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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #51889 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51889)
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Emmet, by Louise Imogen Guiney
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Robert Emmet
-       A Survey of His Rebellion and of His Romance
-
-Author: Louise Imogen Guiney
-
-Release Date: April 29, 2016 [EBook #51889]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT EMMET ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Emmy, MWS and the Online Distributed
-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-produced from images generously made available by The
-Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: _Robert Emmet._
-
-AET XXV.]
-
-
-
-
-ROBERT EMMET
-
-    A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION
-    AND OF HIS ROMANCE
-
-    BY
-
-    LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
-
-    WITH A PORTRAIT
-
-    OF
-
-    ROBERT EMMET
-
-    LONDON
-    DAVID NUTT, 57-59 LONG ACRE
-    1904
-
-
-
-
-    Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
-    At the Ballantyne Press
-
-
-
-
-                     _To_
-
-                 LIONEL JOHNSON
-
-    _in the Land of the Living to remind him of
-       old thoughts and of things once dear_
-
-
-
-
-PREFATORY NOTE
-
-
-THE following unscientific monograph, a sort of little historical
-descant, is founded upon all the accurate known literature of the
-subject, and also largely on the Hardwicke MSS. These, in so far as
-they relate to Emmet, the writer was first to consult and have copied,
-last winter, before they were catalogued. But while these sheets were
-in press, several interesting fragments from the MSS. appeared in
-the _Cornhill Magazine_ for September, 1903, thus forestalling their
-present use. This discovery will condone the writer’s innocent claim,
-made on page 60, of printing the two letters there as unpublished
-matter.
-
-The portrait is after Brocas’s hurried court-room sketch, made the day
-before the execution. The original print is in the Joly Collection of
-the National Library of Ireland. The head is too sharp and narrow, and
-yet it bears a marked resemblance, far exceeding that of either of the
-other portraits, to some of Robert Emmet’s collateral descendants. On
-such good _à posteriori_ evidence it was chosen.
-
-    Oxford, _Dec. 9, 1903_.
-
-
-
-
-ROBERT EMMET
-
-A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION AND OF HIS ROMANCE
-
-
-THE four who lived to grow up of the seventeen children born to
-Robert Emmet, M.D., of Cork, later of Dublin, and Elizabeth Mason,
-his wife, were all, in their way, persons of genius. The Emmets
-were of Anglo-Norman stock, Protestants, settled for centuries in
-Ireland. The Masons, of like English origin, had merged it in repeated
-alliances with women of Kerry, where the Dane, the Norman, and later
-invaders from nearer quarters had never settled down to perturb the
-ancient Celtic social stream. Dr. Emmet was a man of clear brain
-and incorruptible honour. The mother of his children, to judge by
-her letters, many of which have been privately printed, must have
-been an exquisite being, high-minded, religious, loving, humorous,
-wise. Her eldest surviving son, Christopher Temple Emmet, was named
-for his two paternal grandparents, Christopher Emmet of Tipperary
-and Rebecca Temple, great-great-granddaughter of the first Baronet
-Temple of Stowe, in Buckinghamshire. The mention of that prolific,
-wide-branching, and extraordinary family of Temple as forebears of the
-younger Emmets is like a sharply accented note in a musical measure.
-It has never been played for what it is worth; no annalist has tracked
-certain Emmet qualities to this perfectly obvious ancestral source.
-The Temples had not only, in this case, the bygone responsibility to
-bear, for in a marked manner they kept on influencing their Emmet
-contemporaries, as in one continuous mood thought engenders thought.
-Says Mr. James Hannay: “The distinctive ηθος of the Temples has been
-a union of more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men of
-letters, with more than usual of the kind of talent which makes men
-of affairs.” The Emmets, too, shared the “distinctive ηθος” in the
-highest degree. Added to the restless two-winged intelligence, they
-had the heightened soberness, the moral elevation, which formed no
-separate inheritance. The Temples were, and are, a race of subtle but
-somewhat austere imagination, strongly inclined to republicanism, and
-to that individualism which is the norm of it. The Temple influence in
-eighteenth-century Ireland was, obliquely, the American influence: a
-new and heady draught at that time, a “draught of intellectual day.” If
-we seek for those unseen agencies which are so much more operative than
-mere descent, we cover a good deal of ground in remembering that Robert
-Emmet the patriot came of the same blood as Sidney’s friend, Cromwell’s
-chaplain, and Dorothy Osborne’s leal and philosophic husband. And he
-shared not only the Temple idiosyncrasy, but, unlike his remarkable
-brothers, the thin, dark, aquiline Temple face.
-
-Rebecca Temple, only daughter of Thomas, a baronet’s son, married
-Christopher Emmet in 1727, brought the dynastic names, Robert and
-Thomas, into the Emmet family, and lived in the house of her son, the
-Dublin physician, until her death in 1774, when her grandchildren,
-Temple and Thomas Addis, were aged thirteen and ten, Robert being
-yet unborn. Her protracted life and genial character would have
-strengthened the relations, always close, with the Temple kin. Her
-brother Robert had gone in his youth from Ireland to Boston, where
-his father was long resident; and there he married a Temple cousin.
-This Captain Robert Temple died on April 13, 1754, “at his seat, Ten
-Hills, at Boston, in New England.” His three sons, the eldest of whom,
-succeeding his great-grandfather, became afterwards Sir John Temple,
-eighth Baronet of Stowe, all settled in New England and married
-daughters of the Bowdoin, Shirley, and Whipple families—good wives
-and clever women. John Temple had been “a thorough Whig all through
-the Revolution,” and had suffered magnanimously for it. He had to
-forfeit office, vogue, and money; and little anticipating his then
-most improbable chances of a rise in the world, he forfeited all these
-with dogged cheerfulness, in the hour when he could least afford to do
-so. The latter-day Winthrops of the Republic are directly descended
-from him, and the late Marquis of Dufferin and Ava from his brother.
-A certain victorious free spirit, an intellectual fire, whimsical and
-masterful, has touched the whole race of untamable Temples, and the
-Emmets, the very flower of that race. Love of liberty was, in both
-Robert Emmet and in Thomas Addis Emmet, no isolated phenomenon, but
-their strengthened and applied inheritance. Captain Robert Temple’s
-second son, Robert, came back with his wife, Harriet Shirley, after
-the Declaration of Independence, to Allentown, Co. Dublin. His widow
-eventually received indemnification for the loss of their transatlantic
-estates. It is thus proved that Robert Temple was a loyalist to some
-appreciable degree. Earlier and later, however, he did considerable
-thinking, cherished liberal principles, and had much to say of the
-rights of man and other large theses to his namesake first cousin,
-Robert Emmet, M.D., with whom he lived for eighteen months after his
-return. This community of ideas was further cemented by the marriage
-of Anne Western Temple, Robert Temple’s daughter, to Dr. Emmet’s
-eldest son, Temple Emmet. Dr. Emmet was faithful to the unpopular
-convictions which he found himself sharing in increased degree with his
-cousin. Up to 1783 he was always voluntarily abandoning one position
-of eminence after another, as he came to dissent from English rule in
-Ireland. He held among other offices that of State Physician; and from
-a bland condemnatory notice of his youngest son in _The Gentleman’s
-Magazine_ for October 1803, we learn that he was also physician to
-the Lord-Lieutenant’s household. It is clear, then, that he also began
-his career as a trusted Conservative. But as his opinions changed,
-he gave up, Temple-like and Emmet-like, every position and emolument
-inconsistent with them; when the ’98 broke out he had even ceased to
-practise his profession. He and his wife and their children felt alike
-in these matters so adversely and intimately affecting their chances
-of worldly success. The boys and the girl were brought up to think
-first of Ireland and her needs. An amicable satirist and distinguished
-acquaintance was wont facetiously to report Dr. Emmet’s administration
-of what the visitor named “the morning draught” to his little ones:
-“Well, Temple, what are you ready to do for your country? Would you
-kill your sister? Would you kill me?” For after this perilous early
-Roman pattern the catechism ran. Even if only a beloved joke, it would
-have been enough to seal the young Emmets for fanaticism, had not their
-good angels intervened. As it turned out, they were all of a singularly
-judicial cast. The only daughter, Mary Anne, had what used to be
-called, by way of adequate eulogy, a “masculine understanding,” and
-wrote pertinently and well. Her husband was the celebrated barrister
-and devoted Irishman, Robert Holmes. He was the true friend and adviser
-of the whole Emmet family, and survived his wife, who died during his
-imprisonment in 1804, for five-and-fifty years. Of Dr. Emmet’s three
-sons, Temple, Thomas Addis, and Robert, the former had an almost
-incomparably high repute for “every virtue, every grace,” to quote
-Landor’s mourning line for another. It is no disparagement to him to
-say that this was partly owing to the pathos of so short a career,
-and to the fact that he died ten years before the great Insurrection,
-twelve before the Union; seeming to belong to a prior order of things,
-it was the easier to praise the Emmet who did not live long enough to
-get into trouble, at the expense of the Emmets who did.
-
-Temple Emmet, with his beautiful thought-burdened head, a little like
-the young Burke’s, passed by like a wonderful apparition in his day.
-His success at Trinity College was complete; it is said the examiners
-found their usual maximum of commendation, _Valde bene_, unequal to
-the occasion, and had a special _O quam bene!_ given to him with his
-degree. This has a sort of historic parallel in the incident at Wadham
-College, Oxford, just a century before, when Clarendon, Lord Chancellor
-of the University, set a kiss for eulogy upon the boyish cheek of John
-Wilmot, Master of Arts. Again serving as his own precedent, Temple
-Emmet became King’s Counsel at twenty-five. Two years later he was
-in his grave, whither his young wife quickly followed him. All his
-contemporaries qualified to appraise his worth, deplored him beyond
-common measure. Said the great Grattan, long after: “Temple Emmet,
-before he came to the Bar, knew more law than any of the judges on
-the Bench; and if he had been placed on one side and the whole Bench
-opposed to him, he could have been examined against them, and would
-have surpassed them all; he would have answered better both in law and
-divinity than any judge or bishop in the land.” His premature death
-called his next brother from the University of Glasgow, where he had
-just graduated in medicine, to the profession of the law.
-
-The Emmet name was not destined to rise like a star where it had
-fallen, for bitter times were drawing nigh, and his own generosity and
-integrity were to bring Thomas Addis Emmet into fatal difficulties.
-With a great number of other zealous spirits, he flung himself with
-all his force of protest against the legalised iniquities destroying
-Ireland. Examined before the secret committee of the House of Lords,
-August 10, 1798, the young man, then as always quietly intrepid, let
-fall brave prophetic words. Asked if he had been an United Irishman,
-he righted the tense in answering: “My Lords, I am one”; then he
-continued: “Give me leave to tell you, my Lords, that if the Government
-of this country be not regulated so that the control may be wholly
-Irish, and that the commercial arrangements between the two countries
-be not put upon a footing of perfect equality, the connection [with
-England] cannot last.” Lord Glentworth said: “Then your intention was
-to destroy the Church?” Mr. Emmet replied: “No, my Lord, my intention
-never was to destroy the Church. My wish decidedly was to overturn the
-Establishment.” Here Lord Dillon interrupted: “I understand you. And
-have it as it is in France?” “As it is in America, my Lords.” When the
-chance for self-expatriation came, when “to retract was impossible, to
-proceed was death,” Thomas Addis Emmet followed the ancestral trail,
-and founded a new family in his approved America. The only one of
-his circle spared to continue the Emmet name, he came to flower sadly
-enough, because his hopes were broken, on what was not to him alien
-soil. Everyone knows the rest: how, admitted to the New York Bar by
-suspension of rules, without probation, he died in all men’s honour, in
-1827, Attorney-General of the State.
-
-Robert Emmet was even surer of an illustrious career. Alas! There is
-no documentary proof forthcoming for it as yet, but it is painfully
-probable that his little afterglow of a rebellion was long fostered,
-for reasons of their own, by great statesmen, and that their secret
-knowledge of it arose from Irish bad faith; that, in short, he was let
-dream his dream until it suited others to close the toils about him.
-The two or three highest in authority in Dublin, Lord Hardwicke chief
-among them, were kept ignorant as himself. Emmet was really victim and
-martyr. But to die prodigally at twenty-five, and to be enshrined with
-unwithered and unique passion in Irish hearts; to go down prematurely
-in dust and blood, and yet to be understood, felt, seen, for ever, in
-the sphere where “only the great things last,” is perhaps as enviable
-a privilege as young men often attain. His is one of several historic
-instances in which those who have wrought little else seem to have
-wrought an exquisite and quite enduring image of themselves in human
-tradition. With none of the celebrities of his own nation can he in
-point of actual service, compare; but every one of them, whether known
-to ancient folk-lore or to the printed annals of yesterday, is less
-of a living legend with Thierry’s “long-memoried people,” than “the
-youngest and last of the United Irishmen,” “the child of the heart of
-Ireland.” A knot of peasants gathered around a peat fire in the long
-evenings, pipe in hand, are the busy hereditary factors of apocryphal
-tales beginning “Once Robert Emmet (God love him),” &c.; and a certain
-coloured print, very green as to raiment, very melodramatic as to
-gesture, hangs to-day in the best room of their every cabin, and stands
-to them for all that was of old, and is not, and still should be.
-
-He was born March 4, 1778, in his father’s house in St. Stephen Green
-West, Dublin, now numbered 124-125. As a boy he was active out of
-doors, yet full of insatiable interest in books, and developed early
-his charming talent for drawing and modelling. He was always rather
-grave than gay; but the best proof, if any were needed, that he had
-nothing of the prig in him, is that he was a favourite at school;
-the potential Great Man, in fact, to whom the others looked up. His
-one serious early illness was small-pox, which left his complexion
-slightly roughened. He entered Trinity College, in his native city,
-at fifteen. Either at this time, or just before, occurred an incident
-so characteristic as to be worth recording, for it illustrates both
-his power of mental concentration, and his still courage in facing
-the untoward haps of life alone. Like Shelley, he had a youthful
-fascination for chemistry. He had been dabbling with corrosive
-sublimate, not long before bedtime. Instead of going upstairs, he sat
-down, later, to figure out an allotted algebraic problem which, by way
-of whetting adventurous spirits, the author of the book in question
-acknowledged to be extremely difficult. Poring earnestly over the
-page, the boy fell to biting his nails. He instantly tasted poison,
-and pain and fear rushed on him. Without rousing a single person from
-sleep, he ran to the library, got down his father’s encyclopædia,
-turned to the article he needed, and learned that his antidote was
-chalk and water; then he went in the dark to the coach-house where
-he had seen chalk used, got it, mixed and drank it, and returned to
-his interrupted task. His tutor could not fail to notice the agonised
-little face at breakfast. Robert confessed the mischance, and that he
-had lain perforce awake all night; but he added, modestly, that he had
-mastered the problem. One of Plutarch’s heroes, at that age, could
-hardly have done better. The antique world, with its heroic simpleness,
-was indeed Robert Emmet’s own ground. At Trinity he earned, without
-effort, a golden reputation, partly due to his scientific scholarship,
-partly to his goodness, partly, again, to his possession of a faculty
-of animated fluent speech, a faculty dear to the Irish, as to every
-primitive people. He had a presence noticeably sweet and winning, with
-“that gentleness so often found in determined spirits.” His classmate,
-Moore, the poet, bore witness long after to his “pure moral worth
-combined with intellectual power.... Emmet was wholly free from the
-follies and frailties of youth, though how capable he was of the most
-devoted passion events afterwards proved.” Mr. Charles Phillips wrote
-in 1818: “[Emmet at Trinity] was gifted with abilities and virtues
-which rendered him an object of universal esteem and admiration. Every
-one loved, every one respected him; his fate made an impression on the
-University which has not yet been obliterated. His mind was naturally
-melancholy and romantic: he had fed it from the pure fountain of
-classic literature, and might be said to have lived not so much in the
-scene around him as in the society of the illustrious and sainted dead.
