Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 424, February 1851

He visited Hampton Court, and though he seems to have passed through its solemn halls and stately galleries without peculiar remark, he seized on his game of living character.

"The servant who showed us the splendid apartments seemed to be a good deal pleased with his manner of explaining a suite of tapestry representing the Persian war of Alexander. Though a simple fellow, he had his lesson well by rote, and ran over the battles of Issus, Arbela, &c., with surprising fluency. 'But, where is Alexander?' cries Apjohn, (a young fellow-student, who had accompanied him.) 'There, sir, at the door of Darius's tent, with the ladies at his feet.' 'Surely,' said I, 'that must be Hephæstion, for he was mistaken by the Queen for Alexander.' 'Pardon me, sir, I hope I know Alexander better than that.' 'But, which of the two do you think the greater man?' 'Greater! – bless your soul, sir, they are both dead these hundred years.'"

Curran's observation on this official, or, as he would probably have called it, ministerial blunder, exhibits, even in these early days of his mind, something of the reflective spirit which afterwards gave such an interest to his eloquence.

"Oh, what a comment on human vanity! There was the marrow of a thousand folios in the answer. I could not help thinking at the instant, what a puzzle that mighty man would be in, should he appear before a committee from the Temple of Fame, to claim those laurels which he thought so much of, and to be opposed in his demands, though his competitor were Thersites, or the fellow who rubbed Bucephalus's heels!"

All this is showy if not new; yet, in defiance even of Curran's authority, its argument is practically denied by all human nature. What man ever acts for the praise of posterity alone? Present impulses, excited by present rewards, are the law of the living; and Alexander charging through the Granicus, and sweeping the royal Persian cavalry before him, had probably a heart as full of the most powerful impulses, as if he could have assured himself of the inheritance for ten thousand years of the plaudits of the globe. We are also to remember, that he has inherited the great legacy of fame, to this hour – that, to the minds of all the intelligent, he is still the hero of heroes; that clowns are not the clients of memory, or the distributors of renown; and that the man whose history has already survived his throne two thousand years, has exhibited in himself all the distinction between the perishableness of power and the immortality of fame.

In 1775 Curran returned to Ireland, and after anxiously pondering on the chances of abandoning Europe, and seeking fortune in America, as other eminent men – Edmund Burke among the number – had done before him, he fixed his fates at home.

This portion of the subject begins with a high panegyric on the difficult but attractive profession into which Curran now threw himself, without income, connection, or friend: —

"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 perfect reliance on 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 exertion. And there not unfrequently 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."

That the Bar was the first body in the country was incontestible, and that it often exhibited remarkable instances of ability is equally known. But those facts must not be understood as giving the author's opinion, that perfection lies in the populace. All the remarkable persons of their time in Ireland were men of education, many of birth, and many of hereditary fortune. Grattan was the son of a judge; Flood a man of old family and estate; Clare, the Chancellor, was the son of the leader of the Bar, and began the world with £4000 a-year – a sum probably now equal to twice the amount. The Ponsonbys, the leading family of Whiggism in Ireland, were among the first blood and fortune of the land. Hussey Burgh was a man of old family and fortune. The Beresfords were closely allied to nobility. Plunket and Curran were, perhaps, those among the leaders the least indebted to the Heralds' College; but Plunket was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and both had received the best education which Ireland could give – both were graduates of the University.

Of course, nature is impartial in the distribution of talents, but the true distinction is in their training. The Radicalism which fills public life with vulgarity and faction is wholly the work of that absence of all early training, which must be the fate of men suddenly gathered from the manual labours of life. We know the necessity of those labours, but intellectual superiority must be the work of another school. The men of eminence in Ireland were also men of accomplished general knowledge, and of classical acquirement, to an amount seldom found even in the English Legislature. There was not an assembly in the world where a happy classical quotation, or dexterous reference to antiquity, would be received with a quicker sense, or a louder plaudit than in the Irish Parliament.

When the well-known antagonist of the Romish claims, Dr Duigenan, a stern-looking and singularly dark-featured old man, had one night made a long and learned speech on the subject, Sir John Doyle wholly extinguished its effect, by the Horatian line, —

"Hic niger est, hunc tu Romane caveto."

The House shook with applause, and the universal laugh drove the doctor from the field.

On another evening, when the prince of jesters, Toler, then a chief supporter of Government, contemptuously observed, on seeing a smile on some of the Opposition faces —

"Dulce est desipere in loco;"

an Opposition member started up and retorted the quotation, by saying, "That it was much more applicable to the conduct and position of the honourable member and his friends, and that the true translation was, 'It is mighty pleasant to play the fool in a place.'"

