counsel, and made an eloquent and vigorous defence, but Mr. Rowan was convicted and sentenced to imprisonm nt, and after the breaking out of the rebellion in 1798 he was the counsel generally employed by the accused, among whom the most remarkable were the two brothers Sheares, Theodore Wolfe Toone, and Napper Tandy.

Mr. Curran had retired from the House of Commons before the introduction of the measure for the Union, of which he strongly disapproved, and which he ever continued to lament. The insurrection, 1813, brought trouble into his family: Robert Emmet, one of its leaders, had formed an attachment for Miss Sarah Curran, which was returned, and his correspondence with her, with his visits, sometimes secretly, to her father's home, led to a suspicion of Mr. Curran's loyalty, and to the searching of his house. He instantly waited upon the Attorney-General, Standish O'Grady, and the Privy Council, by all of whom his perfect want of complicity was instantly admitted. Mr. Emmet had named him one of his counsel, but he did not act. Mr. Emmet was convicted and executed: his fate and his love adventure form the subject of two of Moore's Irish Melodies. The first of these refers evidently to Emmet's fate :

"When he who adores thee has left but the name

Of his fault and his sorrow behind,

Oh, say, wilt thou weep when they darken the fame
Of a life that for thee was resigned?

Yes, weep! and however my foes may condemn,
My tears shall efface the decree ;

For Heaven can witness, though guilty to them,
I have been but too faithful to thee!

"With thee were the dreams of my earliest love,
Every thought of my reason was thine;

In my last humble prayer to the Spirit above,
Thy name shall be mingled with mine!

Oh! blessed are the lovers and friends who shall live

The days of thy glory to see ;

But the next dearest blessing that glory can give

Is the pride of thus dying for thee!"

THE BOYHOOD OF CURRAN.

Sir Jonah Barrington used to relate, with infinite humour, an adventure between a mastiff and Curran when he was a

boy. He had heard somebody say that any person throwing the skirts of his coat over his head, stooping low, holding out his arms and creeping along backward, might frighten the fiercest dog, and put him to flight. He accordingly made the attempt upon a miller's dog in the neighbourhood, who would never let the boys rob the orchard; but found to his sorrow that he had a dog to deal with who did not care which end of a boy went forward, so as he could get a good bite out of it. "I pursued the instructions," said Curran, "and as I had no eyes, save those in front, fancied the mastiff was in full retreat, but I was confoundedly mistaken, for at the very moment I thought myself victorious the enemy attacked my rear, got a reasonably good mouthful out of it, and was fully prepared to take another before I was rescued. Egad, I thought for a time the beast had devoured my entire centre of gravity, and that I should never go on a steady perpendicular again." "Upon my word, Curran," said I, "the mastiff may have left your centre, but he could not have left much gravity behind him, among the bystanders."

CURRAN'S BOYHOOD, RELATED BY HIMSELF.

"When a boy, I was one morning playing at marbles in the village of Ball-alley, with a light heart and lighter pocket. The gibe and the jest went gladly round, when suddenly among us appeared a stranger of a remarkable and very cheerful aspect; his intrusion was not the least restraint upon our merry little assemblage. He was a benevolent creature, and the days of infancy (after all, the happiest we shall ever see) perhaps rose upon his memory. Heaven bless him! I see his fine form at the distance of half a century just as he stood before me in the little Ball-alley, in the day of my childhood. His name was Boyse; he was the rector of Newmarket. To me he took a particular fancy. I was winning, and full of waggery, thinking everything that was eccentric, and by no means a miser of my eccentricities; every one was welcome to a share of them, and I had plenty to spare after having freighted the company. Some sweetmeats easily bribed me home with him. I learned from Boyse my alphabet and my grammar, and the rudiments of the classics. He taught me all he could, and then he sent me to a school at Middleton. In short, he made me a man. I recollect it was about thirtyfive years afterwards, when I had risen to some eminence at

the bar, and when I had a seat in Parliament, on my return one day from the court, I found an old gentleman seated alone in my drawing-room, his feet familiarly placed on each side of the Italian marble chimney-piece, and his whole air bespeaking the consciousness of one quite at home. He turned round -it was my friend of Ball-alley. I rushed instinctively into his arms, and burst into tears. Words cannot describe the scene which followed. 'You are right, sir, you are right; the chimney-piece is yours—the pictures are yours—the house is yours. You gave me all I have-my friend-my benefactor!' He dined with me; and in the evening I caught the tear glistening in his fine blue eye, when he saw poor little Jack, the creature of his bounty, rising in the House of Commons to reply to a right honourable. Poor Boyse! he is now gone; and no suitor had a longer deposit of practical benevolence in the Court above. This is his wine-let us drink to his memory!"

CURRAN'S FIRST FEE.