-The poets of antiquity were his companions, its patriots his models,
-and its republics his admiration. He had but just entered upon the
-world, full of the ardour which such studies might be supposed to have
-excited, and unhappily at a period in the history of his country when
-such noble feelings were not only detrimental but dangerous.”
-
-When Emmet was in his twentieth year the so-called Rebellion, in which
-Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were leaders, broke out. In the
-agitation which led up to it and sustained it, Thomas Addis Emmet was
-deeply implicated, nor did his younger brother go unsinged by the
-travelling flame. Sitting once by the pianoforte in Thomas Moore’s
-rooms, listening to _Let Erin Remember_, he stood up suddenly, with a
-brief pregnant speech, such as was habitual with him: “O that I were
-at the head of twenty thousand men, marching to that air!” As it was,
-he made one of the nineteen of her best spirits whom his University
-then thought fit to dismiss without benisons. One of these was no fiery
-undergraduate, but a Fellow and a famous scholar, Dr. Whitley Stokes.
-Their chief offence was that they had refused to tell what they knew
-of others who shared their outspoken opinions. There is no need here
-to dwell upon the memorable rising of 1798, or upon the rooted general
-opposition to that Union with Great Britain which wholesale bribery was
-so soon to consummate. One need but bear in mind that the Anglo-Irish
-(chiefly the Presbyterians and members of the dominant Church, the
-landed classes, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by their
-championship of disenfranchised Catholics and the countless poor)
-came angrily to the fore as the defenders of nationalism, at a time
-when exile, the dungeon, and the axe, active for two generations, had
-deprived Ireland of the last of her native Jacobite gentry. Saurin, the
-great jurist, had written: “Whether it would be prudent in the people
-to avail themselves of that right would be another question; but if a
-Legislative Union were forced on the country against the will of its
-inhabitants, it would be a nullity: ... [To take issue with it] would
-be a struggle against usurpation, not resistance against law.” Emmet
-had only to cross the street from his College to hear the debates in
-either House of Parliament, to hear the like doctrine from Grattan in
-his glory; and with “malignants” of the loftiest character, like Lord
-Cloncurry, then the Rt. Hon. Valentine Lawless, he and his associated
-every day. It was inevitable, with such counsels of perfection brought
-to bear upon his daring and his entire disinterestedness, that Robert
-Emmet should attempt a popular emancipation, and succeed but in ruining
-himself. It was a poignant case of chronological and topographical
-misplacement. In his expulsion, or rather, withdrawal from College
-(for he had anticipated the action of the authorities), his father, of
-course, approved and stood by him, although Robert’s entry upon any
-professional career was fatally compromised. His “highly distinguished
-family, striking talents, and interesting manners,” could not mend
-that. He may even have taken at once the plain godly oath of the
-United Irishmen, and become an active agent for the cause. Within the
-twelvemonth he had bestirred himself so effectually that a warrant
-was actually issued for his arrest. For some reason or other it was
-not put in force: even thus early there began to be woven about him
-the web of curious cross-purposes in which, in the end, he was to be
-caught and strangled. It became advisable to go to France, to see the
-First Consul and Talleyrand on an all-important matter. It would be
-well to reach a quiet place beyond espionage, where inhibited rites
-might go on. The young conspirator had military histories in process
-of annotation, plans of campaign in mountainous districts to perfect,
-seditious conferences to hold with colleagues and subordinates, and,
-incidentally, even poems to commit for his sad country’s sake. And
-there was another excellent reason why he found it convenient to go
-away.
-
-One of Robert Emmet’s college mates was Richard, youngest son of the
-John Philpot Curran, “ugly, copious, full of wit and ardour and fire,”
-the Curran of “fifty faces and twice as many voices,” of Byron’s
-lasting admiration. Richard had a sister Sarah, aged not quite eighteen
-when Robert Emmet, three years her senior, fell in love with her.
-Sentimental invention has placed their first meeting at a ball in a
-Wicklow country-house; but it would rather seem as if, in the compact
-society of a gay little city like Dublin before the Union, they must
-have known each other fairly well from childhood, especially as the
-two families were then acquainted. That fatal mutual affection was to
-endure long vicissitudes and to prove invincible.
-
-We must infer from a passage in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his father
-that Emmet’s reserve, for once, but imperfectly concealed evidences
-of some strong passion, political or extra-political, or both, from
-the oracular host of the Priory at Rathfarnham. Parenthetically, and
-without emphasis, Mr. Curran saw fit to warn his household against too
-implicit a cherishing of their engaging visitor. That Sarah’s interest
-in him was particular, that it was already awakened and deepening,
-seems never to have been surmised. According to such evidence as we
-have, it looks as though he had declared to her the state of his
-feelings before he went to Paris. It was not an hour, however, when
-Sarah dared to be happy. Her family had but just gathered together
-after a most harrowing break-up; she herself had been away for several
-years under the roof of a beloved clergyman in Lismore, and her
-homecoming was recent. Her mother, how driven to that point of revolt
-we know not, had eloped in 1794 with a too sympathetic neighbouring
-vicar. Sarah was fourteen then, and of a peculiarly sensitive
-temperament; and she had worshipped her mother. Her sensitiveness was
-not allayed by her father’s increased mental aloofness from his family,
-after his misfortune. Incomparably genial, when he chose, to strangers,
-he visited his resentments in private upon his children, her children,
-especially upon his son Henry, who stood in lifelong dread of him.
-The one little daughter of his inordinate love, Gertrude, had died by
-accident at twelve years old.
-
-Sarah’s sad young face was typically Irish, her noble and touching
-beauty stamped in every feature with irony, melancholy, and fatalism.
-To her lover, with his head full of all poetic ideas, she must have
-looked like the very spirit of Innisfail. His intensely sanguine and
-resolute nature may have kept him from reading in such a face their
-own common rune of sorrow. It is clear that his forgetting her, while
-he was absorbed in the grave business abroad, was out of the question.
-No one knows, he tells Mme. la Marquise de Fontenay, in one of his
-few recovered letters, what his return to Ireland and to “the sorrows
-before him” is costing. Memories of the past (of that long-distanced
-past which is proper to blasted youth) must assail him; and it will be
-hard to affect that he has not known “tender ties, perhaps,” which he
-is forbidden to resume. The lad was writing in French, and does it in
-character. But then, as ever, he was radically sincere. His thoughts
-seem to have turned towards Dublin, from motives of filial duty. His
-father and mother had agreed to the elder brother’s first suggestion
-from Paris that Robert should be induced to go to America with him; and
-Robert felt that so generous a permission laid its own obligation on
-him not to accept the parting. Everything seemed to conspire to restore
-him to Ireland. And with his yet-to-be-liberated Ireland, like
-
-    “Flame on flame and wing on wing,”
-
-shone the remote sweetness of Sarah Curran. He was told that
-revolutionary hopes were ripening fast; he was thus lured back in
-October, 1802. His absence had lasted nearly three years.
-
-The separation had probably taught Sarah something more of her own
-heart. Immediately Emmet’s visits to the Priory were resumed, as if
-in the general stream of homage which brought so many enthusiastic
-young men into Mr. Curran’s presence, at evening, to listen and gather
-wisdom. Dr. Emmet died in April, much lamented, and by his will
-Robert came into possession of considerable ready money. He spent
-it instantly, effectively, and entirely on preparations for armed
-resistance. No one suspected it; those in his confidence were yet
-faithful. Still less did others suspect the now plighted attachment,
-the innocent love hungry for joy, and yet hurried on to dark ends
-through devious and hidden ways. Mr. Curran’s strenuous opposition, on
-all grounds, was necessarily taken for granted, until some prodigious
-success should befall Emmet, and as if by a spell free the daughter who
-so feared her father. Sarah knew detail by detail of the conspiracy as
-it arose, and was fain with all her soul to encourage its progress. For
-the two sensitive creatures under so complicated a strain there passed
-an anxious and exciting year. The most disagreeable surprise of Mr.
-Curran’s life was yet to come before it ended.
-
-Robert Emmet took lodgings under an assumed name in Butterfield
-Lane, in the suburb of Rathfarnham. His agents came to him by night
-and reported their progress. The record of all he had meant to do,
-drawn up with manly composure at the brink of the grave, may be read
-elsewhere. As has been noted, his plan for the capture of Dublin and
-the summoning of the patriotic Members of Parliament was clearly
-founded on an inspiring precedent, that of the Revolution of 1640
-in Portugal, when but two-score clever and resolute men served to
-deliver the whole country from the yoke of Spain. But when the hour of
-Ireland’s destiny struck, every clock-wheel went wrong. If the failure
-were not so piteous, because of one’s interest in the doomed wizard
-and his suddenly disenchanted wand, it would be grotesque. Emmet had
-studied with enormous industry, and arranged with masterly precision,
-directing, among pikes and powder in his dingy depôts, each needful
-move and counter-move for a concerted rising; he thought it strange
-that in every conceivable way, major and minor, the whole scheme
-simultaneously miscarried.
-
-If one could believe him as free as he believed himself, one might
-regret that he maintained too perfect a secrecy, and counted too much
-upon the elasticity of Irish impulse. He had been careful to avoid
-what he thought the error of the United Irishmen in establishing
-too many posts for revolutionary action, and confiding knowledge of
-preliminaries to innumerable persons all over the country, some of
-whom would be almost certain to play him false. He worked in the
-dark, with but a dozen friends at his elbow, spending his money
-freely but heedfully on manufacturing and storing weapons of war in
-Dublin. He looked towards a moment when a disaffected legion would
-arise at a summons, like the men from the heath in _The Lady of the
-Lake:_ a legion which he could arm and command and weld, in one magic
-moment, for Ireland’s regeneration. He leaned overmuch, not on human
-goodness, but on human intelligence in making opportunity: and it
-failed him. He was like the purely literary playwright labouring with
-the average theatre audience; he was never in the least, for all his
-wit, cunning enough to deal scientifically with a corporation on whom
-hints, half-tones, adumbrations, are thrown away; the law of whose
-being is still to crave a presentation of the “undisputed thing in
-such a solemn way.” As drama through its processes, act after act,
-does well to assume that we are all blockheads, and then, as the
-case requires, to modify, so any flaming revolutionary genius would
-do well to trust nothing whatever to a moral inspiration only too
-likely to be non-existent. It is a terribly costly thing to be, as
-we say, equal to an emergency, before the emergency is quite ready
-to be equalled. And that was Emmet’s plight. A French fleet had been
-promised to begin military operations towards the end of August, but
-an unforeseen explosion in one of Emmet’s Dublin magazines led him
-to declare his toy war against the English Crown prematurely. The
-local volunteer troops were to be reinforced by others, well armed,
-from the outlying counties, at the firing of a rocket agreed upon;
-the Castle was to be seized as the chief move, and a Provisional
-Government, according to printed programme, set up. The time for
-assembling was hurriedly fixed for July 23, 1803, early in the evening.
-The gentlemen leaders and the trusty battalions failed to appear,
-kept away by mysterious quasi-authentic advices; appeared instead, as
-time wore on, many unknown, unprepossessing insurgents, the drunken
-refuse of the city taverns. The cramp-irons, the scaling-ladders, the
-blunderbusses, the fuses for the grenades, were not ready; signals
-had been delayed or suppressed; the prepared slow-matches were mixed
-in with others; treachery was at work and running like fire in oil
-under the eyes of one who could believe no ill of human kind. Beyond
-Dublin, the Wicklow men under Dwyer, an epic peasant figure, received
-no message; the Wexford men waited in vain for orders all night; the
-Kildare men, whom Emmet meant to head in person, actually reached the
-city, and left it again. They had met and talked with him, and were
-not satisfied with the number and quality of the weapons, chiefly
-primitive inventions of his own; and because Dublin confederates were
-not produced for inspection (such was Emmet’s caution where others were
-concerned), the canny farmers returned homewards, spreading the ill
-word along the roads that Dublin had refused to act. Each imaginable
-prospect grew darker than its alternative. But the curtain had to
-rise now, let results be what they might. About nine o’clock, Emmet
-being in such a state of speechless agitation as may be conceived, one
-Quigley rushed in with the false report that the Government soldiery
-were upon them. There was nothing to do but sally forth in the hope
-of augmented numbers, once the move was made. The poor “General,” in
-his green-and-white-and-gold uniform, at the head of some eighty
-insubordinates, took in the bitter situation at a glance: he foresaw
-how his holy insurrection would dwindle to a three-hours’ riot, how his
-dream, with all its costly architecture, was ending like snow in the
-gutter. Hardly had he set out on foot, with drawn sword, through the
-town, accompanied by the faithful Stafford and two or three associates,
-followed confusedly by the uncontrollable crowd, when an uproar rose
-from the rear; there was a sudden commotion which ended in wounds and
-death to a citizen and an officer; then the spirit of rowdyism, private
-pillage, and indiscriminate slaughter took the lead. While it ran high,
-Arthur Wolfe, Lord Kilwarden, Lord Chief-Justice, the one unfailingly
-humane and deservedly beloved judge in all Ireland, was killed. He
-was driving in from the country with his daughter and his nephew, the
-Rev. Richard Wolfe; finding the carriage stopped in Thomas Street, he
-put his grey head out at the window in the pleasant evening light,
-announcing the honoured name which, as he thought he knew, would be
-his passport through the maddest mob ever gathered. A muddle-brained
-creature, quite mistaken as to facts, and acting in revenge for a
-wrong never inflicted, unmercifully piked him: a fate paralleled only
-by the unpremeditated assassination in our own time of that other
-kindest heart, Lord Frederick Cavendish. It is significant that some in
-the ranks afterwards made separately in court the unasked declaration
-that had they been near enough, Lord Kilwarden’s life should have
-been saved at the expense of their own. Such, indeed, was the general
-feeling. It has been carelessly stated that Emmet was not far from the
-scene of the outrage, and arrived, in a fury, just too late to prevent
-the second horror, the stabbing to death of Mr. Wolfe; and that it
-was he who took the unfortunate Miss Wolfe, to whom no violence was
-offered, from the carriage. But records now show conclusively that (as
-he once said) he had withdrawn from that part of Dublin before the
-murders came to pass. He had addressed his followers in Francis Street,
-setting his face against useless bloodshed, and made for the mountains
-hard by, commanding those who retained any sense of discipline to go
-along with him. A quick retreat was the only sagacious course to follow
-in this gross witless turmoil, so contrary to his purpose: for his
-printed manifesto had expressly declared life and property were to
-be held sacred. His secret, up to this point, was practically safe,
-and his losses reparable. The “rebels” abroad that night were but
-diabolical changelings; he would break away with the few he could rely
-upon, nurse hope to life with the courage that never failed, and take
-his chances to fight again. He reached safety, unchallenged; Dwyer even
-then implored for leave to call out on the morrow his disappointed
-veterans for a new assay; but Emmet was firm. No lust of revenge on
-fate, no recoil from being thought, for one hot moment, a coward, could
-shake him from his shrewd and rational acceptance of present defeat.
-He had no personal ambition, no vicarious tax to pay it. Ireland could
-wait the truer hour. He seems never once to have bewailed aloud the
-miserable end of his own long minute study of military strategy, the
-foul check to aspirations founded in honour, and breathed upon by the
-dead of Salamis and Thermopylæ.
-
-It is an almost incredible fact that the authorities, meanwhile,
-whether aware or unaware of the projected outbreak, were virtually off
-their guard, and the garrison was so little in condition to repel an
-onset that not a ball in the arsenal would fit the artillery! Public
-attention in Great Britain was fixed on the difficulties with France,
-and this preoccupation everywhere affected social life. Dublin had been
-almost deserted on July 23; the Castle gates stood wide open, without
-sentries. Two entire hours passed before the detachments of horse and
-foot arrived to clear the streets. “Government escaped by a sort of
-miracle,” as _The Nation_ remarked half a century after, “by a series
-of accidents and mistakes no human sagacity could have foreseen, and no
-skill repair.” Though there was treachery behind and before as we now
-see, Emmet, mournfully closing his summary of events, took no account
-of it. “Had I another week [of privacy], had I one thousand pounds, had
-I one thousand men, I would have feared nothing. There was redundancy
-enough in any one part to have made up in completeness for deficiency
-in the rest. But there was failure in all: plan, preparation, and men.”