The novelty and happiness of the translation disturbed the gravity of debate for a considerable time.

But those were the gay days of Ireland. Times of keen anxiety, of daring change, and of social convulsion, were already shaping themselves to the eye of the patriot, and the true debates on which the fate of the nation hung were transferred from parliament to the peasantry, from the council-room to the cabin, from the accomplished intelligence and polished brilliancy of the legislature to the rude resentment, fierce recollections, and sullen prejudices of the multitude. It was on the heath, that Revolution, like Macbeth, met the disturbing spirits of the land, and heard the "All hail, hereafter."

Curran's rapid professional distinctions were the more remarkable, that the Irish Bar was aristocratic, to a degree wholly unknown in England. If it is true, that this great profession often leads to the Peerage, in Ireland the course was reversed, and the Peerage often derived its chief honours from its connection with the Bar. The sons of the first families wore the gown, and the cedant arma togæ was more fully realised in Ireland than it ever was in Rome.

But few men of condition ever entered the Army; and in a nation of habitual passion for publicity, and proverbial love of enterprise, perhaps fewer officers were added to the British service than from the Channel Islands. This has since been largely changed, and Ireland, which in the last century but filled up the rank and file, has since nobly contributed her share to the names which register themselves in the memory of nations. To Ireland, glorious England and rescued Europe owe a Wellington!

The Church, the usual province of high families in England, was poor, feeble, and unpopular in Ireland. With a few positions of great wealth, all below was barren: livings of vast extent, with a meagre population, and still more meagre income; Romanism was hourly spreading with a population, itself spreading until it had nothing to eat, and embittered against Protestantism until conversion became more than a hopeless toil – an actual terror. Law was the only instrument of collecting the clerical income, and the collector and the clergyman were involved in one common obloquy, and often in one common danger – a condition of things which must have largely repelled all those who had the power of choice.

The mitres were chiefly bestowed on the Fellows of English colleges, and tutors of English noblemen. Every new Viceroy imported a succession of chaplains, and quartered them all upon the Irish Church. The majority of those men looked upon their position with the nervous alarm of settlers in the wilderness, thought only of the common-room of the colleges from which they had been torn, or of the noble houses in which they had been installed; and reproached the ill luck which had given them dignities which only excited popular disgust; and wealth, from which they could derive no pleasure, but in its accumulation. We can scarcely wonder that, through almost the whole of the eighteenth century, the Irish Church lay in a state of humiliation, repulsive to the public feelings. This, too, has changed; and the Church now possesses many able men.

Commerce, which plays so vigorous a part in the world, was then a swathed infant in Ireland, and swathed so tightly by provincial regulations, that there was scarcely a prospect of its ever stepping beyond the cradle. Manufactures – that gold-mine worth all the treasures of the Western World – were limited to the looms of the north; and the only manufacture of three-fourths of this fine country consisted in the fatal fabrication of forty-shilling voters.

The Squiredom of Ireland was the favourite profession of busy idleness, worthless activity, and festive folly. But this profession must have an estate to dilapidate, or a country to ride over, and English mortgagees to pamper its prodigality and accelerate its ruin. Gout, the pistol, broken necks, and hereditary disease, rapidly thinned this class. Perpetual litigation stood before their rent-rolls, in the shape of a devouring dragon; and, with a peasantry starving but cheerful, and with a proprietary pauperised, but laughing to the last, they were determined, though hourly sinking into bankruptcy, to be ruined like a gentleman.

All those circumstances coming together, made the Bar almost the sole assemblage of the ability of Ireland. But they also made it the most daring, dashing, and belligerent body of gentlemen that Europe has seen. It was Lord Norbury's remark, in his old age, when he reposed on the cushions of the peerage, had realised immense wealth, and obtained two peerages for his two sons – that all this came out of fifty pounds, and a case of pistols, his father's sole present as he launched him in life. The list of duels fought by the leading members of the Bar might figure in the returns of a Continental campaign; and no man was regarded as above answering for a sarcasm dropped in court, by his appearance in the field.

