and banker has no more effects in his hands, and that if he draws any more upon him, he must pay his own bills himself. You will do much good by doing so ; you may not enlighten his conscience, nor touch his heart, but his frugality will under- stand the hint. He may despise Epictetus, but he will listen with respect to Cocker, when he finds, that he can enforce the precepts of his morality 396 APPENDIX. with all the precision of mathematical demonstra- tion. He will adopt the prudence of age,, and be deterred from pursuits, in which, though he may be insensible of shame, he will not be regard- less of expense. You will do more, you will not only punish him in his tender point, but you will weaken him in his strong one his money. We have heard much of this noble Lord's wealth, and much of his exploits, but not much of his accomplishments or his wit : I know not that his verses have soared even to the Poet's Corner. I have heard it said, that an ass, laden with gold, could find his way through the gate of the strong- est city. But, gentlemen, lighten the load upon his back, and you will completely curtail the mis- chievous faculty of a grave animal, whose mo- mentum lies not in his agility, but his weight, not in the quantity of motion, but the quantity of his matter. There is another ground, on which you are called upon to give most liberal da- mages, and that has been laid by the unfeeling- vanity of the defendant. This business has been marked by the most elaborate publicity. It is very clear that he has been allured by the glory of the chase, and not the value of the game. The poor object of his pursuit could be of no value to him, or he could not have so wantonly, and APPENDIX. 397 cruelly, and unnecessarily abused her. He might easily have kept this unhappy intercourse an un- suspected secret. Even if he wished for her elope- ment, he might easily have so contrived it, that the place of her retreat would be profoundly un- discoverable ; yet, though even the expense, a point so tender to his delicate sensibility, of con- cealing, could not be a one fortieth of the cost of publishing her, his vanity decided him in favour of glory and publicity. By that election he has in fact put forward the Irish nation,, and its cha- racter, so often and so variously calumniated, upon its trial before the tribunal of the empire ; and your verdict will this day decide, whether an Irish jury can feel with justice and spirit, upon a subject that involves conjugal affection and comfort, domestic honour and repose the certainty of issue the weight of public opinion the gilded and presumptuous criminality of overweening rank and station. I doubt not but he is at this moment reclined on a silken sofa, anticipating that submissive and modest verdict, by which you will lean gently on his errors; and expecting from your patriotism, no doubt, that you will think again and again, before you con- demn any great portion of the immense revenue of a great absentee, to be detained in the nation 398 APPENDIX. that produced it, instead of being transmitted., as it ought, to be expended in the splendour of ano- ther country. He is now probably waiting for the arrival of the report of this day,, which, I under- stand, a famous note-taker has been sent hither to collect. (Let not the gentleman be disturbed.) Gentlemen, let me assure you, it is more, much more the trial of you than of the noble Marquis, of which this imported recorder is at this moment collecting the materials. His noble employer is now expecting a report to the following effect : " Such a day came on to be tried at Ennis, by a special jury, the cause of Charles Massy, against the most noble the Marquis of Headfort. It appeared that the plaintiff's wife was young, beautiful, and captivating ; the plaintiff himself a person fond of this beautiful creature to distrac- tion, and both doating on their child : but the noble Marquis approached her ; the plume of glory nodded on his head. Not the goddess Mi- nerva, but the goddess Venus, had lighted upon his casque; ' the fire that never tires such as many a lady gay had been dazzled with before/ At the first advance she trembled, at the second she struck to the redoubted son of Mars, and pupil of Venus. The jury saw it was not his fault (it was an Irish jury) ; they felt compassion for the ten- APPENDIX. 