-Three days after the abortive rising, the disturbance was completely
-over and the country everywhere quiet. The whole number of the slain
-was under fifty.
-
-None among those who have written of Robert Emmet have noted for what
-reason the news of the death of Lord Kilwarden must have been to him
-a last desperate blow. Quite apart from his natural horror of the
-blundering crime, he had the most intimate cause to lament it. Lord
-Kilwarden was the person in all the world whom John Philpot Curran most
-revered: “my guardian angel,” he was wont to call him, summing up in
-the words all his tutelary service of long years to a junior colleague.
-It would have gone hard with Mr. Curran, so high was partisan passion
-at the time, if, in his defence of the State prisoners during the
-terrible series of prosecutions in the ’98, he had not been protected,
-day after day, by the strong influence of Kilwarden. Emmet, if he
-could have leaned for once on a merely selfish motive, might have
-looked forward, as to the blackness of hell, to that hour when Curran
-should learn that his dearest friend’s indirect murderer was none other
-than his daughter’s betrothed lover. Apprehensions of danger to his
-sweetheart must have haunted Robert Emmet through the sleepless nights
-among the outlawed folk on the wild fragrant Wicklow hillsides. Below,
-in a little port, was a fishing-smack under full sail, which meant
-liberty and security, would he but abandon all and come away. But the
-insistent beat of his own heart was to see his beautiful Sarah again;
-to learn how she looked upon him, or whether she would fly with him now
-that his first great endeavour was over, and only the rag of a pure
-motive was left to clothe his soiled dream and his abject undoing.
-It was a mad deed; but Robert Emmet, in relics of his tarnished
-regimentals, stole back to Dublin. He was so young that the adventure
-took on multiple attractions.
-
-He hid himself in a house at Harold’s Cross, where he had masqueraded
-once before, when his country’s need constrained him. Now he was there
-chiefly because the road in front ran towards Rathfarnham, and because,
-at least, he could sometime or other watch his own dear love go by. A
-servant, a peasant wench who was devoted to him, Anne Devlin, carried
-letters under her apron to the Priory, carried letters “richer than
-Ind” back to the proscribed master. She was a neighbouring dairyman’s
-daughter, and her coming and going were unquestioned. Forty years
-after, in her pathetic old age, she told Dr. Madden how Miss Sarah’s
-emotion would all but betray her: “When I handed her a letter, her
-face would change so, one would hardly know her.” And again: “Miss
-Sarah was not tall, her figure was very slight, her complexion dark,
-her eyes large and black, and her look was the mildest, the softest,
-and the sweetest look you ever saw!” All this is beautifully borne out
-by the Romney portrait, save that the pensive face which Romney must
-have begun to paint before the time of her betrothal (for after 1799
-he painted hardly at all) is not olive-skinned and not black-eyed. The
-eyes are, in truth, very dark, but of Irish violet-grey. Every Anne
-Devlin in the world would have called them “black.” But one hastens to
-contradict a hasty phrase: there is but one Anne Devlin, a soul beyond
-price, who suffered afterwards and without capitulation, for her “Mr.
-Robert’s” sake, tortures of body and mind which read like those in the
-_Acta Sanctorum_. Her name will be with his when that “country shall
-have taken her place among the nations of the earth;” until then there
-is no fear but that those who care for him will keep a little candle
-burning to his most heroic friend.
-
-At every house where Emmet lived, as “Mr. Huet” or “Mr. Ellis,” during
-his fugitive and perilous months, he had his romantic trap-doors, and
-removable wainscots, and sliding panels. Even at Casino, his own home
-in the country, closed after his father’s death, with its summer-house
-and decaying garden, he provided like subterfuges and inventions of
-his own, for he had a turn for mechanism as well as for the plastic
-arts. It is hard to be both a hunted rebel and an anxious lover, to
-have equal necessity for staying in and for sallying forth! Just so
-had “Lord Edward,” dear to every one who knew him, managed to exist,
-in and out of a hole, before his seizure and death. It has been justly
-said that “a system of government which could reduce such men as Robert
-Emmet and Lord Edward Fitzgerald to live the life of conspirators,
-and die the death of traitors, is condemned by that alone.” It seems
-hardly possible but that Robert and his Sarah made out to meet again,
-as they had met after the lamentable no-rising, when for a night and a
-morning he had lingered in the alarmed city before escaping into the
-mountains. One may be not far wrong in believing that the girl was by
-this time too overwrought, dismayed, and grief-stricken, to come to any
-immediate decision about joining him, and breaking away while there was
-yet opportunity. He must have realised fully the alternative, whether
-she did so or not, that to remain in Ireland was but to beckon on his
-fate. At any rate, on August 23, at his humble dining-table, he was
-suddenly apprehended. The informer has never been discovered; from the
-Secret Service Money books we know that he received his due £1000. The
-captor was Major Sirr, the unloved fowler of that other young eagle of
-insurrection but just mentioned, Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He was able to
-recognise Emmet by the retrospective description obligingly furnished
-by Dr. Elrington, Provost of Trinity, of an undergraduate whom he
-had not loved. The captive was bound and led away, bleeding from a
-pistol wound in the shoulder. He had tried to get off, and some rough
-treatment followed, for which apologies were tendered. “All is fair in
-war,” said the prince of courtesy. The Earl of Hardwicke, then Lord
-Lieutenant of Ireland, writes two days after, in his usual covertly
-kind way, of the arrest of young Emmet, now consigned to Kilmainham
-Gaol on the charge of high treason. “I confess I had imagined that
-he had escaped,” he says to his brother, his confidential daily
-correspondent. “His having remained here looks as if he had been in
-expectation of a further attempt.” Not yet was the Lord Lieutenant
-aware of the love-story intertwined with the one-man insurrection.
-
-When enclosed in his cell, Emmet became the object of apparent concern
-and affection on the part of two acquaintances: the accomplished
-advocate and litterateur, Mr. Leonard M’Nally, and Dr. Trevor,
-Superintendent of Prisons. If these persons had stepped out of an
-ancient epic or some fancied tragedy to show what human genius could
-do by way of creating hypocrites, no plaudit ever yet given could be
-worthy of the play. They were both moral monsters, paragons of evil,
-beyond the Florentine or Elizabethan imagination. How they played
-with the too noble and trusting creature in their hands, how they
-tricked him with illusory plans of escape, and beguiled him into
-inditing documents which were promptly handed over to headquarters,
-need not detain us, though it supplies a long thrilling chapter in the
-humanities. Emmet’s first move was to empty his pockets of coin for
-the gaoler, under the man’s promise that he would carry in person a
-communication to Miss Curran. The recipient was not that distracted
-maid, but the Attorney-General. The Lord Lieutenant wrote to the Hon.
-Charles Yorke on September 9 as follows: “A curious discovery has
-been made respecting Emmet, the particulars of which I have not time
-to detail to you fully. There were found upon him two letters from
-a woman, written with a knowledge of the transactions in which he
-had been engaged, and with good wishes for the success of any future
-attempt. He has been very anxious to prevent these letters being
-brought forward, and has been apprehensive that the writer was arrested
-as well as himself. Till yesterday, however, we were entirely ignorant
-of the person who had written these letters, which are very clever and
-striking. The discovery was made last night by a letter from Emmet,
-intercepted on its passage from Kilmainham Prison to Miss Sarah Curran,
-youngest daughter of Curran the lawyer. Wickham has seen him, and he
-professes entire ignorance of the connection; but I think he must
-decline being counsel for Emmet in a case in which his daughter may
-be implicated. It is a very extraordinary story, and strengthens the
-case against Emmet.” A rumour of the fate of his letters was allowed
-to reach Emmet, and cut him to the quick. He wrote at once begging
-that the third letter (surely with news of his arrest, and with such
-assurances and sorrowful endearments as the occasion called for), might
-not be withheld; and in exchange for the service demanded, knowing
-that the Government already feared what that eloquent tongue might
-have to say in court, he offered to plead guilty, and go dumb to the
-grave. He who had staked so much on the purity of his public motive,
-he who cared only, and cared fiercely, for the clearing of his name
-from the misconceptions of posterity, he who was one of the elect
-souls loving his love so much because he loved honour more—he, Robert
-Emmet, was willing to forfeit every chance of his own vindication
-for the sake of the sad girl brought into abhorrent publicity by his
-rashness. He said he had injured her; he pleaded for the delivery of
-the letter, and offered his own coveted silence as the price of it.
-“That was certainly a fine trait in his character,” said Grattan, who
-looked upon him as a visionary broken justly upon the wheel of things
-ordained. Sarah never received her letter. But the discovery that
-there had been a correspondence between herself and the arch-rebel
-was a highly important-looking circumstance, and with all apologies
-to its distinguished owner, the Priory at Rathfarnham was ordered to
-be searched. Mr. Curran was not at home, but he returned in season to
-meet Major Sirr and the armed escort riding down his drive-way, and
-aglow with virtuous wrath at the possibility of suspicion alighting
-upon him or his, he went to clear himself before the Privy Council.
-Though his action secured its ends, being voluntary and merely formal,
-it was a singular humiliation to the paternity concerned. But the
-culminating shock he had to endure arose from another cause. Sarah’s
-apartments had been searched; Emmet’s glowing letters, openly alluding
-to his purposes, had been seized, and tied up and carried away. Here
-was complicity indeed! and the knowledge of it came upon him like a
-thunderbolt.
-
-Within a few days, towards the end of this month of August, Mr. Curran
-himself received a letter from Robert Emmet. It was neither signed
-nor dated, and opened abruptly, waiving all formalities, not from any
-hidden defiance, but from entire absorption in the mournful retrospect
-it called up. As we know from Lord Hardwicke’s communication, Emmet
-had retained Mr. Curran for his counsel, and it was thought fitting
-that the latter should decline the brief for the defence. Of course Mr.
-Curran threw it up; no man could have done otherwise. But his general
-turmoil, and the apparent motives of it, are not a particularly noble
-spectacle. The young prisoner, meanwhile, had something to say to him.
-
-“I did not expect you to be my counsel. I nominated you, because not
-to have done so might have appeared remarkable. Had Mr. ——[1] been
-in town, I did not even wish to have seen you, but as he was not, I
-wrote to you to come to me at once. I know that I have done you very
-severe injury, much greater than I can atone for with my life; that
-atonement I did offer to make before the Privy Council by pleading
-guilty if those documents were suppressed.... My intention was not to
-leave the suppression of those documents to possibility, but to render
-it unnecessary for anyone to plead for me, by pleading guilty to the
-charge myself. The circumstances that I am now going to mention I do
-not state in my own justification. When I first addressed your daughter
-I expected that in another week my own fate would have been decided. I
-knew that in case of success many others would look on me differently
-from what they did at that moment; but I speak with sincerity when
-I say that I never was anxious for situation or distinction myself,
-and I did not wish to be united to one who was. I spoke to your
-daughter, neither expecting nor (under those circumstances) wishing
-that there should be a return of attachment, but wishing to judge
-of her dispositions, to know how far they might be not unfavourable
-or disengaged, and to know what foundation I might afterwards have
-to count on. I received no encouragement whatever. She told me she
-had no attachment for any person, nor did she seem likely to have any
-that could make her wish to quit you. I stayed away till the time
-had elapsed, when I found that the event to which I allude was to be
-postponed indefinitely. I returned, by a kind of infatuation, thinking
-that to myself only was I giving pleasure or pain. I perceived no
-progress of attachment on her part, nor anything in her conduct to
-distinguish me from a common acquaintance. Afterwards I had reason to
-suppose that [political] discoveries were made, and that I should be
-obliged to quit the kingdom immediately. I came to make a renunciation
-of any approach to friendship that might have been formed. On that very
-day she herself spoke to me to discontinue my visits; I told her it was
-my intention, and I mentioned the reason. I then for the first time
-found, when I was unfortunate, by the manner in which she was affected,
-that there was a return of affection, and that it was too late to
-retreat. My own apprehensions also I afterwards found were without
-cause; and I remained. There has been much culpability on my part in
-all this, but there has also been a great deal of that misfortune which
-seems uniformly to have accompanied me. That I have written to your
-daughter since an unfortunate event [the arrest], has taken place, was
-an additional breach of propriety for which I have suffered well; but
-I will candidly confess that I not only do not feel it to have been
-of the same extent, but that I consider it to have been unavoidable
-after what had passed. For though I shall not attempt to justify in the
-smallest degree my former conduct, yet, when an attachment was once
-formed between us (and a sincerer one never did exist), I feel that,
-peculiarly circumstanced as I then was, to have left her uncertain of
-my situation would neither have weaned her affections nor lessened her
-anxiety; and looking upon her as one whom, if I lived, I hoped to have
-had my partner for life, I did hold the removing of her anxiety above
-every other consideration. I would rather have the affections of your
-daughter in the back settlements of America, than the first situation
-this country could offer without them. I know not whether this will
-be any extenuation of my offence; I know not whether it will be any
-extenuation of it to know that if I had that situation in my power at
-this moment I would relinquish it to devote my life to her happiness;
-I know not whether success would have blotted out the recollection of
-what I have done; but I [do] know that a man with the coldness of death
-on him need not to be made to feel any other coldness, and that he may
-be spared any addition to the misery he feels, not for himself, but for
-those to whom he has left nothing but sorrow.”
-
-It is apparent from this page that the great Mr. Curran had not
-withheld from one under misfortune some crumbs of that verbal opulence
-for which he was famous. Emmet’s disclaimer of any eagerness on
-Sarah’s part in reciprocating his devotion is a knightly one. The
-interpretation of her maidenly conduct, purely chivalric, was designed
-to exculpate her in her over-lord’s eyes.
-
-Poor Sarah, thus rudely informed by events of her Robert’s arrest, in
-an hour of unprecedented torment, did not lack the tender consideration
-from the Chief Secretary and the Attorney-General, which her innocent
-misery deserved. Lord Hardwicke, too, directed that no action of any
-kind should be taken against her. But the stress of this last summer
-day was too much for her after the intense emotional life she had been
-bearing so long alone. In the breath of her love’s exposure and of her
-father’s anger head and heart seemed to break together, and for months
-to come she was to be wholly and most mercifully exempt from the “rack
-of this rough world.” On September 16, the Home Secretary was able to
-felicitate the Lord Lieutenant from Whitehall on his generous treatment
-of the implicated rebel at the Priory: “Your delicacy and management,”
-he says, “with regard to the Curran family is highly applauded. The
-King is particularly pleased with it. It is a sad affair. Mademoiselle
-seems a true pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft.” This, of course, amounts to
-the accusation that gentle little Sarah, with her sweet eyes and her
-“most harmonious voice,” was guilty of doing her own thinking, and of
-doing it, which was worst of all, upon political matters. It supplies
-us, at any rate, with evidence of the wide and deep grounds for Emmet’s
-true passion for the girl whose national ideals could so fearlessly
-keep pace with his own. Heart and brain, soul and body, she would have
-been his perfect mate. Her father’s harshness was the one element
-needed to perfect Sarah’s desolation. Her real life closed without
-conscious pain, and remained for a decent space buried. She never had
-to look in the face the day of Emmet’s death, the all-significant day
-“under her solemn fillet;” for that had tiptoed past her while her
-reason slept. The good sister Amelia, afterwards Shelley’s friend
-and portrait-painter in Italy, as soon as Sarah could be moved, took
-her away from the intolerable home, and left her with loving Quaker
-friends, the Penroses of Cork. During all the time of her affliction
-and illness at the Priory, Mr. Curran is said never to have looked upon
-his youngest daughter’s face; and from the hour of her leaving Dublin,
-presumably under an allowance made for her support, he seems neither
-ever to have sent her a message, nor to have thought of her again.