But we must not, from this unfortunate and guilty habit, conceive that the spirit of the higher orders of Ireland was deficient in the courtesies of life. There was a melancholy cause in the convulsions of the country. The war of William III., which had broken down the throne of James II., had left many a bitter feeling among the Popish families of Ireland. Many of the soldiers of James had retired into village obscurity, or were suffered to retain the fragments of their estates, and live in that most embittering of all conditions – a sense of birth, with all the struggles of diminished means. These men indulged their irritable feelings, or avenged their ruin, by the continual appeal to the pistol. Always nurturing the idea that the victory had been lost to them solely by the cowardice of James, they were ready to quarrel with any man who doubted their opinion; and as their Protestant conquerors were brave bold men, equally disposed to maintain their right, and unhesitating in their claim to possess what they had won by their swords, their quarrels became feuds. Law, which reprobated the principle, by its laxity established the practice; and when lawyers led the way, the community followed. Still, there can be no doubt that duelling is a custom alike contrary to the order of society, and the command of heaven; and, the first judge who hangs a duellist as a murderer, and sends all the parties engaged in the transaction to the penal colonies for life, will have rendered a signal service to his country.

While every part of this volume is valuable, for the display of vigorous writing and manly conception, the more interesting fragments, to us, are the characters of the parliamentary leaders; because such men are the creators of national character, the standards of national intellect, and the memorials to which their nation justly points as the trophies of national honour.

The Parliament of Ireland is in the grave; but, while the statues of her public orators stand round the tomb, it must be felt to be more than a sepulchre. Whatever homage for genius may be left in the distractions of an unhappy country, must come to kneel beside that tomb; and if the time shall ever arrive for the national enfranchisement from faction, the first accents of national wisdom must be dictated from that sacred depository of departed virtue.

Grattan, the first man in the brightest day of the Irish Parliament, was descended of an honourable lineage. His father was a barrister, member of parliament for Dublin, and also its Recorder. He himself was a graduate of the Irish University, where he was distinguished. Entering the Middle Temple, he was called to the Irish Bar in 1772.

But his mind was parliamentary; his study in England had been parliament; and his spirit was kindled by the great orators of the time. He who had beard Burke and Chatham, had heard the full power of imaginative oratory – of all oratory the noblest. Grattan had the materials of a great speaker in him by nature – keen sensibility, strong passion, daring sincerity, and an imagination furnished with all the essential knowledge for debate – not overwhelmed by it, but refreshing the original force of his mind, like the eagle's wing refreshed by dipping into the fountain, but dipping only to soar. Yet, though almost rapturously admiring those distinguished men, he was no imitator. He struck out for himself a line between both, and, in some of its happier moments, superior to either; combining the rich exuberance of Burke's imagination with Chatham's condensed dignity of thought. Possessed of an extraordinary power of reasoning, Grattan had the not less extraordinary power of working it into an intensity which made it glow; and some of the most elaborate arguments ever uttered in Parliament have all the brilliancy of eloquence. He continually reasoned, though the most metaphorical of speakers; and this combination of logic and lustre, though so unusual in others, in him was characteristic. He poured out arguments like a shower of arrows, but they were all arrows tipped with fire.

Mr Phillips' sketch of him brings Grattan before us to the life: —

"He was short in stature, and unprepossessing in appearance. His arms were disproportionately long. His walk was a stride. With a person swaying like a pendulum, and an abstracted air, he seemed always in thought, and each thought provoked an attendant gesticulation. Such was the outward and visible form of one whom the passenger would stop to stare at as a droll, and the philosopher to contemplate as a study. How strange it is that a mind so replete with grace and symmetry, and power and splendour, should have been allotted such a dwelling for its residence! Yet so it was, and so also was it one of his highest attributes, that his genius, by its 'excessive light,' blinded his hearers to his physical imperfections. It was the victory of mind over matter."

It is then stated that, even while at the Temple, he exercised himself in parliamentary studies, and made speeches in his walks in Windsor Forest, near which he had taken lodgings, and in his chamber. Of course, he was supposed to be a little mad: —

"His landlady observed, 'What a sad thing it was to see the poor young gentleman all day talking to somebody he calls Mr Speaker, when there was no speaker in the house but himself.' Nor was the old lady singular in her opinion. In some few years afterwards, no less a man than Edmund Burke wrote over to Ireland, 'Will no one stop that madman, Grattan?' Assuredly when Burke himself enacted the dagger-scene on the floor of the House of Commons, the epithet was more applicable."

