THESE volumes are extremely interesting; they contain not only the authentic memoirs of a person of extraordinary genius and eminence, but combine together, with a short and candid review of the history of the period in which he lived, a variety of curious particulars with regard to the most noted of his contemporaries. They are written, on the whole, with considerable talent, and the author, in many passages, shows a vigour and an eloquence not unworthy of his race. It is quite impossible to form any thing like a just estimate of Mr Curran, without bearing constantly in The Life of the Right Honourable John Philpot Curran, late Master of the Rolls in Ireland. By his Son, William Henry Curran, Barrister at Law. Two Volumes. London, 1819. mind the extraordinary circumstances in which his country was placed during the greater part of his career. His character was moulded by the times. Born with a vivid imagination and keen feelings, his compassion for his suffering and degraded countrymen could not fail to be powerfully excited, and his indignation roused against the tyranny of their oppressors. His patriotism had of course a strong tinge of enthusiasm, and his eloquence was vehement, figurative, and pathetic, the true language of impassioned feeling. During the earlier part of Mr Curran's life, the political state of Ireland was humiliating and deplorable in the extreme. We give the following rapid sketch in the words of his biographer. This "It was immediately after the revolution of 1688, that era of glory and freedom to England, that Ireland became the victim of this systematic plan of debasement. Her adherence to the deposed monarch and its result are familiar to all. James's party having been crushed, Ireland was treated as a conquered country, that merited nothing but chastisement and scorn. was not the policy of the English king; it was that of the English whigs, the framers of the Bill of Rights, the boasted champions of liberty at home. By these men, and by their successors, (who, of whatever political denomination, agreed with them in their intolerance,) was Ireland, without shame or pity, dismantled of her most precious rights. Laws were made to bind her, without consulting the Irish parliament, which, when it remonstrated, was charged with riot and sedition. Ireland's commerce was openly discouraged: a code more furious than bigotry had hitherto penned was levelled against the mass of the nation, the Roman Catholics. They were successively excluded from the right to sit in parliament, to acquire land, to hold any employment under the crown, to vote in elections of members of parliament, to intermarry with Protestants, to exercise religious worship; in short, by a kind of constructive annihilation, the laws did not presume a papist to exist in the kingdom, nor could they breathe without the connivance of government.' "This state of national humiliation lasted almost a century. Viceroy succeeded viceroy with no other rule of government than to continue the system as he found it. A race of subordinate ministers sprang up within the land, of no public virtue, no expanded thought, utterly unconscious that man can be improved; exhibiting in their heartless measures that practical ferocity 4 6 for which jailors or keepers would be selected, rather than those mild and sanative qualities that might have soothed the distempers of the times. Hence it is,' said Mr Curran, speaking of this period, that the administration of Ireland so often presents to the reader of her history, not the view of a legitimate government, but rather of an encampment in the country of a barbarous enemy, where the object of an invader is not government but conquest; where he is of course obliged to resort to the corrupting of clans, or of single individuals, pointed out to his notice by public abhorrence, and recommended to his confidence only by a treachery so rank and consummate as precludes all possibility of their return to private virtue or to public reliance, and therefore only put into authority over a wretched country, condemned to the torture of all that petulant unfeeling asperity with which a narrow and malig nant mind will bristle in unmerited elevation; condemned to be betrayed, and disgraced, and exhausted by the little traitors that have been suffered to nestle and grow within it; who make 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.'* "Thus it continued for many years; with all the miseries of despotism without its repose: commerce extinguished, the public spirit broken, public honour and private confidence banished, and bigotry and faction alone triumphant." pp: 161 167. At length, about the year 1767, the English Cabinet began to show some symptoms of relenting; it resolved to inquire, and, if necessary, to redress. The principal reform effected at that time was the passing the Octennial bill, and, of course, disbanding what "banditti of perpetual dictators;" for till then the House of Commons had no limit to its duration. Further relief was certainly in the contemplation of Lord North, but he was anticipated by events that were above his control." Mr Curran calls ง 66 The American war bore particularly hard upon Ireland; the linen trade with these colonies, the chief source of her commercial wealth, was suddenly checked, which, together with the prohibition of the exportation of provision, produced unusual distress, * Mr Curran's speech in Howison's case. VOL. V. which was aggravated by the dangers of war; the enemy's fleets were sailing in triumph through the Channel, and daily expected on the unprotected coasts; for the regular forces did not exceed 5000 men in the whole kingdom, the rest having been sent off to recruit the army in America. In this emergency, the town of Belfast having in vain applied to Government for military protection, “had the honour of first raising that warning voice which awoke the nation to confidence and strength. She called upon her citizens to arm in their defence, and a corps of volunteers was immediately established." The coun try at large ardently followed her example. Forty thousand volunteers were on foot with incredible rapidity 6 "You cannot but remember,' said Mr Curran, describing this scene, of which he had been a witness, 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, that Providence seemed to have worked 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 community 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 of 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 stood forward, and assumed the title which I trust the ingratitude of their country will never blot from its history, The volunteers of Ireland.' 999* pp. 173-174. 