-
-There are several historic instances of a like fatherliness in fathers,
-a century ago. Mr. Curran doubtless felt outraged in every fibre, and
-not more indignant at the independent conduct of his meek domestic
-vassal than at the astounding ignorance in which she had contrived to
-keep him. Yet there were powerful pleas for compassion in such a case
-inherent in his own history. In early manhood he himself had figured
-as collaborator in a similar headlong falling in love, a similar
-breach of parental discipline. John Philpot Curran had been for a
-short time tutor in the family of a fellow-Whig, Dr. Richard Creagh
-of Creagh Castle, near Spenser’s Doneraile, when with Miss Creagh, a
-young lady of beauty and of moderate fortune, he contracted a private
-marriage. The discovery brought on storms; but on further reflection
-Dr. Creagh saw fit to forgive the offenders, to receive them once
-more beneath his roof, and even to allow his daughter’s portion to be
-expended without stint on Mr. Curran, until he had completed his legal
-studies in London, and begun to establish his inevitable ascendancy
-at the Bar. The match, however, seems never to have been a happy one.
-Conjugal differences seldom lack their annotation. Without adopting
-the adjective missiles of either faction, let it suffice to say that
-they parted, in the summary fashion of which we are already aware.
-Mr. Curran had earned a right, he may have thought, to his opinion of
-women. The memory of his calamity may well have operated to make him
-both excessively exacting as to female behaviour and pitiless towards
-any supposed violation of it. In one touching story of domestic ruin,
-at least, he had a deplorable influence. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick, in his
-_Life, Times, and Contemporaries of Lord Cloncurry_, records that after
-the Lady Cloncurry’s trespass, her generous husband would have taken
-her back, “were it not for his well-beloved J——n P——t C——n, who urged
-him, in strong and persuasive language, to the contrary.” Moreover,
-an Irish father is as likely as not to cherish spacious ideas of his
-own governing prerogative, and refuse to be tied in the matter to
-“anything so temporal,” as Lowell says in another application, “as a
-responsibility.” Mr. Curran could have bespoken for his children other
-destinies if they had ever known freedom of the heart at home.
-
-Again, his attitude towards Emmet may have seemed to him no exaggerated
-hatred, but the mere tribute of virtuous scorn. In that, however,
-he was self-deceived. To any publicist in Ireland with the seed of
-compromise in him, even if the compromise never amounted to the
-smallest sacrifice of actual principle, Robert Emmet’s straight career
-must have been like a buffet in the face. Naked logic was Emmet’s
-element, and the expedient his negligible quantity. Every agitation
-sincerely founded on a popular need breeds, in time, its extremists.
-They are the glory and the difficulty of all reform. It might have been
-said of Emmet, as at the outset of the Oxford Movement it was said of
-Hurrell Froude, that “the gentleman was not afraid of inferences.”
-Curran’s thoughts dwelt in no such simplified worlds. Like all the
-best Irishmen of his blazingly brilliant day, he was for Parliamentary
-Reform and Catholic Emancipation, and against the Union. It was even
-he who appeared to defend the revolutionists of 1798, who had obtained
-the writ of _habeas corpus_ for Wolfe Tone on the very morning set for
-his execution under court-martial (a reprieve frustrated by suicide),
-and who was the first to plead, though with vain eloquence, at the
-bar of attainder for the Fitzgerald heirs. But though his convictions
-seemed close enough to Emmet’s, there was wide variance in their
-bearing and momentum. Initial or generic differences take on an almost
-amatory complexion when contrasted with those springing from the final
-consideration in like minds. Both men vehemently desired the framing
-of fresh good laws, and the unhampered operation of existing good
-laws, for Ireland. To Curran, incorruptible as he was, England was an
-excellent general superintendent and referee to set over the concerns
-of other nations, including his own, provided that she could be got to
-abstain scrupulously from undue interference, and hold tenure under
-a more than nominal corporal withdrawal. Poor Emmet’s ideal of Irish
-independence was remote enough from this. He had read somewhere that
-his country used to be a proud kingdom, and not a petted province.
-Surely, Curran in his latter years, when he “sank” (the word is
-Cloncurry’s, and used of his friend) to office, could have no patience
-with a Separatist son-in-law. But the Master of the Rolls continued to
-be a great man, and Emmet at twenty-five ceased to be a fool.
-
-The trial came off before Lord Norbury, Mr. Baron George, and Mr. Baron
-Daly on September 19, 1803, at the court-house in Green Street. It is
-an extraordinary circumstance that it lasted eleven hours in a crowded
-room, the prisoner standing for all that time in the dock without
-proper food or rest. Mr. Emmet firmly refused to call any witnesses,
-to allow any statement by his counsel, or to furnish any comment upon
-the evidence. Long afterwards, Mr. Peter Burrowes told Moore of the
-continual check put upon his own attempts to disconcert those who were
-giving testimony. “No, no,” Emmet would protest, “the man is speaking
-the truth.” The indictment was in part strengthened by the reading in
-court of passages of his own captured love-letters to Miss Curran.
-Thanks to the consideration of the Attorney-General the reading was
-brief and as non-committal as possible, Miss Curran’s name being of
-course suppressed. The Attorney-General (Mr. Standish O’Grady) showed,
-throughout the poor girl’s troubles, a most fatherly solicitude towards
-her, and pleaded for her with her own father, without appreciable
-results.
-
-Emmet had other annoyances to bear. Mr. Conyngham Plunkett, as counsel
-for the Crown, took an unfair advantage of the silence of the counsels
-for the prisoner (Messrs. Ball, Burrowes, and M’Nally), and delivered
-at great length a very able oration, in which, _more Hibernico_, he had
-rather more to say of the Creator of men, and of His implicit support
-of the existing Government, than was strictly necessary; neither did he
-forget to recommend “sincere repentance of crime” to “the unfortunate
-young gentleman.” And when Emmet himself was invited to speak, and
-did so, or would have done so, to really magnificent purpose, he
-was causelessly and continually interrupted by the presiding judge,
-lectured on the virtues and the standing of his long-deceased elder
-brother, and on the abominable anomaly of “a gentleman by birth”
-associating with “the most profligate and abandoned ... hostlers,
-bakers, butchers, and such persons!” A sprig of lavender was handed
-him by some woman in the close court-room; it was snatched away as
-soon, on the groundless suspicion that it had been poisoned by one
-who would save the youth from his approaching fate. The jury, without
-leaving the box, brought in a verdict of guilty. It was to them a clear
-case. As the Earl of Hardwicke wrote to his brother, the Honourable
-Charles Yorke, “it was unanimously admitted that a more complete case
-of treason was never stated in a court of justice.” Of Emmet himself he
-adds conclusively: “He persisted in the opinions he had entertained,
-and the principles in which he had been educated.”
-
-It was late in the evening when the Clerk of the Crown, following
-the usual form, ended: “Prisoner at the bar, what have you therefore
-now to say why judgment of death and execution should not be awarded
-against you according to law?” Emmet was weary, but had body and mind
-under triumphant control, and he filled the next half-hour with words
-which were overwhelming at the time, and will never fail to thrill the
-most casual reader who can discern in them the victory of the human
-spirit over the powers which crush it. It is an immortal appeal. The
-rich phrases, the graceful, quick gestures, were unprepared and born
-of the moment. We are told that Emmet walked about a little, or stood
-bending hither and thither, in his earnestness. “He seemed to have
-acquired a swaying motion, when he spoke in public, which was peculiar
-to him; but there was no affectation in it.” It was a habit which
-the young man shared with a great contemporary singularly free from
-mannerisms: the Grattan to whom he used to listen, spell-bound, in his
-early years. Emmet has been misreported in one important particular.
-He had a fine understanding of the uses of irony; but it is his praise
-that he was also scrupulously, persistently, and invincibly courteous.
-To know him is to know that sentences such as those figuring in some
-reports of his speech, about “that viper,” meaning (Mr. Plunkett),
-or “persons who would not disgrace themselves by shaking your (that
-is, Lord Norbury’s) blood-stained hand,” are, as attributed to him,
-all but impossible. The truth seems to be that his admirers, finding
-him unaccountably lacking in invective, and the vituperative power of
-the Gael, have amended, between them, this evidence of his undutiful
-shortcomings. It were a pity to summarise or paraphrase that living
-rhetoric, so fit in its place. We are disposed to forget nowadays that
-emotional speech is natural speech: its many and seemingly exuberant
-colours are but primal and legitimate, whereas it is our subdued daily
-chatter which is artificial. Emmet did not occupy himself with refuting
-the charge of having revolted against existing political conditions
-with “the scum of the Liberties behind him,” for he had a concern more
-intimate. It had been reported broadcast, and it had been taken for
-granted at the trial, that he had become an agent of France because
-he sought to deliver the country over to French rule. Hopeless, there
-and then, of being understood on the main issue, he was determined to
-make himself plain in this. He admitted that he had indeed laboured
-to establish a French alliance, but expressly under bond that aided
-Ireland, once freed, should be as completely independent of France as
-he would have her of England. He sought, as he said, such a guarantee
-as Franklin had secured for America. For the reassertion of his own
-position as a patriot, Emmet spent his last energies. Like some few
-other selfless reformers known to history, he had taken little pains
-to proclaim himself, and in consequence had been translated into terms
-of expected profit and personal ambition, in the generalising minds
-of bystanders. It was nothing to him to go to his untimely grave
-legally convicted of Utopianism, precipitation, madness, or even of
-monstrous wickedness; but why he had plunged into such folly, or such
-crime, or such pure passion for freedom, as the case might be, seemed
-to demand some explanation from the person best qualified to give
-it. To risk that his informing intent should be misread hereafter,
-was more than he could bear. And thus it came about that, reserved
-as he always was, humble as he always was, he blazed out at last,
-and feared not to base himself proudly on “my character.” The word
-recurs: its numerical strength is almost equal to that of the beloved
-other one, “my country.” This was clearly a tautologous egotist, this
-young belated Girondin, to those who knew him not. As he talked on,
-in his beautiful round tones, into the night, the dingy lamps begun
-to sputter as if tired of their unexpected vigil. “My lamp of life is
-nearly extinguished,” he said, looking sadly down. And then: “My race
-is run. The grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. I
-have but one request to make, at my departure from this world: it is
-the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man
-who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice nor
-ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace; let my
-memory remain in oblivion, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other
-times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country
-shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth, then, and
-not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.” There was
-perceptible emotion in every breast but his, when sentence of death by
-hanging and beheading was given at half-past ten o’clock, and ordered
-to take place next day.
-
-Emmet’s strong slight frame had stood the long ordeal perfectly, and
-his mood had wings. He whispered cheerfully through the grating: “I
-shall be hanged to-morrow!” as he passed John Hickson’s cell on his way
-back to his own.
-
-We know he read the Litany there; and he also indulged a turn for
-secular, and even profane employment. In fact, it pleased Mr. Robert
-Emmet to draw himself (he drew exquisitely) as a posthumous serial in
-two parts. Some one found and recognised the grim _R. E., head_, the
-disconcerted _R. E., body_, on separate scraps of paper: they lay on
-his little table, when all was over, witnesses to the detached humour
-possible to an easy conscience. His industry was great during the few
-remaining hours. He possessed a lock of his absent Sarah’s hair, which
-she may have given him years before: this he wished to wear in his
-dying hour. As he sat plaiting it minutely, and tenderly fastening
-it into the fold of his velvet stock, he was noticed and questioned.
-Fearing that the treasure might be taken from him, he said that his
-occupation was “an innocent one.” The only persons allowed to see him
-were the chaplains and M’Nally, the fine flower of infamy, happy in
-Government pay, who to the end played with success the part of the
-assiduous friend. It was he who brought to Emmet on his final morning
-the news, then ten days old, of his mother’s death. The son took it,
-as he took all his losses, with what Mr. W. H. Curran briefly calls
-his “unostentatious fortitude.” After an instant of silence he looked
-up and found his voice. “It is better so,” he answered quietly. Her
-delicate proud heart had broken at the menace hanging over her darling:
-that much he had divined at once. She had written, during that last
-year, that she was “a parent supremely blest” in the virtues and
-dispositions of her children.
-
-Mr. M’Nally was intimate with Mr. Curran, for whom he had an
-affection as genuine as he was capable of feeling. It was like
-“Janus” Wainewright’s affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt from
-the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to divers and sundry.
-It is possible, therefore, that Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his
-much-deceived client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a
-life-in-death which also was surely “better so.” But this is mere
-conjecture, as Emmet would never have inquired; rather than name his
-“nut-brown maid,” the truly “banished man” would still have endured all
-the inner turmoil of lonely love,
-
-                  “—surges
-    Which wash both Heaven and Hell.”
-
-No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmet went forth to his
-death through the Dublin streets, a young lady, believed to be Miss
-Curran, was seen in a carriage despairingly taking leave of him, and
-fluttering a handkerchief until he was out of sight, when she sank in
-a swoon. It is not the fashion of persons of deep feeling, save on the
-stage, to have recourse at solemn moments to fluttering handkerchiefs.
-If any young lady interested in Robert Emmet were abroad in a carriage
-on that autumn morning, it would be his only sister, Mrs. Holmes, fated
-to outlive him but one melancholy year. As for poor lovely Sarah, she
-had disappeared like an underground stream during his last weeks and
-days, ever since her letters were seized as spoils of war. Major Sirr
-is believed to have destroyed them all, in due course, not without a
-flow of tears! The sweet lady was indeed an object of pity; and Emmet,
-putting in never a stroke of conscious work, had a most unaccountable
-faculty for melting hearts. The reign of Sensibility was not over;
-able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning to be carried out of
-the pit, more dead than alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something
-in Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern men habituated to
-political offenders. The honest turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting
-at his feet, only to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and
-it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing him, could with
-difficulty steady his voice, though he was popularly believed to revel
-in pronouncing capital sentence.
-
-Emmet busied himself with letters in his cell. He slept and ate as
-usual; and his firm handwriting witnessed the unshaken soul within.
-Several of his last letters have been recovered; two or three have been
-published, in Mr. W. H. Curran’s _Life_ of his illustrious father, in
-Dr. Madden’s moving but chaotic _Memoirs of the United Irishmen_, and
-elsewhere. On the day set for his execution Robert Emmet wrote to his
-old friend Richard Curran:—
-
-    “MY DEAREST RICHARD: I find I have but a few hours to
-    live; but if it was the last moment, and the power of
-    utterance was leaving me, I would thank you from the
-    bottom of my heart for your generous expressions of
-    affection and forgiveness to me. If there was any one
-    in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed
-    not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be
-    you. I have deeply injured you; I have injured the
-    happiness of a sister that you love, and who was formed
-    to give happiness to every one about her, instead
-    of having her own mind a prey to affliction. Oh,
-    Richard! I have no excuse to offer, but that I meant
-    the reverse: I intended as much happiness for Sarah
-    as the most ardent love could have given her. I never
-    did tell you how much I idolised her. It was not with
-    a wild or unfounded passion, but it was an attachment
-    increasing every hour, from an admiration of the purity
-    of her mind, and respect for her talents. I did dwell
-    in secret upon the prospect of our union; I did hope
-    that success, while it afforded the opportunity of our
-    union, might be a means of confirming an attachment
-    which misfortune had called forth. I did not look to
-    honours for myself; praise I would have asked from
-    the lips of no man: but I would have wished to read,
-    in the glow of Sarah’s countenance, that her husband
-    was respected. My love, Sarah! it was not thus that I
-    thought to have requited your affection. I did hope
-    to be a prop round which your affections might have
-    clung, and which would never have been shaken; but a
-    rude blast has snapped it, and they have fallen over
-    a grave. This is no time for affliction. I have had
-    public motives to sustain my mind, and I have not
-    suffered it to sink; but there have been moments in my
-    imprisonment when my mind was so sunk by grief on her
-    account that death would have been a refuge. God bless
-    you, my dearest Richard. I am obliged to leave off
-    immediately.              ROBERT EMMET.”
