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generations kindle the lamp of patriotism; and it might have been supposed that he whose life was fraught with so many weighty lessons, and whose memory possesses so deep a charm, would have rested at last in his own land and among his own people. Another, and, as it would seem to some, a nobler lot, was reserved for Grattan. A request was made to his friends that his remains might rest in Westminster Abbey, and that request was complied with. He lies near the tombs of Pitt and Fox. The place is an honourable one, but it was the only honour that was bestowed on him. Not a bust, not an epitaph marks the spot where the greatest of Irish orators sleeps; but one stately form seems to bend in triumph over that unnoticed grave. It is the statue of Castlereagh, 'the statesman of the legislative Union.'

DANIEL O'CONNELL.

WHILE the Union was under discussion in the Irish Parliament no class of persons exerted themselves more energetically in opposing it than the Dublin lawyers. Among the meetings they held for this purpose there was one which assumed a peculiar significance from its being composed entirely of Roman Catholics. They assembled to protest against the assertion that the Roman Catholics, as a body, were favourable to the measure; to express their opinion that it would exercise an injurious influence upon the struggle for emancipation; and to declare that were it otherwise they did not desire to purchase that boon at the expense of the independence of the nation. Military law was then reigning, and a body of troops, under Major Sirr, were present at the Exchange to watch the proceedings. It was under these rather trying circumstances that a young lawyer, trembling,' as he afterwards said, 'at the sound of his own voice,' rose to make his maiden speech. He delivered a short address against the Union, which, if it contained no very original or striking views, had at least the merit of exhibiting the common arguments in the clearest and most convincing light; and he shortly after hurried to a newspaper-office to deposit a copy for publication. This young lawyer was Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish agitator. I confess that it is not without some hesitation that I approach this part of my subject, for the difficulty of painting the character of O'Connell with fairness and impartiality

can hardly be exaggerated. 'Never, perhaps,' as has been said, 'was there a man at once so hated and so loved;' and it may be doubted whether any public man of his time was the object of so much extravagant praise and blame. On the whole, however, the latter greatly preponderates. For many years the entire press of England, and a large section of that of Ireland, was ceaselessly employed in denouncing him. All parties in England were combined against him, and in Parliament he had to bear alone the assaults of statesmen and of orators of the most varied opinions. By the more violent Irish Protestants he was regarded with feelings of mingled hatred and terror that almost amounted to a superstition; and the failure of the last great struggle of his life, as well as the disastrous condition of the country at the time of his death, has been very injurious to his reputation.

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Daniel O'Connell was born in the county of Kerry, in year 1775. His family was one which had for a long time occupied a prominent position among the Catholics of the county, which was much noted for its national feeling, and, it must be added, greatly addicted to smuggling. It was in after-years remarked as a curious coincidence that its crest bore the proud motto 'Oculus O'Connell Salus Hiberniæ.' During his boyhood the penal laws were still unrepealed, though much relaxed in their stringency, and the poorer Roman Catholics had sunk into that state of degradation which compulsory ignorance necessarily produces, while the richer drew their opinions, with their education, from France. O'Connell spent a year at St. Omer, where the principal predicted that he would afterwards distinguish himself, and he then remained for a few months at the English College of Douay. The Revolution had at this time shattered the French Church

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and crown, and the minds of all men were violently agitated in its favour or against it. O'Connell's sympathies were strongly opposed to the movement. Like the members of most Irish families that had adhered to their religion during the penal laws, he was deeply attached to it, politically and through feelings of honour, if not from higher motives. Besides this, the associations of his college were necessarily clerical; and some of the revolutionary soldiers, in passing through Douay, had heaped many insults on the students. On his return to Ireland he found that the contagion of the Revolution had already spread, and in the year '98, when he was called to the Bar, rebellion was raging over the country. He became a member of a yeomanry corps which the lawyers had formed, and was at that time, as he afterwards confessed, almost a Tory.' Though he retained to the last his antipathy to rebellion, his opinions in other respects were soon altered by the scandalous scenes of the State trials, by the spectacle of the condition of his co-religionists, and above all by the circumstances attending the Union.

The Roman Catholics had made some inconsiderable efforts to influence public opinion by a society for the purpose of preparing petitions for Parliament, and of this society he early became a member. His extraordinary eloquence, his fertility of resources, his sagacity in reading characters and in discerning opportunities, his boundless and ever daring ambition, soon made him the life of this society, and outweighed all the advantages of rank and old services that were sometimes opposed to his views. There is much reason to believe that almost from the commencement of his career he formed one vast scheme of policy which he pursued through life with little deviation, and, it must be

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added, with little scruple. This scheme was to create and lead a public spirit among the Roman Catholics; to wrest emancipation by this means from the Government; to perpetuate the agitation created for that purpose till the Irish Parliament had been restored; to disendow the Established Church; and thus to open in Ireland a new era, with a separate and independent Parliament and perfect religious equality. It would be difficult to conceive a scheme of policy exhibiting more daring than this. The Roman Catholics had hitherto shown themselves absolutely incompetent to take any decisive part in politics. They were not, it is true, quite as prostrate as they had been when Swift so contemptuously described them as being 'altogether as inconsiderable as the women and children, without leaders, without discipline, without natural courage, little better than hewers of wood and drawers of water, and out of all capacity of doing any mischief if they were ever so well inclined;' but yet the iron of the penal laws had entered into their souls, and they had always thrown themselves helplessly on Protestant leaders. Grattan, it is true, was now in the decline of life, but Plunket, who was still in the zenith of his great powers, was ready to succeed him. If the Roman Catholics could be braced up to independent exertion the noblemen and men of property in their ranks would be their natural leaders, and, at all events, a young lawyer, dependent on his talents and excluded from Parliament and from the higher ranks of his profession, would seem utterly unfitted for such a position. O'Connell, however, perceived that it was possible to bring the whole mass of the people into the struggle, and to give them an almost unexampled momentum and unanimity by applying to politics a great power that lay dormant in Ireland-the power of

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