6 These associations, which afterwards became so formidable, had originally certainly no other object than defence against foreign invasion. "They had armed to protect the crown -no invader appeared; another and a more precious object of protection now remained. Ireland was at their disposal, and they unanimously determined that, to *Speech in Hamilton Rowan's case. H consummate their work, they should continue under arms until they saw her free. "The demands of the volunteers were altogether unlike a mere sudden ebullition of popular discontent. They were the result of deep convictions, the splendid signs of the improved opinions of the age. The example of America was before them, and the cry for redress in Ireland was but the echo of that voice which shouted to liberty' there. The mode of their constitution, too, was peculiarly fortunate and authoritative. They were not a regular military force, mutinously dictating measures to the state; they were not a band of insurgents, illegal in their origin and objects. The circumstances of the times had invested the volunteers with a constitutional character. The government had recognised them, and aided their formation; the House of Commons voted them a formal declaration of thanks for their public services; the people looked up to them with admiration and respect, as a brave, united, and zealous body, combining the intelligence and moderation of loyal citizens, with the influence and resources of a powerful army. "The effects of the firmness and wisdom of their proceedings were soon apparent. The demand of the nation for a free trade, and the memorable declaration in parlia ment, 'that no power on earth, save the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland, had a right to make laws for Ireland,' + were no longer disregarded. The case of America had just shewn how a struggle for principle might terminate. • British supremacy had fallen there like a spent thunderbolt.' The bigotry, and servility, and disunion, which so long supported it in Ireland, had for the moment disappeared. Ireland declared, and England felt, that no other policy remained, but to do justice to a people, who were otherwise determined to do justice to themselves.' § The British ministry, whose infatuated counsels had lost America, and whose tardiness and insincerity with respect to Ireland had been encouraging the spirit of resistance there, were removed, and successors appointed with instructions to make such honourable concessions as were due to the services, the strength, and the just pretensions of the Irish people. The principal restrictions upon the trade of Ireland had been previously taken off. Under the Marquis of Rockingham's administration, the great leading grievance, that included in its principle so many more, was redressed. Eng An expression of Mr Flood's. Mr Grattan's speech, Nov. 13, 1781. land resigned her legislative pretensions, and recognised Ireland to be a free nation.* "This signal event, so justly denominated by Mr Burke the Irish revolution, was the work of the Irish volunteers." pp. 175-179. These efforts were powerfully aided for a short time by the Irish House of Commons, but in many of its members this spirit evaporated with the occasion; a few continued to struggle for the public good with constancy and zeal; the merits of their illustrious leader Mr Grattan require no new attestation. Mr Curran, from his honourable band. entrance into Parliament, joined this Great domestic abuses continued to prevail; the corrupt state of the Legislature; its consequences, an enormous and increasing pension list; and, above all, the exclusion of the Roman Catholics from the most valuable privileges of the constitution. These were the chief abuses against which the party with whom he acted, during the fourteen years that he was a senator, incessantly but vainly struggled. The courage and zeal with which Mr Curran devoted himself to the cause could not be exceeded; and afterwards, when those fearful times arrived, when the stoutest heart was appalled, he fearlessly and steadily pursued his course in the senate and at the bar as the ardent and undaunted defender of the people's rights. No allurement of personal ambition could detach him from his party. The following anecdote should not be suppressed. "About this time, when the general panic was daily thinning the ranks of the opposition, his most intimate and attached friend, the late Lord Kilwarden, (then the attorney-general,) frequently urged him to separate himself from a hopeless cause, and to accept the rewards and honours that were so open to him. Upon one occasion, when Mr Curran was confined by illness to his bed, that gentleman visited him, and renewing the subject, with tears in his eyes implored him to consult his interest and his * 1782.-Several important constitutional acts were passed in Ireland during this short administration. A habeas corpus act, the repeal of the perpetual mutiny bill, the act for the independence of the judges, an act in favour of dissenting Protestants. A slight relaxation of the penal code had taken place in 1778, safety: I tell you, (said Mr Wolfe,) that you have attached yourself to a desperate faction, that will abandon you at last; with whom you have nothing to expect but dan ger and disappointment. With us, how different would be your condition-I ask for no painful stipulations on your part, only say that you would accept of officemy situation will probably soon be vacant for you, and after that, the road would be clear before you.' This proof of private affection caused Mr Curran to weep, but he was unshaken; he replied, that he knew, better than his friend could do, the men with whom he was associated; that they were not a desperate faction; that their cause was that of Ireland, and that, even though it should eventually be branded with the indelible stigma of failure, he should never regret that it was with such men, and such a cause, that he had linked his final destinies.'" pp. 319-321. The state of the country at the period immediately preceding the catastrophe of 1789, is described in the most interesting manner, in the volumes before us, and we should be tempted to quote largely from this part of the work, were not our limits so confined, that we must content ourselves at present with laying before our readers some specimens of Mr Curran's eloquence at the bar. The trial of Mr Finnerty for a libel on the government and person of the Viceroy (Lord Cambden) took place in December 1797. The subject of the libel was the trial and execution of William Orr, which had taken place a little before. Orr, who had been committed on a charge of high treason, was arraigned on an indictment under the Insurrection Act, for administering unlawful oaths, and convicted. "The prisoner was recommended by the jury to mercy, but, after receiving no less than three respites, was finally executed. He died, protesting his innocence; and though such a declaration be very doubtful evidence of the fact, (for who, about to suffer for a political