-
-This touching letter has been printed before, but the two which follow,
-long lost and newly found, have never been made public. The original
-letters seem to have disappeared. The contemporary copies figure in
-the Hardwicke or Wimpole collection, which has very recently been
-made accessible to readers by the issue of the current Catalogue of
-Additional Manuscripts at the British Museum. The shorter of them was
-intended by Emmet for Thomas Addis Emmet and his wife Jane Patten, his
-brother and sister-in-law. With it was sent a long historical document,
-called _An Account of the late Plan of Insurrection in Dublin, and the
-Causes of its Failure_. Hurriedly penned, in order to give the beloved
-relatives a unique and direct knowledge of all that the writer had
-meant and missed, it is a masterly detailed statement, as free from
-all traces of morbidity, or even of agitation, as if it had been drawn
-up “on happy mornings with a morning heart,” in the tents of victory.
-Thanks to the practised duplicity of Dr. Trevor, to whose care it was
-confided, Mr. Thomas Addis Emmet, then in Paris, never received it;
-he complained bitterly of its suppression, and was only towards the
-close of his life enabled to read it through the medium of the press.
-But neither he nor any of his American descendants, inclusive of the
-distinguished compiler of the quarto, privately printed in New York,
-entitled _The Emmet Family_, seems to have suspected the existence
-of the little personal note in which the _Account_ was enclosed. The
-official draft of it figures in Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 197:—
-
-    “MY DEAREST TOM AND JANE: I am just going to do my
-    last duty to my country. It can be done as well on the
-    scaffold as in the field. Do not give way to any weak
-    feelings on my account, but rather encourage proud ones
-    that I have possessed fortitude and tranquillity of
-    mind to the last.
-
-    “God bless you, and the young hopes that are growing
-    up about you. May they be more fortunate than their
-    uncle, but may they preserve as pure and ardent an
-    attachment to their country as he has done. Give
-    the watch to little Robert; he will not prize it
-    the less for having been in the possession of two
-    Roberts before him. I have one dying request to make
-    to you. I was attached to Sarah Curran, the youngest
-    daughter of your friend. I did hope to have had her
-    my companion for life; I did hope that she would not
-    only have constituted my happiness, but that her
-    heart and understanding would have made her one of
-    Jane’s dearest friends. I know that Jane would have
-    loved her on my account, and I feel also that, had
-    they been acquainted, she must have loved her for her
-    own. None knew of the attachment till now, nor is it
-    now generally known; therefore do not speak of it to
-    others. [I leave her][2] with her father and brother;
-    but if those protectors should fall off, and that no
-    other should replace them, [take][2] her as my wife,
-    and love her as a sister. Give my love to all friends.”
-
-It is to be feared that “little Robert” (the eldest of the children,
-afterwards Judge Robert Emmet of New York) did not receive his legacy.
-According to what testimony can be gathered, the watch which Emmet
-carried to the last was either presented to the executioner, or passed
-over to him with some understanding which has not transpired. Poor
-Emmet’s seal, a beautiful design of his own for the United Irishmen,
-went safely into friendly keeping; but most of his personal belongings
-worn on the scaffold, including his high Hessian boots and the stock
-with the precious hair sewed inside the lining, were actually sold
-at auction in Grafton Street, Dublin, during December, 1832. In this
-letter to his brother and sister, how piercing is the “I did hope,”
-iterated to them as to Richard Curran! It reminds us what a network
-of beneficent will and forethought made up that intense nature, and
-how the perishing leaf was but in the green. When the Lord Lieutenant,
-in the course of his industrious correspondence with his brother,
-sent to him, as a literary curio, a copy of Robert Emmet’s letter
-(Robert himself being newly dead), in reference to it, he hastens to
-add this significant sentence: “The letter to his brother will not
-be forwarded; but the passage respecting Miss Sarah Curran has been
-communicated to her father.” The Chief Secretary and Lord Hardwicke
-were joint contrivers of what seems to us (from the point of view of
-the most helpless of the persons chiefly concerned) an unnecessary if
-not unfeeling move. And Mr. Curran promptly replied to the former, the
-Right Honourable William Wickham, on the morrow (Hard. MS. 35,703, f.
-158):—
-
-                                  “_Sept. 21st, 1803._
-
-    “SIR: I have just received the honour of your letter,
-    with the extract enclosed by desire of His Excellency.
-    I have again to offer to His Excellency my more than
-    gratitude, the feelings of the strongest attachment
-    and respect for this new instance of considerate
-    condescension. To you also, sir, believe me, I am most
-    affectionately grateful for the part that you have been
-    so kind as [to] take upon this unhappy occasion; few
-    would, I am well aware, perhaps few could, have known
-    how to act in the same manner.
-
-    “As to the communication of the extract, and the motive
-    for doing so, I cannot answer them in the cold parade
-    of official acknowledgment; I feel on the subject the
-    warm and animated thanks of man to man, and these I
-    presume to request that Lord Hardwicke and Mr. Wickham
-    may be pleased to accept: it is, however, only justice
-    to myself to say, that even on the first falling of
-    this unexpected blow, I had resolved (and so mentioned
-    to Mr. Attorney-General), that if I found no actual
-    guilt upon her, I would act with as much moderation
-    as possible towards a poor creature that had once
-    held the warmest place in my heart. I did, even then,
-    recollect that there was a point to which nothing but
-    actual turpitude or the actual death of her parent
-    ought to make a child an orphan; but even had I thought
-    otherwise, I feel that this extract would have produced
-    the effect it was intended to have, and that I should
-    think so now. I feel how I should shrink from the idea
-    of letting her sink so low as to become the subject of
-    the testamentary order of a miscreant who could labour,
-    by so foul means and under such odious circumstances,
-    to connect her with his infamy, and to acquire any
-    posthumous interest in her person or her fate. Blotted,
-    therefore, as she may irretrievably be from my society,
-    or the place she once held in my affection, she must
-    not go adrift. So far, at least, ‘these protectors will
-    not fall off.’
-
-    “I should therefore, sir, wish for the suppression of
-    this extract, if no particular, motive should have
-    arisen for forwarding it to its destination. I shall
-    avail myself of your kind permission to wait upon you
-    in the course of the day, to pay my respects once more
-    personally to you, if I shall be so fortunate as to
-    find you at leisure. I have the honour to be, with very
-    great respect, your obliged servant,  JOHN P. CURRAN.”
-
-But it is time to return to our death-doomed “miscreant.” At half-past
-one, on the afternoon of September 30, the order was given to start.
-The scaffold had been built in Thomas Street, nearly opposite S.
-Catherine’s Church. He was dressed all in black, and maintained the
-serene and undemonstrative demeanour which was thought scandalously
-unbefitting by some spectators and some scribes. On the principle
-that the game was up, that “no hope can have no fear,” Robert Emmet
-became, not indifferent, but beautifully gay towards the end, as gay
-in irons as Raleigh or Sir Thomas More. He was quite sure that he had
-nothing to repent of, now that the account was cast and cancelled. Of
-course his care-free conduct was misconstrued: it passed officially
-for “effrontery and nonchalance,” and the single-minded Christian,
-never quite out of touch with the Church in which his holy mother
-had brought him up, was darkly given forth as an impenitent atheist.
-The ordinary attitude of the revolutionary late eighteenth-century
-mind was irreligious enough, but it was not Robert Emmet’s. One of his
-colleagues in the dream and the disaster, Thomas Russell, an elder
-figure in Emmet’s never-marshalled “army,” and a nobly interesting one,
-was extraordinarily pious: as pious as General Gordon. On the scaffold
-at Downpatrick (brought to that by his thwarted outbreak in the North),
-he recalled, for a memory well suited to encourage him, “my young
-hero, my great and dear friend, a martyr to the cause of his country
-and to liberty.” Russell’s hospitality of mind was not such that he
-could have made an exemplar of an infidel. But there is so much proof
-on this point, that the old charge may be laid aside in that limbo of
-all inaccuracies for which the invention of printing is responsible.
-The Englishman at the helm of affairs in Dublin, by no means (as we
-have seen) a wholly unsympathetic annalist, bequeaths us an account
-of Emmet’s final interview with the chaplains. It cannot escape the
-reader that two distinct issues were, in the minds of those worthy
-gentlemen, vaguely blended. No person in Mr. Robert Emmet’s situation,
-unless he repented of his politics, had any chance of being considered
-otherwise than unsound in his religion. Individualism, looked upon as
-the exact science it undoubtedly is, was not quite at its best in the
-self-righteous era of George the Third, and under the Establishment
-which was regulated by a now almost obsolete basilolatry.
-
-“Mr. Gamble, the clergyman who attends the prisoners in Newgate,
-visited [Mr. Emmet] yesterday evening, and again this morning, in
-Kilmainham Prison, in company with the Reverend Mr. Grant, a clergyman
-who resides at Island Bridge. In the report which they have made to
-me of what passed in their communications with Mr. Emmet, they state
-that though their conversation did not produce all the good they had
-hoped, it had nevertheless the effect of bringing him to a more calm,
-and in some respects a better temper of mind, than they had reason to
-expect from a person professing the principles by which they supposed
-him to be directed. They repeatedly urged to him those topics which
-were likely to bring him to a better feeling, and acknowledgment of
-the crime for which he was to suffer, but were not successful in
-persuading him to abjure those principles by which he was actuated in
-his conspiracy to overthrow the Government. He disclaimed any intention
-of shedding blood; professed a total ignorance of the murder of Lord
-Kilwarden, before which, he declares, he had left Dublin; and also
-professed an aversion to the French. He declared that though persons
-professing his principles, and acting in the cause in which he had
-been concerned, were generally supposed to be Deists, that he was a
-Christian in the true sense of the word; that he had received the
-Sacrament, though not regularly and habitually, and that he wished to
-receive it then; that what he felt, he felt sincerely, and would avow
-his principles in his last moments; that he was conscious of sins, and
-wished to receive the Sacrament. The clergymen consented to join in
-prayer with him, and administered the Sacrament to him, considering
-him as a visionary enthusiast, and wishing him to bring his mind to a
-proper temper and sense of religion.
-
-“On their way to the place of execution they conversed with him upon
-the same topics, but could never persuade him to admit that he had
-been in the wrong. In answer to their question whether, if he had
-foreseen the blood that had been spilt in consequence of his attempt,
-he would have persisted in his design to overthrow the Government, he
-observed that no one went to battle without being prepared for similar
-events, always considering his attempt as free from moral reproach in
-consequence of what he conceived to be the goodness of the motive that
-produced it. At the place of execution he was desirous of addressing
-the people. He intended to have declared that he had never taken any
-oath but that of the United Irishmen, and by that oath he meant to
-abide. The clergymen who were present explained to him that an address
-to that effect might possibly produce tumult and bloodshed, and that
-it ought not to be permitted. He was therefore obliged to acquiesce,
-and did so without appearing to be disturbed or agitated.” (Hard. MS.
-35,742, ff. 191 _et seq._)
-
-What Robert Emmet did say to the people, a sentence seemingly of
-puzzling platitude, was, in him, one of profound truth: “My friends,
-I die in peace, and with sentiments of love and kindness to all men.”
-There is another and more animated contemporary account of his exit in
-_The Life and Times of Henry Grattan_. The whole passage may as well be
-quoted:—
-
-“Robert Emmet [was] devoid of caution, foresight, and prudence: ardent,
-spirited, and impetuous. ... He was an enthusiast, he was a visionary.
-Without a treasury, without officers, without troops, he declared war
-against England and France, and prepared to oppose both!—the one, if
-she sought to retain possession of Ireland, and the other, if she
-attempted to invade it. With a few followers, he rose to take the
-Castle of Dublin and defeat a disciplined garrison. He put on a green
-coat and a cocked hat, and fancied himself already a conqueror. If no
-lives had been lost he probably would not have suffered, although Lord
-Norbury was the judge who tried him.... When asked the usual question
-why sentence should not be passed on him, he exclaimed: ‘Sentence of
-death may be pronounced: I have nothing to say. But sentence of infamy
-shall not be pronounced: I have everything to say.’ He was as cool and
-collected before his death as if nothing was to happen. Peter Burrowes
-saw him on his way, and related a circumstance that occurred as he was
-going to execution. He had a paper that he wished to be brought to Miss
-Curran, to whom he was strongly attached: he watched his opportunity,
-and in passing one of the streets, he caught a friendly eye in the
-crowd, and making a sign to the person, got him near; then he dropped a
-paper. This was observed by others, and the person who took it up was
-stopped: the paper was taken from him and brought to the Castle. Mr.
-Burrowes and Charles Bushe saw it, and said it was a very affecting and
-interesting letter.”
-
-And so to poor Emmet, Fate, in her most diabolical mood, had for
-the last time played the postman. He shook hands with the masked
-executioner, removed his own stock, and helped to adjust both the cap
-and the noose. The correspondent of the _London Daily Chronicle_, after
-a fervent “God forbid that I should see many persons with Emmet’s
-principles!” adds in unwilling tribute—and those were the days when a
-hanging was a favourite spectacle with persons of elegant leisure—“As
-it was, I never saw one die like him.” When all was over, and the head,
-with every feature composed and pale as in life, had been held up with
-the formula proper to traitors, that and the body were brought back to
-the gaol, and shortly after buried in the common ground, Bully’s Acre,
-none of Emmet’s few living kindred appearing then to claim it. His
-parents were not long dead; his only brother was in exile; his sister
-was a delicate woman, probably crushed by her latest grief, and her
-husband, Mr. Robert Holmes, a most serviceable friend, was in prison;
-John Patten, Thomas Addis Emmet’s brother-in-law, was far away; St.
-John Mason, a cousin of the Emmets, and one heart and soul with them
-in all that pertained to the wished-for welfare of Ireland, was, like
-Mr. Holmes, and for the same reason, the tenant of a cell. Others,
-more remotely connected by affection with Robert Emmet, might have
-come forward in time had any one realised the blight, the paralysis,
-which events had imposed simultaneously on the entire family. It seems
-pretty conclusive from a valuable pamphlet just published by Mr. David
-A. Quaid (though the facts are not yet verified), that Robert Emmet
-was laid to rest in his father’s vault in the churchyard of St. Peter,
-Aungier Street. There one may leave that sentinel dust until the day of
-conciser habit than his own shall carve the good word above it which he
-foreknew.
-
-Sarah Curran’s quiet annals are ungathered by any one hand, but the
-main outlines are henceforth discernible, and some celebrated writers
-have found them of interest. Washington Irving, in _The Broken
-Heart_, has given her an exquisite immortality; and the pathetic
-central incident of his narration is also the inspiration of Moore’s
-haunting song: _She is far from the land_. It was not, however, at
-the Rotunda in Dublin, but in a festal room in the friendly house
-where, after the death of her betrothed, she lived on in a dispirited
-convalescence, that she wandered away from the company, and sitting
-alone on the stair, began singing softly a plaintive air, “housed in
-a dream, at distance from the kind.” This happened at Woodhill, in
-Cork. Her voice seems to have been singularly beautiful: there was
-a general development of musical genius in her father’s family. The
-incident was reported at firsthand to Irving, as to Moore. To those who
-knew her story, the little forgetful act was poignant enough: for she
-was singing to the dead. In her sorrow, her deprivations, her entire
-withdrawal from the world, Miss Curran was blest with tender friends
-and champions. The poet just named, who was one of Robert Emmet’s early
-comrades, knew how admiration followed her like her shadow.
-
-    “And lovers are round her, sighing:
-     But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
-     For her heart in his grave is lying.”