Curran was as small and as insignificant in appearance as Richard Shiel, but no one who ever had the opportunity of listening to and looking at either man, when flinging abroad a torrent of eloquence, and marked the glow of animation. which lighted up his countenance, could let either of these defects dwell on his imagination for a moment. Curran's birth occurred at Newmarket, in the county of Cork, on the 24th of July, 1750; his death in London, October 14, 1817.

Curran in his youth was as improvident as some others of his countrymen. He married before he touched his first fee, and was in straitened circumstances when that first fee was brought to his house on Hog Hill (now St. Andrew Street). Mrs. Curran being a barrister's lady, considered that their landlady was taking undue liberty when reminding her of arrears of rent. The good woman felt herself aggrieved by her tenant's airs, and freely aired her own displeasure.

"I walked out one morning," said the eloquent man at a later date, "to avoid the perpetual altercations on the subject (of rent), with my mind in no enviable condition. I fell into 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 despondence; I returned home almost.in desperation. When I

opened my study, where Lavater alone could have found a library, the first object that presented itself was an immense folio of a brief, with twenty golden guineas wrapped up beside it, and the name of old Bob Lyons marked on the back of it. I paid my landlady, bought a good dinner, gave Bob Lyons a share of it, and that dinner was the starting-point of my prosperity."

Curran as vigorously defended the political prisoners of the disastrous last years of the eighteenth century as Sir Toby Butler had defended those obnoxious to the penal laws. Till a comparatively late date it was thought that Leonard MacNally was as sincere as Curran in his exertions to save croppies and their well-wishers from Tom Galvin at Kilmainham. Alas! it has transpired that the dishonest counsellor regularly furnished the government officials with the information which he had obtained in confidence from the accused or their friends, and thus rendered their escape hopeless in most instances.

CURRAN AT A DEBATING SOCIETY.

6

Curran has vividly described his first appearance at a debating society. After calculating upon the tear of generous approbation bubbling in the eyes of the little auditory, never suspecting, alas! that a modern eye may have so little affinity with moisture, that the finest gunpowder may be dried upon it, "I stood up," says Curran; "my mind was stored with about a folio volume of matter; but I wanted a preface, and for want of a preface the volume was never published. I stood up, trembling through every fibre; though remembering that in this I was but imitating Tully, I took courage, and had actually proceeded as far as, Mr. Chairman,' when to my astonishment and terror, I perceived that every eye was riveted upon me. There were only six or seven present, and the little room could not have contained as many more; yet it was to my pain-stricken imagination as if I were the central object in nature, and assembled millions were gazing upon me in breathless expectation. I became dismayed and dumb. My friends cried, "Hear him,' but there was nothing to hear. My lips, indeed, went through the pantomime of articulation; but I was like the unfortunate fiddler at the fair, who, coming to strike up a solo that was to ravish every ear, discovered that an enemy had maliciously soaped his bow, as I once saw him; or, rather, like poor Punch, as I once saw him, grimacing

a soliloquy of which his prompter had most indiscreetly neglected to administer the words." Such was the débût of 66 Stuttering Jack Curran,” or “Orator Mum," as Curran was waggishly called; but not many months elapsed ere the sun of his eloquence burst forth in dazzling splendour.

CURRAN AT THE KING OF CLUBS.

Curran came to the King of Clubs, at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, in the Strand, during a short visit to London; there he met Erskine, but the meeting was not convenient. Curran gave some odd sketches of a Serjeant Kelly, at the Irish bar, whose whimsical peculiarity was an inveterate habit of drawing conclusions directly at variance with his premises. He had acquired the sobriquet of "Counsellor Therefore." Curran said he was a perfect human personification of a non sequitur. For instance, meeting Curran on Sunday, near St. Patrick's, he said to him, "The archbishop gave us an excellent discourse this morning. It was well written, and well delivered; therefore, I shall make a point of being at the Four Courts to-morrow at ten." At another time, observing to a person whom he met in the street, "What a delightful morning this is for walking!" he finished his remark on the weather by saying, "Therefore I will go home as soon as I can, and stir out no more the whole day." His speeches in court were interminable, and his therefore kept him going on, though every one thought he had done. "This is so clear

a point, gentlemen," he would tell the jury, "that I am convinced you felt it to be so the very moment I stated it. I should pay your understandings but a poor compliment to dwell on it for a minute; therefore, I will now proceed to explain it to you as minutely as possible."

CURRAN'S LAW LIBRARY.

Soon after Mr. Curran had been called to the bar, on some statement of Judge Robinson, the young counsel observed that, "he had never met the law as laid down by his lordship, in any book in his library." "That may be, sir," said the judge, “but I suspect that your library is very small." Mr. Curran replied, "I find it more instructive, my lord, to study good works, than to compose bad ones. My books may be

*

* Judge Robinson was the author of many stupid, slavish, and scurrilous political pamphlets; and, by his demerits, raised to the eminence which he thus disgraced.-Lord Brougham.