399 tlerness of the mother's heart, and for the warmth of the lover's passion. The jury saw on the one side, a young, entertaining gallant; on the other, a beauteous creature, of charms irresistible. They recollected that Jupiter had been always success- ful in his amours, although Vulcan had not always escaped some awkward accidents. The jury was composed of fathers, brothers, husbands but they had not the vulgar jealousy, that views little things of that sort with rigour, and wishing to assimilate their country in every respect to England, now that they are united to it, they, like English gentlemen, returned to their box, with a verdict of sixpence damages and sixpence costs." Let this be sent to England. I promise you your odious secret will not be better kept than that of the wretched Mrs. Massy. There is not a bawdy chronicle in London, in which the epitaph, which you will have written on yourselves, will not be published, and our enemies will delight in the spectacle of our precocious depravity, in seeing that we can be rotten before we are ripe. But 1 do not suppose it ; I do not, cannot, will not, believe it : I will not harrow up myself with the antici- pated apprehension. There is another consideration, gentlemen, which I think most imperiously demands even a 400 APPENDIX. vindictive award of exemplary damages, and that is, the breach of hospitality. To us peculiarly does it belong to avenge the violation of its altar. The hospitality of other countries is a matter of neces- sity or convention, in savage nations of the first, in polished, of the latter ; but the hospitality of an Irishman is not the running account of posted and ledgered courtesies, as in other countries; it springs, like all his qualities, his faults, his vir- tues directly from his heart. The heart of an Irishman is by nature bold, and he confides ; it is tender, and he loves; it is generous, and he gives; it is social, and he is hospitable. This sacri- legious intruder has profaned the religion of that sacred altar, so elevated in our worship, so precious to our devotion ; and it is our privilege to avenge the crime. You must either pull down the altar, and abolish the worship, or you must preserve its sanctity undebased. There is no al- ternative between the universal exclusion of all mankind from your threshold, and the most rigor- ous punishment of him who is admitted and betrays. This defendant has been so trusted, he has so betrayed, and you ought to make him a most signal example. Gentlemen, 1 am the more disposed to feel the strongest indignation and abhorrenceat this odious APPENDIX. 401 conduct of the defendant, when I consider the deplorable condition to which he has actually reduced the plaintiff,, and perhaps the still more deplorable one that he has in prospect before him. What a progress has he to travel through,, before he can attain the peace and tranquillity which he has lost ! How like the wounds of the body are those of the mind! how burning; the fever ! how painful the suppuration ! how slow, how hesitating, how relapsing the process to con- valescence ! Through what a variety of suffering, through what new scenes and changes must my unhappy client pass, ere he can re-attain, should he ever re-attain, that health of soul of which he has been despoiled, by the cold and deliberate ma^ chinations of this practised and gilded seducer? If, instead of drawing upon his incalculable wealth for a scanty retribution, you were to stop the progress of his despicable achievements by reduc- ing him to actual poverty, you could not, even so, punish him beyond the scope of his offence, nor reprise the plaintiff beyond the measure of his suffering. Let me remind you, that in this action the law not only empowers you, but that its policy commands you, to consider the public example, as well as the individual injury, when you adjust the amount of your verdict. I confess I am most D D 402 APPENDIX. anxious that you should acquit yourselves worthily upon this important occasion. I am addressing you as fathers, husbands, brothers. I am anxious that a feeling of those high relations should enter into, and give dignity to, your verdict. But I con- fess it, I feel a tenfold solicitude when I remem- ber that I am addressing you as my countrymen, as Irishmen, whose characters as jurors, as gen- tlemen, must find either honour or degradation in the result of your decision. Small as must be the distributive share of that national estimption that can belong to so unimportant an individual as my- self, yet do I own I am tremblingly solicitous for its fate. Perhaps it appears of more value to me, because it is embarked on the same bottom with yours ; perhaps the community of peril, of com- mon safety, or common wreck, gives a consequence to my share of the risk, which I could not be vain enough to give it, if it were not raised to it by that mutuality. But why stoop to think at all of my- self, when I know that you, gentlemen of that jury, when I know that our country itself, are my clients on this day, and must abide the alternative of honour, or of infamy, as you shall decide ? But I will not despond, I will not dare to despond. 1 have every trust, and hope, ami confidence in you. And to that hope I will add my most fervent prayer APPENDIX. 403 to the God of all truth and justice, o as to raise and enlighten,, and fortify your minds, that you may so decide, as to preserve to yourselves, while you live, the most delightful of all recollections, that of acting justly, and to transmit to your chil- dren the most precious of all inheritances, the me- mory of your virtue. THE END. and Brcwis. Printers, Love Lanr. Easlcheap. A 001 421 072