-
-Among those who looked with infinite sympathy and respect on the
-gentle girl moving like a soulless phantom in an unreal world, was a
-very young Englishman, barely her senior, a newly commissioned captain
-of Royal Engineers, a lineal descendant of Strafford, and full of
-Strafford’s strong singleness of heart. Henry Robert Sturgeon was
-third son of William Sturgeon, Esquire, and the Lady Henrietta Alicia
-Watson-Wentworth; grandson of the first, and nephew of the second
-Marquis of Rockingham. He conceived for Sarah Curran an instinctive
-affection, ardent and profound, and free from stain of self as Emmet’s
-own. It was as if Emmet, absented for ever, had breathed himself into
-another for the comfort and protection of the well-beloved. But the
-well-beloved would not be comforted nor protected: not though she knew,
-as she knew perfectly, both what her suitor’s worth was, and what
-were his fortune and standing in the great world; not though every
-member of the Penrose family, devoted to him, encouraged his hope; not
-though all of them, of their own accord, interceded with their ward
-and guest. In the _Literary Souvenir_ for 1831, there is an agreeable
-paper of fifteen pages entitled _Some Passages in the History of Sarah
-Curran_, signed “M.” It has been conjectured that the writer was one
-of the Crawfords of Lismore, who had been very kind to Sarah when her
-mother’s flight broke up the Curran household. Whoever “M.” was, her
-devotion to her friend, of whose character and mental qualities she had
-the highest opinion, is conspicuous, and one may glean much information
-from what she has to tell us. Captain Sturgeon, she says in the
-slightly stilted Georgian phrases, was everything which is good. “Had
-not her heart been seared by early grief and disappointment, he could
-not have failed to have experienced the most flattering reception.”
-Sarah herself was entirely open with him: one would expect no less of
-her nobly sweet nature. “She pleaded his own cause for him by proving
-how little he deserved a divided affection;” but “the constancy and
-tenderness of her attachment to Emmet seem only to have rendered her
-the more interesting.” Two difficult years and more went by for Henry
-Sturgeon. He never wavered in his purpose: much as society sought after
-him, there was but one woman in the world to that patient and dedicated
-lover. Time was on their side. Sarah was gaining some measure of
-content and also of health, although she never definitely rallied from
-the heartbreak of 1803. It touched her at last that as she was, as she
-had told him so often that she was, with no life to live and nothing to
-give him, he prayed her still to become his wife, to lend him the one
-ultimate privilege of humblest service, from which otherwise he would
-be debarred. Some expectation of leaving the south of Ireland, or the
-actual arrival of orders from headquarters, seems to have lent a sudden
-heightened earnestness to his addresses; and Sarah, being pressed, gave
-her sad consent. They were married at Glanmire Church, near Woodhill,
-in the February of 1806.
-
-A dismal wedding it must have been! “M.” was told by one of the
-bridesmaids, long after, of the melancholy drive in the closed
-carriage, with the bride in tears. For a time Captain Sturgeon’s
-affairs kept him in England; then he was transported, with his
-regiment, to Malta and Sicily. The first journey, fully a half-year
-after the marriage, must have taken him and his wife through the
-capital, the Dublin of all racking memories, for we hear of Mrs.
-Sturgeon visiting Mr. James Petrie’s studio there. From the sketches he
-had made of Robert Emmet in the court-room, and from the mask in his
-possession, he had painted a portrait unhappily not wholly successful.
-But we know what peculiar interest belongs to a portrait, when there
-is, and can be, but one; and no person, surely, in all the world, can
-have longed to scan this one with the longing of Sarah Sturgeon. Dr.
-William Stokes, the biographer of George Petrie, says that George, then
-the artist’s little son, happened to be alone, playing in his father’s
-studio, when a veiled lady entered and went over to the easel. He never
-forgot her nor the moment. “She lifted her veil, and stood long in
-unbroken silence, gazing at the face before her; then suddenly turning,
-moved with an unsteady step to another corner of the room, and bending
-forwards, pressed her head against the wall, heaving deep sobs, her
-whole form shaken with a storm of passionate grief. How long that agony
-lasted the boy could not tell; it appeared to him to be an hour. Then
-with a supreme effort she controlled herself, pulled down her veil, and
-quickly and silently left the room. Years after, the boy learned from
-his father that this was Sarah Curran, who had come by appointment to
-see her dead lover’s portrait, on the understanding that she should
-meet no one of the family.”
-
-Captain Sturgeon was glad of the duty which turned his face
-southwards, as he could not but believe that the softer climate would
-help his frail Sarah. It is curious that Moore, in making her the
-unconscious heroine of his lovely lyric, should have placed the scene
-of her abstracted singing “the wild song of her dear native plains,”
-and of her abstracted turning from “lovers around her sighing,” in
-Italy! quite as if Captain Sturgeon, “curteis and mylde, and the most
-soofering man that ever I met withal,” had no existence. The poet, in
-all probability, heard late of the incident, and thus did not assign it
-to Woodhill. Only too accurate was one foreboding stanza:
-
-    “Nor soon will the tear of his country be dried,
-     Nor long will his love stay behind him.”
-
-But before 1808 set in, Sarah’s strength seemed to be establishing
-itself in the kindly foreign air; in that and in her growing happiness
-her husband began to reap the moral reward he had so hardly won.
-Abruptly, and not without alarm, the English in Sicily were driven
-homewards by the descent of the French on those shores. Captain and
-Mrs. Sturgeon hurried aboard a crowded transport bound for Portsmouth.
-The poor lady had great excitement and considerable hardship to
-undergo, and in the course of that most luckless voyage was prematurely
-born her only child. The deep-seated sadness of her soul, as if
-unjustly alienated from her, returned in all its fulness after his
-death. She settled with her husband at Hythe in Kent, and there she
-made haste to die. The laburnums were coming into blossom when she
-entered upon her eternity, six-and-twenty years old. She had a meek
-request to make of her father, who was oftentimes as near to her new
-home as London: it was that she might be buried in a garden grave at
-the Priory, where the sister who died in childhood had been laid.
-One need have no very romantic imagination to guess that the remote
-green spot bordering the lawn (a natural trysting-place screened by
-great trees that grow near the little grave), was dear to her also
-for another’s sake, for some old association with him who loved her
-in his hunted youth. For his own reasons, Mr. Curran, approached on
-the subject, saw fit to refuse. During the first week of May, 1808,
-Sir Charles Napier thus wrote his mother: “I rode over to Hythe this
-morning to see poor Sturgeon, who has lost his little wife at last,
-the betrothed of Emmet. Young Curran is here: his sister was gone
-before his arrival. They are going to take the body to Ireland.” It
-was Richard Curran, faithful in every human relationship, who went on
-to his brother-in-law. The bereaved two brought Sarah home to her own
-country, to the tomb in Newmarket of the grandmother of whom she had
-been fond, and for whom she was named: Sarah Philpot. The headstone
-was prepared, and seen by some local antiquary, and remembered; but
-it disappeared before it was placed. Emmet’s love sleeps, like Emmet,
-without an epitaph.
-
-The letter which Richard Curran wrote to “M.” about his dead sister was
-printed by her twenty-three years after. In it was enclosed a fragment
-of Sarah’s own:—
-
-                      “RADISH’S HOTEL, ST. JAMES’S STREET,
-                               “LONDON, _May 8, 1808_.
-
-    “MY DEAR MADAM: I know how heartily you’ll participate
-    in the feelings with which I announce to you the
-    death of your poor friend, my lamented Sarah. I would
-    willingly spare myself this distressing office; but
-    I cannot expose one whom she so loved to the risk of
-    stumbling inadvertently in a public paper on a piece
-    of intelligence so affecting.... I wish also to convey
-    to you a testimony that her thoughts never strayed from
-    you, and that to the hour of her death you were the
-    object of her affection. The enclosed unfinished letter
-    is the last she ever wrote. In it you will find a very
-    mitigated statement of her sufferings. I can anticipate
-    the satisfaction you will derive from the strong sense
-    of religious impressions which marks her letters; and
-    I at the same time congratulate and thank you for
-    having cultivated in her the seeds of that consoling
-    confidence which cheered her departing moments, and
-    stripped death, if not of its anguish, yet of its
-    greatest horrors. The hopes held out by her physicians
-    were, alas! more humane than well-grounded: she expired
-    at half-past five, on the morning of the 5th inst.,
-    of a rapid decline. To describe my sorrow would be
-    but to write her eulogy. You know all the various
-    qualities with which she was so eminently gifted, and
-    the consequent pangs I must feel at so abrupt and
-    calamitous a dispensation. I am now on my way, with her
-    afflicted widower, accompanying her remains, which she
-    wished to lie in her native land. I enclose you a lock
-    of her hair; it was cut off after her death. Adieu,
-    my dear madam. I make no apology for this melancholy
-    intrusion, and I beg to assure you that one in whose
-    acquirements and disposition she found so much that was
-    kindred to her own, can never cease to be an object of
-    most respectful esteem and attachment to a brother that
-    loved her as I did.—I remain, your obliged friend and
-    humble servant,                      RICHARD CURRAN.”
-
-    _To_ MRS. HENRY W——.
-
-
-[_Enclosure._]
-
-    “MY DEAR M——: I suppose you do not know of my arrival
-    from Sicily, or I should have heard from you. I must
-    be very brief in my detail of the events which have
-    proved so fatal to me, and which followed our departure
-    from that country. A most dreadful and perilous
-    passage occasioning me many frights, I was, on our
-    entrance into the Channel, prematurely delivered of a
-    boy, without any assistance save that of one of the
-    soldiers’ wives, the only woman on board except myself.
-    The storm being so high that no boat could stand out
-    at sea, I was in imminent danger till twelve next
-    day, when at the risk of his life a physician came
-    on board from one of the other ships, and relieved
-    me. The storm continued, and I got a brain fever,
-    which, however, passed off. To be short: on landing
-    at Portsmouth, the precious creature for whom I had
-    suffered so much God took to Himself. The inexpressible
-    anguish I felt at this event, preying on me, has
-    occasioned the decay of my health. For the last month
-    the contest between life and death has seemed doubtful;
-    but this day, having called in a very clever man here,
-    he seems not to think me in danger. My disorder is a
-    total derangement of the nervous system, and its most
-    dreadful effects I find in the attack on my mind and
-    spirits. I suffer misery you cannot conceive. I am
-    often seized with icy perspirations, trembling, and
-    that indescribable horror which you must know, if you
-    have ever had the fever. Write instantly to me. Alas,
-    I want everything to soothe my mind. O my friend!
-    would to Heaven you were with me: nothing so much as
-    the presence of a dear female friend would tend to my
-    recovery. But in England you know how I am situated:
-    not one I know intimately. To make up for this, my
-    beloved husband is everything to me. His conduct,
-    throughout all my troubles, surpasses all praise.
-    Write to me, dear M——, and tell me how to bear all
-    these things. I have, truly speaking, cast all my
-    care on the Lord; but ah, how our weak natures fail;
-    every day, every hour, I may say. On board the ship,
-    when all seemed adverse to hope, it is strange how an
-    overstrained trust in certain words of our Saviour gave
-    me such perfect faith in His help, that although my
-    baby was visibly pining away, I never doubted his life
-    for a moment. ‘He who gathers the lambs in His arms,’
-    I thought, would look down on mine, if I had faith in
-    Him. This has often troubled me since——”
-
-Richard Curran, who took pains to send that broken letter to a woman
-who valued it above fine gold, was always a good brother. Concerning
-his dear Sarah he had to be reticent, too, in reticent company. A lady
-who knew W. Henry Curran long and well, heard him mention his youngest
-sister only once. They were searching for something in a garret, when
-an exquisite picture standing laced with cobwebs, the picture of a girl
-about eighteen, caught her eye. “My sister Sarah, by Romney,” Henry
-said shortly, seeing that he had to say something. “Family pride had
-been deeply hurt by the publicity attached to poor Sarah’s unfortunate
-love-episode.” The Romney, sold by auction when Henry Curran died, is
-now the property of the Hon. Gerald Ponsonby; it has been beautifully
-engraved for Miss Frances A. Gerard’s _Some Fair Hibernians_, 1897.
-The delicately powdered hair, the low frilled dress with the line of
-black velvet about the neck, the gracious shoulders, the purely Irish
-mouth and eyes, half-scornful of life, half-resigned to it, which never
-knew illusion, and can never know abiding joy—-these are most tenderly
-painted, and remain among the things one does not forget. The last word
-of this haunting personality shall be loyal “M.’s”:—
-
-“In person Mrs. Sturgeon was about the ordinary size, her hair and eyes
-black. Her complexion was fairer than is usual with black hair, and
-was a little freckled. Her eyes were large, soft, and brilliant, and
-capable of the greatest variety of expression. Her aspect in general
-indicated reflection, and pensive abstraction from the scene around
-her. Her wit was keen and playful, but chastised [_sic_]; although no
-one had a quicker perception of humour or ridicule. Her musical talents
-were of the first order: she sang with exquisite taste. I think I never
-heard so harmonious a voice.”
-
-As for Captain Henry Sturgeon, he only betook himself anew to his
-post. His more active military career was now to begin. Throughout
-the Peninsular War he served as Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and later
-as Colonel of South Guides on the Duke of Wellington’s staff; and
-Wellington’s despatches ring again and again with his commended name.
-Riding across a vineyard during the fight near Vie Begorre, on a
-March morning of 1814, in the sixth year of his widowerhood, and the
-thirty-second of his age, he was shot dead in the saddle. He never
-had his dues in a profession where official recognition was then not
-stinted; and perhaps he cared little that it was so. _The Dictionary
-of National Biography_, which does not mention his all-significant
-marriage, yet quotes from _The War in the Peninsula_ what is said of
-Henry Sturgeon: “Skilled to excellence in almost every branch of war,
-and possessing a variety of accomplishments, he used his gifts so
-gently for himself and so usefully for the service that envy offered
-no bar to admiration, and the whole army felt painfully mortified that
-his merits were passed unnoticed.” This is one comrade’s glowing praise
-of another. Has it gone unguessed, the cause of the neglect at home of
-one of the most brilliant and devoted officers of his generation? Can
-the cause be hidden from those who have scrutinised the Government
-of that day, with its spites, its partisanships, its incapacity for
-distant outlooks, its severance from ideals? This Englishman, whatever
-his eminence of courage and skill might be, had been the husband of
-Emmet’s sweetheart; and Emmet was an Irish rebel and felon. The young
-soldier had probably weighed well what he was inheriting, before his
-marriage, and found all that endurable enough, until he died. In a
-world where earthly accidents wither away at a breath, and men of like
-temper see each other as they are, Henry Sturgeon must have smiled from
-the blood-wet Spanish grass straight into Robert Emmet’s eyes.
-
-One likes the unexpected epilogue, as one likes the mournful play. It
-is all satisfactory: “nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet
-us,” in the odd pattern of the plot. Emmet lives in it, and outlives.
-It is the compensation of a lot cast in a planet where even our own
-honourable action has a trick of turning hostile and smearing us,
-that there is something in the best of us which cannot be smeared.
-Robert Emmet’s large soul has, like a magician, pieced together his
-broken body, the symbol of his broken, mistimed, and because mistimed,
-unhallowed effort. But only his own soul has done it, and by a power
-within, shaking herself clear of censure. Mr. Henry Curran devotes
-to him a reticent paragraph obliquely affectionate. “He met his fate
-with unostentatious fortitude; and although few could ever think of
-justifying his projects or regretting their failure, yet his youth, his
-talents, the great respectability of his connections, and the evident
-delusion of which he was the victim, have excited more general sympathy
-for his unfortunate end, and more forbearance towards his memory,
-than are usually extended to the errors or sufferings of political
-offenders.” At the end of a hundred years, the feelings which may
-temperately be described as sympathy and forbearance do survive, ranged
-on the side of this political offender; but is it to be thought for
-a moment that five-and-twenty years of life, intellectuality, social
-standing, above all the capacity for being fooled (adorable as that may
-sometimes be), are alone able to commend any man to the remembrance of
-posterity? No: to dominate a moral distance there must be moral height.
-Emmet was magnanimous. The word was nobly applied to him by Lord
-Hardwicke, the head of the Government which hanged and beheaded him.
-Now to be magnanimous is not to possess a definite grace or virtue:
-magnanimity, like a sense of humour, is a spirit, a solvent merely; to
-exercise it in any one emergency is to show greatness equal to all.