We refer to this remark, chiefly to correct a misconception generally adopted. It has been supposed that Burke, to heighten the effect of his speech on the discontents then engendering against the State, actually purchased a dagger, to throw on the floor of Parliament. This, of course, would have been ridiculous; and it is to do the common duty of rescuing the fame of a great man from the slightest touch of ridicule that this explanation is given. One of his friends (we believe, a member of Parliament) had received, in the course of the day, from Birmingham, a newly-invented dagger, of a desperate kind, of which some thousands had been ordered, evidently for the purpose of assassination. Burke, naturally shocked at this proof of the sanguinary designs spreading among the lower population, took the weapon with him, to convince those who constantly scoffed at him as an alarmist that his alarms were true. The whole was a matter of accident; nothing could be less premeditated; and every hearer of the true statement will agree that, so far from being a theatrical exhibition, it was the very act which any rational and manly man would have done. The time was terrible: revolution threatened every hour. Jacobinism was hourly boasting that it had the Church and Throne in its grasp; and, at such a period, the positive statement of a man like Burke, that thousands (we believe five thousand) of weapons, evidently made for private murder, were actually ordered in one of our manufacturing towns, and the sight of one of those horrid instruments itself, was an important call on the vigilance of Government, and a salutary caution to the country. It is not at all improbable that this act crushed the conspiracy.

Mr Phillips observes, that when Burke wrote "that madman Grattan, the madman was contemplating the glorious future; his ardent mind beheld the vision of the country he so loved rising erect from the servitude of centuries, 'redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled' by his exertions. Nor was that vision baseless – he made of it a proud and grand reality: her chains fell off, as at the bidding, of an enchanter."

Grattan's influence in Parliament was felt from his first entrance. But he earned it in the only way in which even genius can be permanently successful.

"His industry was indomitable. The affairs of Parliament were to be thenceforth the business of his life, and he studied them minutely. The chief difficulty in this great speaker's way was the first five minutes. During his exordium, laughter was imminent. He bent his body almost to the ground, swung his arms over his head, up and down and around him, and added to the grotesqueness of his manner a hesitating tone and drawling emphasis. Still there was an earnestness about him, that at first besought, and, as he warmed, enforced – nay, commanded attention."

His first entrance into the British House of Commons is described with the same graphic effect: —

"He had said of Flood 'that he forgot that he was an oak of the forest, too old and too great to be transplanted at fifty.' And yet here he was himself. Whether he would take root was the question, and for some moments very questionable it was. When he rose, every voice in that crowded House was hushed; the great rivals, Pitt and Fox, riveted their eyes upon him; he strode forth and gesticulated – the hush became unanimous; not a cheer was heard; men looked in one another's faces, and then at the phenomenon before them, as if doubting his identity. At last, and on a sudden, the indication of the master-spirit came. Pitt was the first generously to recognise it. He smote his thigh hastily with his hand – it was an impulse when he was pleased – his followers saw it, and knew it, and with a universal burst they hailed the advent and the triumph of the stranger."

Grattan was sincere, and this sincerity gave at once substance to his popularity, and power to his eloquence. But, as a politician, he was rash; and as a prophet, he had to see the failure of all his predictions. He wielded a torch of exceeding brightness, it is true; but the torch at once blinded himself and inflamed the nation. His patriotism was pure, but it wanted practicability. He left no great measure of public utility behind him. His liberation, as he called it, of Ireland in 1782, was a showy fiction, to end in the disgrace of a painful discovery. It was the liberation of a fever to end in exhaustion; of a dream of opulence and independence, to finish in an awaking of poverty and despair. Its closest resemblance was to the late festival at the Hanwell Asylum – an assemblage of lunatics dressed for the night in feathers and flowers, dancing and feasting, until the morning light sent them back to their cells, and the drudgery of their melancholy discipline.

The whole policy of the Whig party in Ireland was the counterpart of their policy in England, only on a smaller scale. It was, to the performances of Fox and Opposition here, what the little stage-play in Hamlet is to the tragedy itself – the same characters and the same crime performed in imitation of the larger guilt that gazes on it. The wretched shortsightedness of supporting any demand of the populace whom they at once deluded and despised; the perpetual agitation to give the franchise to classes who must use it without the power of discrimination, and who must be careless of it but for the purposes of corruption; the reckless clientship of the Popish claims, ending in the sale of Irish independence by the Papists; the universal conspiracy, and the sanguinary civil war, followed by the political suicide of the Parliament —all the direct and rapid results of the Whig policy in Ireland – show either the headlong ignorance or the scandalous hypocrisy of Irish faction.

Yet, in all this blaze of fraud and falsehood, the name of Grattan was never degraded by public suspicion. He was an enthusiast; and his robe of enthusiasm, like one of the fire-resisting robes of antiquity, came out only brighter for its passing through the flame. But the Legislature (all impurities) was left in ashes.