crime, would not prefer to be remembered as a martyr,) still there were, in the case of Orr, some corroborating circumstances, which render it a matter of surprise and regret that they should have been disregarded. His previous life and character had been irreproachable: subsequent to his trial, it appeared that the informer, upon whose evidence he had been convicted, had, according to his own confession, perjured himself on a former occasion, and had been in other particulars a person of infamous conduct and reputation; but, above all, the circumstances under which the verdict was found against Orr, pointed him out, if not as an object constitutionally entitled to mercy, at least as one to whom it would have been an act of salutary mildness to have extended it. The jury had continued from seven o'clock in the evening till six on the following morning considering their verdict; in the interval, spirituous liquor had been introduced into the jury-room, and intimidation used to such as hesitated to concur with the majority. To these latter facts two of the jury made a solemn affidavit in open court, before the judge who tried the cause. "Upon these proceedings, a very severe letter of remonstrance to the viceroy appeared in the Press newspaper, of which Mr Finnerty was the publisher; and the letter being deemed a libel, the publisher was brought to immediate trial. "Mr Curran's address to the jury in this case must be considered, if not the finest, at least the most surprising specimen of his oratorical powers. He had no time for preparation; it was not till a few minutes before the cause commenced that his brief was handed to him. During the progress of the trial he had occasion to speak at unusual length to questions of law that arose upon the evidence; so that his speech to the jury could necessarily be no other than a sudden extemporaneous exertion; and it was, perhaps, a secret and not unjustifiable feeling of pride at having so acquitted himself upon such an emergency that inclined his own mind to prefer this to any of his other efforts. "The following is his description of the scenes which attended and followed the trial of William Orr. "Let me beg of you for a moment to suppose that any one of you had been the writer of this strong and severe animadversion upon the lord lieutenant, and that you had been the witness of that lamentable and never to be forgotten catastrophe; 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 restore the people 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 torn from his industry and confined in a gaol; that through the slow and lingering progress of twelve tedious months, you had 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 clanking of his 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 same jury, when their returning sobriety had brought back their reason, prostrate themselves before the humanity 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 selfcondemnation, and their souls from the indelible stain of innocent blood. Let me suppose that you had seen the respite given, and the contrite and honest recommendation transmitted to that seat where mercy was presumed to dwell: that new and before unheard of crimes are discovered against the informer; that the royal mercy seems to relent; that a new respite is sent to the prisoner; that time is taken to see whether mercy could be extended or not; that after that period of lingering deliberation had passed, a third respite is transmitted; that the unhappy captive himself feels the cheering hope of being restored to a family that he had adored, to a character that he had never stained, and to a country that he had ever loved; that you had seen his wife and his children upon their knees, giving those tears to gratitude which their locked and frozen hearts had refused to anguish and despair, and imploring the blessings of eternal Providence upon his head who had graciously spared the father, and restored him to his children: 'Alas! Nor wife, nor children, more shall he behold, Nor friends, nor sacred home!' "Often did the weary dove return to the window of his little ark; but the olive leaf was to him no sign that the waters had subsided. 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 secure, or to insult, or to disturb him, he dies with a solemn declararation 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 monstrous a subject, in what language would you have conveyed the feelings of horror and indignation? Would you have stooped to the meanness of qualified complaint? Would you have checked your feelings to search for courtly and gaudy language? Would you have been mean enough but I intreat your pardon; I have already told you 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 servile instrument, attuned by hope and fear into discord and falsehood, from whose vulgar string no groan of suffering could vibrate, no voice of integrity or honour could speak, let me honestly tell you I should have scorned to fling 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, you could invent no language upon such a subject as this, that must not lag behind the rapidity of your feelings, and that must not disgrace those feelings if it attempted to describe them."" pp. 366-372. When Mr Curran came to comment upon that part of the publication under trial, which stated that informers were brought forward by the hopes of remuneration, he thus goes on: "Is that a foul assertion? or will your upon your oaths, say to the sister country, that there are no such abominable instruments of destruction as informers used in the state prosecutions in Ireland? Let me honestly ask you what do you feel when in my hearing-when in the face of this audience, your 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 absolutely false? I speak not now of the public proclamations for informers with a promise of secrecy and extravagant reward—I speak not of those unfortunate 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, while you attended this court -the number of horrid miscreants who acknowledged, upon their oaths, that they had come from the seat of governmentfrom the very chambers of the Castle (where they had been worked upon, by the fear of death and the hopes of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows) -that the mild, the wholesome, and merciful councils of this government are holden over those 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. this a picture created by a hag-ridden fancy, or is it fact? Have you not seen him, after his resurrection from that tomb, make his appearance upon your table, the living image of life and 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 seen how the human heart bowed to the awful supremacy of his power, in the undissembled homage of deferential horror? How his glance, like the lightning of Heaven, seemed to Is |