-Robert Emmet said that he had received, immediately on his return from
-France, official invitations from conspirators in high quarters at
-home: the “first men in the land” were those who “invited him over.” Of
-his truthfulness there was but one opinion. Said Curran, who loved him
-little: “I would have believed the word of Emmet as soon as the oath of
-any other man I ever knew.” The Attorney-General at the trial referred
-to the prisoner as “a gentleman to whom the rebellion may be traced,
-as the origin, life, and soul of it.” This was Emmet’s reply, when,
-after nightfall, his turn came to speak: “My lords, let me here observe
-that I am not the head and lifeblood of this rebellion. When I came to
-Ireland I found the business ripe for execution: I was asked to join
-in it.” And again: “I have been charged with that importance in the
-efforts to emancipate my country as to be considered the keystone of
-the combination of Irishmen, or, as it has been expressed, the life and
-soul of this conspiracy. You do me honour overmuch. You have given to
-the subaltern all the credit of the superior.” He turned half-smiling
-to the presiding judge. “There are men concerned in this conspiracy
-who are not only superior to me, but even to your own conception
-of yourself, my lord.” At the final moment of his life Emmet stood
-motionless with a handkerchief in his hand, the fall of which was to be
-the signal for the cart to be drawn away. To the usual “Are you ready,
-sir?” he twice answered “No.” As it was, another and obeyed signal
-was impatiently given before he had dropped the handkerchief. Why did
-he hesitate? Was he perhaps expecting these concealed associates,
-his leaders and long-silent abettors, to reprieve or rescue him? So
-romantic a fancy, implying so much belief in human generosity, was only
-too natural to Robert Emmet. Many thinking heads, even under coronets,
-had been hot for reform in that unfavourable hour; there were many who
-desired the removal of religious disabilities, popular representation
-in Parliament, death to the vile system of local laws under which one
-witness, and only one witness, was sufficient to convict a man of high
-treason. Reform being disallowed, they declared themselves eloquently
-as ready to be driven to armed resistance against England: that is,
-towards total divorce and reconstruction. To poor Emmet alone, the
-thing so unavoidable which was good enough to long for and to talk
-about, was the thing good enough to do. The “first in the land” kept
-their heads; and in death as in life he kept their secret. There is a
-great unwritten chapter of perfidy behind his lonely ineffectual blow
-struck for national freedom. Anyone who has studied well these events
-of 1803, and weighed well the astonishing confidential information
-about the historical papers at Dublin Castle, which was given not long
-ago to Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, of New York, by Sir Bernard Burke, and
-incorporated in _The Emmet Family_, can hardly doubt that revelations
-on that subject are yet to come which will lengthen the story of Mr.
-Pitt, Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Under-Secretary Marsden, and their dealings
-with Ireland. And English gold and English terrorism had too truly won
-their way at last with Emmet’s humble colleagues at home.
-
-There are minor instances of Emmet’s magnanimity no less striking
-in their way. “We are all Protestants!” he said in a delighted and
-congratulatory spirit to Russell, implicated with him; he could not
-forget how much more heavily suspicion would bear upon those others
-yet shackled by the penal laws. To this beautiful inborn openness of
-mind was due his allusion before Lord Norbury (a judge as well-hated as
-Jeffreys, and for much the same reasons), to “that tyranny of which you
-are only the intermediate minister.” From his cell, within a few hours
-of the end, he sent a manly letter of thanks to the Chief Secretary, in
-which he addresses him thus:—
-
-    “SIR: Had I been permitted to proceed with my
-    vindication, it was my intention not only to have
-    acknowledged the delicacy with which (I feel with
-    gratitude) I have been personally treated, but also
-    to have done the most public justice to the mildness
-    of the present Administration in this country; and
-    at the same time to have acquitted them, as far as
-    rested with me, of any charge of remissness in not
-    having previously detected a conspiracy, which, from
-    its closeness, I know it was impossible to have done.
-    I confess that I should have preferred this mode if it
-    had been permitted, as it would thereby have enabled me
-    to clear myself from an imputation under which I might
-    in consequence lie, and to have stated why such an
-    Administration did not prevent, but (under the peculiar
-    situation of this country) perhaps rather accelerated
-    my determination to make some effort for the overthrow
-    of a Government of which I do not think equally highly.
-    However, as I have been deprived of that opportunity,
-    I think it right now to make an acknowledgment which
-    justice requires from me as a man, and which I do not
-    feel to be in the least derogatory from my decided
-    principles as an Irishman.—I have the honour to be,
-    sir, with the greatest respect, your most obedient
-    humble servant,
-
-                                         “ROBT. EMMET.”
-
-    (Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 196.)
-
-The Lord Lieutenant makes a comment on this, in that letter to his
-brother, the Home Secretary, from which much has already been cited:—
-
-“I enclose copies of two letters which he wrote this morning [September
-20, 1803]. One of the acts of kindness to which he particularly refers,
-in his letter to Mr. Wickham, was his being removed from the cell at
-Newgate, in which he had been placed after the sentence, to his former
-apartment at Kilmainham, as had been originally intended. He had
-alluded to this in his conversation with the clergymen, and admitted
-that the general conduct of those who administered the Government was
-likely to conciliate the people, though he did not approve the form of
-the Government and the British connection, both of which he had been
-desirous to overthrow.”
-
-In regard to this forwarded letter, the Home Secretary utters his
-congratulatory mind, and gives his opinion of our hero:—
-
-“At the same time that one cannot but deplore the wicked malignity and
-wonder at the enthusiastic wildness which appears to have actuated the
-conduct of this miserable man, one cannot but admire the judgment,
-the temper, and delicacy which appear to have been manifested in
-the conduct of your Excellency’s Government towards this person,
-and all concerned or in any manner connected with him. I cannot but
-take advantage of this occasion to express the satisfaction I feel
-in observing that the justice, moderation, and mildness of your
-Excellency’s Government have extorted even from a condemned traitor the
-same sentiments of respect and reverence which we have been accustomed
-to hear from the loyal part of the community.”
-
-It does not seem to have been revealed to the Hon. Charles Yorke,
-that what “extorted” Emmet’s assurances was his own extreme, almost
-fantastic, chivalry; and that those assurances set off deeply by
-contrast, as he vehemently meant they should do, his abhorrence of the
-underlying system of which Lord Hardwicke’s conduct was merely the
-agreeable accident. Lord Hardwicke, at least, had understood.
-
-Even one intelligent modern has fallen foul of Emmet’s unusually
-scrupulous care in such matters, and of his attitude of regal courtesy,
-like that of the battling foes on Crécy field: such a care and such
-an attitude indicate, it is thought, “weakness of character!” What it
-really indicates is a diplomacy so high that if generally practised
-it might render human intercourse very difficult. We cannot all be as
-Apollo Musagetes, daring to employ nothing but the amenities, the major
-force, in a universe inured to cheap thunderbolts. As Thoreau shrewdly
-says: “The gods can never afford to have a man in the world who is
-privy to any of their secrets. They cannot have a spy here: they will
-at once send him packing!”
-
-A postulate of true magnanimity is modesty. Emmet’s was unique. It
-is the testimony of John Patten, who was well aware of his kinsman’s
-immense self-reliance, that “Robert had not one particle of vanity in
-his composition. He was the most free from conceit of any man I ever
-knew. You might live with him for years ... and never discover that he
-thought about himself at all. He was vain neither of his person nor of
-his mind.” La Comtesse d’Haussonville cannot refrain, in her graceful
-memoir, from contrasting him with another excellent youth of genius,
-André Chénier, who very properly expressed his pang of self-pity
-in face of the guillotine. “_Et pourtant_,” he cried, striking his
-forehead with that gesture of Gallic candour which is so odd to us
-and so winning: “_et pourtant il y avait quelque chose ici_!” _Il y
-avait quelque chose ici_ in Emmet too, although it was not great lyric
-poetry. He had almost every other capacity. The Rev. Archibald Douglas,
-in his old age, when Robert Emmet had been nearly forty years in his
-grave, summed up his conviction about him to Dr. R. R. Madden: “So
-gifted a creature does not appear once in a thousand years.”
-
-We have no portrait of Emmet which antedates his trial. Three artists
-in good repute sketched him, that day, on bits of waste paper or else
-on the backs of envelopes, and did it surreptitiously for dread of
-prohibition: these were Comerford, Brocas, and James Petrie. The
-two first, viewing Emmet in profile, gained better results than the
-third; yet Petrie’s drawing serves as the basis of the only well-known
-engraved pictures. It was Petrie, moreover, who was allowed to take the
-death-mask of Robert Emmet. The good material accumulated was put to no
-very memorable use. The Petrie Emmet is somewhat heavy and glowering,
-and distinctly wry-necked. It is meant, in fact, to be impressive; and
-the note of artificiality disqualifies it as a true representation of
-its subject, a man of shynesses and simplicities. Comerford, on the
-other hand, and Brocas, as effectively, have given us a face to look at
-which one instinctively believes in. It is stamped with concentration
-and resolve, but has in it something serene and gentle and sweet, and
-it harmonises with all we can learn of Emmet’s physical appearance from
-the printed page. He was about five feet seven inches in height, wiry,
-slender, erect, healthy, full of endurance, quick of movement. His dark
-eyes were small and rather deep-set, and sparkling with expression;
-his nose was straight and thin, his mouth delicately chiselled. He had
-the powerful chin and jaw-bone never absent from the bodily semblance
-of a strong-willed personality. The fine pendulous hair bespoke the
-enthusiast, but it was not worn long save over the forehead, which was
-noticeably broad and high. What gave a faun-like idiosyncrasy to the
-whole countenance was the slight upward curve of the perfect eyebrows
-at the inner edge. If we are to accept Brocas as our best authority
-(though his hand at work has somehow captured a momentary scorn not
-seen by Comerford), this idiosyncrasy had in it no touch of frowning
-severity such as was foreign, according to all report, to Emmet, but
-added rather a final whimsical attraction to a sad young face which a
-child or a dog would readily love. As Anne Devlin said once of “Miss
-Sarah’s,” it was “not handsome, but more than handsome.” The one face
-it resembles is the Giotto Dante.
-
-Some critics on the spindle side will find it easier to forgive an
-unsuccessful patriot than an uninventive and unauthoritative lover.
-Emmet in hiding near the Priory, between the no-rising and the arrest,
-had his almost certain chances of escape; but he could not persuade
-the girl, born, like Hamlet, to a tragic inaction, to strike hands
-with him and make the dash for liberty. Habit sat too heavily on her
-defrauded spirit, and insufficient faith in herself kept her where she
-was. The secrecy of their relations seems to have hurt and weakened
-her. She could no more stand up then against her father’s displeasure
-than she could part long after with dejection and a sort of remorse,
-when the face of her outer world had beautifully, almost miraculously,
-changed. And Emmet loved her as she was, a day-lily on a drooping stem.
-To quarrel with them because no fleet-footed horse, as in a novel,
-pranced by night to Rathfarnham to bear them away together, is to
-quarrel with a perfected sequence. To mark the look of this Robert,
-hungry for the heroic, the look of this Sarah, mystical as twilight, is
-but to forecast casualties. Perhaps as every soul has a right to its
-own kind of welfare and happiness, so it has a right to its own kind of
-sorrow. The second alternative suits the innocent, although it shocks
-the moral sense of most persons far more than would the choice of error
-instead of truth. To be an Emmet at all meant to get into trouble for
-advanced ideals. To be a Curran meant to have a keen intelligence
-always besieged hard, and eventually overcome, by melancholia, as John
-Philpot Curran’s was at the end, as Richard Curran’s was in his prime.
-Emmet and the young creature of his adoration were hardly used; but
-Fate chose not ill for them. A _révolution manquée_ with an elopement;
-expatriation with a marriage certificate; a change of political front
-with the parental blessing—all look somehow equally incongruous and
-out of key with those sensitive faces elected, let us say, to better
-things. Their story, with all deductions which can be made, has already
-done something to deepen the sense of human love in the world, and to
-broaden the dream of human liberty. Perhaps either of those games may
-be considered as always worth the candle.
-
-Rashness, and the immediate ruin consequent upon it, two things which
-men can taste, smell, handle, hear, and see, are not redeemed, in their
-opinion, by anything so unsubstantial as motive. History, a tissue of
-externals, cannot afford to take account of that. Hence it falls out
-that certain spirits are finally given over, with their illegitimate
-deeds in arm, to folk-lore and balladry. Of these are Charlotte Corday,
-and John Brown of Ossawatomie, and Robert Emmet. There is no need of
-exculpating them in the forum of the people, where they were never held
-to be at fault; and exculpation is a waste of words to the rest of us.
-We understand too well what social havoc these pure-eyed hot-hearted
-angels bring in their wake, when they condescend to interfere with
-our fixed affairs. They call into being in their own despite our most
-self-protective measures: measures, in short, which amount to an
-international coalition against the undesirable immigrant. Relentless
-inhospitality to such innovators, in every generation and in every
-clime, is the habit of this planet. Such as our affairs are, we do not
-seem to wish them made over into duplicates of those of the Kingdom of
-Heaven. The executed meddlers, however, often take on an unaccountable
-posthumous grace, and may even be approached upon anniversaries in a
-mood none other than that of affectionate congratulation. The anomaly
-of our own situation has passed with their death: though they never
-change, we grow up in time to be Posterity, and to see with them the
-ultimate correlations of things, in a region of intellectual space
-where nothing goes by its old name. To be unbiassed and Irish is to
-love Robert Emmet; to be generously English is to love him; to be
-American is to love him anyhow.
-
-    “Aristogeiton! here is for thy sword
-     A myrtle of Mount Vernon, plucked this day.”
-
-
-THE END
-
-
-
-
-    Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
-    Edinburgh & London
-
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-[1] The name in the original MS. was probably Burrowes.
-
-[2] The bracketed words are conjectures of the present writer. The MS.
-has suffered greatly from the damp, so as to be practically illegible
-in places.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Transcriber’s Note: Page 84, “n” changed to “in” (in a very clever)
-
-
-
-
-
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-Title: Robert Emmet
-       A Survey of His Rebellion and of His Romance
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-
-<h1 class="faux">ROBERT EMMET</h1>
-<div class="figcenter" style="width: 551px;">
-<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="551" height="800" alt="cover" />
-</div>
-<hr class="chap" />
-<div class="chapter"></div>
-<div class="figcenter" style="width: 409px;">
-<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="409" height="600" alt="drawing" />
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<div class="chapter"></div>
-
-
-<div class="maintitle">ROBERT EMMET</div>
-
-<div class="center"><br />
-A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION<br />
-AND OF HIS ROMANCE<br />
-<br />
-<small>BY</small><br />
-<span class="author">LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY</span><br />
-<br /><br />
-WITH A PORTRAIT<br />
-<br />
-<small>OF</small><br />
-<br />
-<b>ROBERT EMMET</b><br />
-<br /><br /><br /><br />
-<small>LONDON</small><br />
-DAVID NUTT, 57-59 LONG ACRE<br />
-1904<br />
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<div class="chapter"></div>
-
-
-<p class="copyright">
-Printed by <span class="smcap">Ballantyne, Hanson &amp; Co.</span><br />
-At the Ballantyne Press<br />
-</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<div class="chapter"></div>
-
-
-<div class="center">
-<i>To</i><br />
-<br />
-<big>LIONEL JOHNSON</big><br />
-<br />
-<i>in the Land of the Living to remind him of<br />
-old thoughts and of things once dear</i><br />
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<div class="chapter"></div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[vii]</a></span></p>
-
-
-
-
-<h2>PREFATORY NOTE</h2>
-
-
-<p class="unindent"><span class="smcap">The</span> following unscientific monograph, a sort of
-little historical descant, is founded upon all the
-accurate known literature of the subject, and also
-largely on the Hardwicke MSS. These, in so far
-as they relate to Emmet, the writer was first to
-consult and have copied, last winter, before they
-were catalogued. But while these sheets were in
-press, several interesting fragments from the MSS.