Mr Phillips seems to regret Grattan's transfer to England, as an injury to his oratorical distinctions. He tells us "that it is in the Irish Parliament, and in his younger day, that his finest efforts are to be found!" Reluctant as we are to differ from such an authority, yet, judging from his published speeches, it appears to us that his powers never found their right position until they were within the walls of the British Parliament. These walls shut out the roar of the populace, which disturbed him, but to which he once must listen. These walls sheltered him from that perpetual clinging of Popery, which dragged down his fine tastes to its own level. Within these walls, he was relieved from the petty interests of partisanship, and raised from the feuds of an island to the policy of an empire. In Ireland, popularity required perpetual submission to the caprices of the multitude, and no man had more fully felt than Grattan the impossibility of taking a stand on his own principles – he must be either on the shoulders of the mob, or under their heels. In England, no longer wearied with the responsibility of leading parties who refused to be guided, or the disgust of following his inferiors through the dust of their hurried "road to ruin," he had before him, and embraced with the gallantry of his nature, the great Cause for which England was fighting – the cause of human kind. In Ireland, Grattan, with all his intrepidity, would not have dared to make his magnificent speech on the war with Napoleon, or, if he had, would have been denounced by the roar of the million. In England, he was in the midst of the noblest associations; he was surrounded by all the living ability of the empire; and if genius itself is to be inspired by the memories of the mighty, every stone of the walls round him teemed with inspiration.

Thus, if his language was more chastened, it was loftier; if his metaphors were more disciplined, they were more majestic; – the orb which, rising through the mists of faction, had shone with broadened disc and fiery hue, now, in its meridian, assumed its perfect form, and beamed with its stainless glory.

In recording the remarkable names of this period in Ireland, Mr Phillips alludes to the celebrated preacher, Dean Kirwan: —

"He had been a Roman Catholic clergyman, but conformed to the Church of England. He was a wonderful orator – one of the greatest that ever filled a pulpit; and yet, when injudicious friends, after his death, published a volume of his sermons, they were scarcely readable. This sounds paradoxical: but it is true. The volume is not remembered – those who heard the preacher never can forget him. It was my happiness to have the opportunity thrice, while a student in the University of Dublin. The church, on those occasions, presented a singular, and, in truth, not a very decorous spectacle – a bear-garden was orderly compared to it. The clothes were torn off men's backs – ladies were carried out fainting – disorder the most unseemly disgraced the entire service, and so continued till Kirwan ascended the pulpit. What a change was there then! Every eye was turned to him – every tongue was hushed – all was solemn silence. His enunciation of the Lord's Prayer was one of the finest things ever heard. Never before or since did mortal man produce such wonderful effect. And yet he had his disadvantages to overcome: his person was not imposing; he was somewhat wall-eyed; and his voice at times was inharmonious."

We see in this striking portrait the writer con amore, and we must give him due credit for his vivid tribute to Irish ability. But there are few miracles in this world, and the fact that Kirwan's printed sermons are wholly inferior to his reputation reduces our wonder within more restricted bounds. If it is true, that much emotion is lost by the loss of the actual speaking; that the full power of the oratory is somewhat diminished by its being calmly read, instead of being ardently heard; still we have but few instances, perhaps none, where true oratory altogether loses its power in publication.

For example, Curran's published speeches give the general reader a very sufficient specimen of the richness of his language, the fertility of imagination, and even the subtlety of his humour. Grattan's speeches, most of them mere fragments, and probably few published with his revision, give the full impression of his boldness of thought, depth of argument, and exquisite pungency of expression. Burke's printed speeches are even said to give a higher sense of his wonderful ability than when they were delivered in the House of Commons. There is an anecdote that, when Pitt had read one of those earlier speeches in the form of a pamphlet, he expressed his astonishment. "Is it possible," he exclaimed, "that this fine oration can be what we heard the other night?"

That Kirwan's preaching was attended by immense congregations is unquestionable; and that his collections were very large is equally true. But there were circumstances remarkably in favour of both. He preached but three or four times in the year, and he never preached but for charities patronised by the highest personages of the land. The Lord-lieutenant and the principal nobility were generally the patrons of those especial charities. There was this additional advantage, that then poor-laws in Ireland were unknown, and public liberality was thus the more urgently required, and the more willingly exercised. The day of his preaching was in general an anniversary; for which the whole preceding year was a preparation; and the collection was thus, in a certain degree, the payment of a rent.