-appeared in the <i>Cornhill Magazine</i> for September,
-1903, thus forestalling their present use. This
-discovery will condone the writer’s innocent claim,
-made on page 60, of printing the two letters there
-as unpublished matter.</p>
-
-<p>The portrait is after Brocas’s hurried court-room
-sketch, made the day before the execution.
-The original print is in the Joly Collection of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[viii]</a></span>
-National Library of Ireland. The head is too sharp
-and narrow, and yet it bears a marked resemblance,
-far exceeding that of either of the other portraits,
-to some of Robert Emmet’s collateral descendants.
-On such good <i>à posteriori</i> evidence it was chosen.</p>
-
-
-
-<p><small>Oxford, <i>Dec. 9, 1903</i>.</small></p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<div class="chapter"></div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></span></p>
-
-
-
-
-<h2>ROBERT EMMET<br />
-
-<small>A SURVEY OF HIS REBELLION AND OF
-HIS ROMANCE</small></h2>
-
-
-<p class="unindent"><span class="smcap">The</span> four who lived to grow up of the seventeen
-children born to Robert Emmet, M.D., of Cork,
-later of Dublin, and Elizabeth Mason, his wife,
-were all, in their way, persons of genius. The
-Emmets were of Anglo-Norman stock, Protestants,
-settled for centuries in Ireland. The Masons, of like
-English origin, had merged it in repeated alliances
-with women of Kerry, where the Dane, the Norman,
-and later invaders from nearer quarters had never
-settled down to perturb the ancient Celtic social
-stream. Dr. Emmet was a man of clear brain and
-incorruptible honour. The mother of his children,
-to judge by her letters, many of which have been
-privately printed, must have been an exquisite
-being, high-minded, religious, loving, humorous,
-wise. Her eldest surviving son, Christopher<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></span>
-Temple Emmet, was named for his two paternal
-grandparents, Christopher Emmet of Tipperary
-and Rebecca Temple, great-great-granddaughter of
-the first Baronet Temple of Stowe, in Buckinghamshire.
-The mention of that prolific, wide-branching,
-and extraordinary family of Temple as
-forebears of the younger Emmets is like a sharply
-accented note in a musical measure. It has never
-been played for what it is worth; no annalist has
-tracked certain Emmet qualities to this perfectly
-obvious ancestral source. The Temples had not
-only, in this case, the bygone responsibility to bear,
-for in a marked manner they kept on influencing
-their Emmet contemporaries, as in one
-continuous mood thought engenders thought.
-Says Mr. James Hannay: “The distinctive ηθος
-of the Temples has been a union of more than
-usual of the kind of talent which makes men of
-letters, with more than usual of the kind of talent
-which makes men of affairs.” The Emmets, too,
-shared the “distinctive ηθος” in the highest degree.
-Added to the restless two-winged intelligence, they
-had the heightened soberness, the moral elevation,
-which formed no separate inheritance. The
-Temples were, and are, a race of subtle but somewhat<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span>
-austere imagination, strongly inclined to
-republicanism, and to that individualism which is
-the norm of it. The Temple influence in eighteenth-century
-Ireland was, obliquely, the American influence:
-a new and heady draught at that time, a
-“draught of intellectual day.” If we seek for
-those unseen agencies which are so much more
-operative than mere descent, we cover a good deal
-of ground in remembering that Robert Emmet the
-patriot came of the same blood as Sidney’s friend,
-Cromwell’s chaplain, and Dorothy Osborne’s leal
-and philosophic husband. And he shared not only
-the Temple idiosyncrasy, but, unlike his remarkable
-brothers, the thin, dark, aquiline Temple face.</p>
-
-<p>Rebecca Temple, only daughter of Thomas, a
-baronet’s son, married Christopher Emmet in 1727,
-brought the dynastic names, Robert and Thomas,
-into the Emmet family, and lived in the house
-of her son, the Dublin physician, until her death in
-1774, when her grandchildren, Temple and Thomas
-Addis, were aged thirteen and ten, Robert being
-yet unborn. Her protracted life and genial character
-would have strengthened the relations, always close,
-with the Temple kin. Her brother Robert had
-gone in his youth from Ireland to Boston, where<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
-his father was long resident; and there he married
-a Temple cousin. This Captain Robert Temple
-died on April 13, 1754, “at his seat, Ten Hills,
-at Boston, in New England.” His three sons,
-the eldest of whom, succeeding his great-grandfather,
-became afterwards Sir John Temple, eighth
-Baronet of Stowe, all settled in New England and
-married daughters of the Bowdoin, Shirley, and
-Whipple families—good wives and clever women.
-John Temple had been “a thorough Whig all
-through the Revolution,” and had suffered magnanimously
-for it. He had to forfeit office, vogue,
-and money; and little anticipating his then most
-improbable chances of a rise in the world, he forfeited
-all these with dogged cheerfulness, in the
-hour when he could least afford to do so. The
-latter-day Winthrops of the Republic are directly
-descended from him, and the late Marquis of
-Dufferin and Ava from his brother. A certain
-victorious free spirit, an intellectual fire, whimsical
-and masterful, has touched the whole race
-of untamable Temples, and the Emmets, the
-very flower of that race. Love of liberty
-was, in both Robert Emmet and in Thomas
-Addis Emmet, no isolated phenomenon, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
-their strengthened and applied inheritance. Captain
-Robert Temple’s second son, Robert, came
-back with his wife, Harriet Shirley, after the
-Declaration of Independence, to Allentown, Co.
-Dublin. His widow eventually received indemnification
-for the loss of their transatlantic estates.
-It is thus proved that Robert Temple was a loyalist
-to some appreciable degree. Earlier and later,
-however, he did considerable thinking, cherished
-liberal principles, and had much to say of the
-rights of man and other large theses to his namesake
-first cousin, Robert Emmet, M.D., with whom
-he lived for eighteen months after his return.
-This community of ideas was further cemented
-by the marriage of Anne Western Temple, Robert
-Temple’s daughter, to Dr. Emmet’s eldest son,
-Temple Emmet. Dr. Emmet was faithful to
-the unpopular convictions which he found himself
-sharing in increased degree with his cousin. Up
-to 1783 he was always voluntarily abandoning one
-position of eminence after another, as he came to
-dissent from English rule in Ireland. He held
-among other offices that of State Physician; and
-from a bland condemnatory notice of his youngest
-son in <i>The Gentleman’s Magazine</i> for October 1803,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
-we learn that he was also physician to the Lord-Lieutenant’s
-household. It is clear, then, that he
-also began his career as a trusted Conservative.
-But as his opinions changed, he gave up, Temple-like
-and Emmet-like, every position and emolument
-inconsistent with them; when the ’98 broke out
-he had even ceased to practise his profession.
-He and his wife and their children felt alike in
-these matters so adversely and intimately affecting
-their chances of worldly success. The boys and
-the girl were brought up to think first of Ireland
-and her needs. An amicable satirist and distinguished
-acquaintance was wont facetiously to
-report Dr. Emmet’s administration of what the
-visitor named “the morning draught” to his little
-ones: “Well, Temple, what are you ready to do
-for your country? Would you kill your sister?
-Would you kill me?” For after this perilous early
-Roman pattern the catechism ran. Even if only a
-beloved joke, it would have been enough to seal
-the young Emmets for fanaticism, had not their
-good angels intervened. As it turned out, they
-were all of a singularly judicial cast. The only
-daughter, Mary Anne, had what used to be called,
-by way of adequate eulogy, a “masculine understanding,”<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span>
-and wrote pertinently and well. Her
-husband was the celebrated barrister and devoted
-Irishman, Robert Holmes. He was the true friend
-and adviser of the whole Emmet family, and survived
-his wife, who died during his imprisonment
-in 1804, for five-and-fifty years. Of Dr. Emmet’s
-three sons, Temple, Thomas Addis, and Robert,
-the former had an almost incomparably high
-repute for “every virtue, every grace,” to quote
-Landor’s mourning line for another. It is no disparagement
-to him to say that this was partly owing
-to the pathos of so short a career, and to the fact
-that he died ten years before the great Insurrection,
-twelve before the Union; seeming to belong to a
-prior order of things, it was the easier to praise the
-Emmet who did not live long enough to get into
-trouble, at the expense of the Emmets who did.</p>
-
-<p>Temple Emmet, with his beautiful thought-burdened
-head, a little like the young Burke’s,
-passed by like a wonderful apparition in his day.
-His success at Trinity College was complete; it is
-said the examiners found their usual maximum of
-commendation, <i>Valde bene</i>, unequal to the occasion,
-and had a special <i>O quam bene!</i> given to him with
-his degree. This has a sort of historic parallel in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
-the incident at Wadham College, Oxford, just a
-century before, when Clarendon, Lord Chancellor
-of the University, set a kiss for eulogy upon the
-boyish cheek of John Wilmot, Master of Arts.
-Again serving as his own precedent, Temple
-Emmet became King’s Counsel at twenty-five.
-Two years later he was in his grave, whither his
-young wife quickly followed him. All his contemporaries
-qualified to appraise his worth, deplored
-him beyond common measure. Said the great
-Grattan, long after: “Temple Emmet, before he
-came to the Bar, knew more law than any of the
-judges on the Bench; and if he had been placed
-on one side and the whole Bench opposed to him,
-he could have been examined against them, and
-would have surpassed them all; he would have
-answered better both in law and divinity than any
-judge or bishop in the land.” His premature
-death called his next brother from the University
-of Glasgow, where he had just graduated in medicine,
-to the profession of the law.</p>
-
-<p>The Emmet name was not destined to rise like a
-star where it had fallen, for bitter times were drawing
-nigh, and his own generosity and integrity were
-to bring Thomas Addis Emmet into fatal difficulties.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
-With a great number of other zealous spirits, he
-flung himself with all his force of protest against the
-legalised iniquities destroying Ireland. Examined
-before the secret committee of the House of Lords,
-August 10, 1798, the young man, then as always
-quietly intrepid, let fall brave prophetic words.
-Asked if he had been an United Irishman, he
-righted the tense in answering: “My Lords, I am
-one”; then he continued: “Give me leave to tell
-you, my Lords, that if the Government of this
-country be not regulated so that the control may
-be wholly Irish, and that the commercial arrangements
-between the two countries be not put upon
-a footing of perfect equality, the connection [with
-England] cannot last.” Lord Glentworth said:
-“Then your intention was to destroy the Church?”
-Mr. Emmet replied: “No, my Lord, my intention
-never was to destroy the Church. My wish decidedly
-was to overturn the Establishment.” Here
-Lord Dillon interrupted: “I understand you. And
-have it as it is in France?” “As it is in America,
-my Lords.” When the chance for self-expatriation
-came, when “to retract was impossible, to proceed
-was death,” Thomas Addis Emmet followed the
-ancestral trail, and founded a new family in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span>
-approved America. The only one of his circle
-spared to continue the Emmet name, he came to
-flower sadly enough, because his hopes were broken,
-on what was not to him alien soil. Everyone knows
-the rest: how, admitted to the New York Bar by
-suspension of rules, without probation, he died in
-all men’s honour, in 1827, Attorney-General of the
-State.</p>
-
-<p>Robert Emmet was even surer of an illustrious
-career. Alas! There is no documentary proof
-forthcoming for it as yet, but it is painfully probable
-that his little afterglow of a rebellion was
-long fostered, for reasons of their own, by great
-statesmen, and that their secret knowledge of it
-arose from Irish bad faith; that, in short, he was
-let dream his dream until it suited others to close
-the toils about him. The two or three highest in
-authority in Dublin, Lord Hardwicke chief among
-them, were kept ignorant as himself. Emmet was
-really victim and martyr. But to die prodigally at
-twenty-five, and to be enshrined with unwithered
-and unique passion in Irish hearts; to go down prematurely
-in dust and blood, and yet to be understood,
-felt, seen, for ever, in the sphere where “only
-the great things last,” is perhaps as enviable a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
-privilege as young men often attain. His is one
-of several historic instances in which those who
-have wrought little else seem to have wrought
-an exquisite and quite enduring image of themselves
-in human tradition. With none of the
-celebrities of his own nation can he in point of
-actual service, compare; but every one of them,
-whether known to ancient folk-lore or to the
-printed annals of yesterday, is less of a living
-legend with Thierry’s “long-memoried people,”
-than “the youngest and last of the United Irishmen,”
-“the child of the heart of Ireland.” A
-knot of peasants gathered around a peat fire in
-the long evenings, pipe in hand, are the busy hereditary
-factors of apocryphal tales beginning “Once
-Robert Emmet (God love him),” &amp;c.; and a certain
-coloured print, very green as to raiment, very melodramatic
-as to gesture, hangs to-day in the best
-room of their every cabin, and stands to them for
-all that was of old, and is not, and still should be.</p>
-
-<p>He was born March 4, 1778, in his father’s
-house in St. Stephen Green West, Dublin, now
-numbered 124-125. As a boy he was active out
-of doors, yet full of insatiable interest in books,
-and developed early his charming talent for drawing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
-and modelling. He was always rather grave
-than gay; but the best proof, if any were needed,
-that he had nothing of the prig in him, is that he
-was a favourite at school; the potential Great Man,
-in fact, to whom the others looked up. His one
-serious early illness was small-pox, which left his
-complexion slightly roughened. He entered Trinity
-College, in his native city, at fifteen. Either at
-this time, or just before, occurred an incident so
-characteristic as to be worth recording, for it illustrates
-both his power of mental concentration, and
-his still courage in facing the untoward haps of life
-alone. Like Shelley, he had a youthful fascination
-for chemistry. He had been dabbling with corrosive
-sublimate, not long before bedtime. Instead
-of going upstairs, he sat down, later, to figure out
-an allotted algebraic problem which, by way of
-whetting adventurous spirits, the author of the
-book in question acknowledged to be extremely
-difficult. Poring earnestly over the page, the boy
-fell to biting his nails. He instantly tasted poison,
-and pain and fear rushed on him. Without rousing
-a single person from sleep, he ran to the library,
-got down his father’s encyclopædia, turned to the
-article he needed, and learned that his antidote was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
-chalk and water; then he went in the dark to the
-coach-house where he had seen chalk used, got it,
-mixed and drank it, and returned to his interrupted
-task. His tutor could not fail to notice the agonised
-little face at breakfast. Robert confessed the
-mischance, and that he had lain perforce awake all
-night; but he added, modestly, that he had mastered
-the problem. One of Plutarch’s heroes, at that
-age, could hardly have done better. The antique
-world, with its heroic simpleness, was indeed
-Robert Emmet’s own ground. At Trinity he
-earned, without effort, a golden reputation, partly
-due to his scientific scholarship, partly to his goodness,
-partly, again, to his possession of a faculty
-of animated fluent speech, a faculty dear to the
-Irish, as to every primitive people. He had a
-presence noticeably sweet and winning, with “that
-gentleness so often found in determined spirits.”
-His classmate, Moore, the poet, bore witness
-long after to his “pure moral worth combined
-with intellectual power.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Emmet was wholly
-free from the follies and frailties of youth, though
-how capable he was of the most devoted passion
-events afterwards proved.” Mr. Charles Phillips
-wrote in 1818: “[Emmet at Trinity] was gifted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
-with abilities and virtues which rendered him an
-object of universal esteem and admiration. Every
-one loved, every one respected him; his fate made
-an impression on the University which has not yet
-been obliterated. His mind was naturally melancholy
-and romantic: he had fed it from the pure
-fountain of classic literature, and might be said to
-have lived not so much in the scene around him as
-in the society of the illustrious and sainted dead.
-The poets of antiquity were his companions, its
-patriots his models, and its republics his admiration.
-He had but just entered upon the world, full of the
-ardour which such studies might be supposed to
-have excited, and unhappily at a period in the
-history of his country when such noble feelings were
-not only detrimental but dangerous.”</p>
-
-<p>When Emmet was in his twentieth year the so-called
-Rebellion, in which Wolfe Tone and Lord
-Edward Fitzgerald were leaders, broke out. In
-the agitation which led up to it and sustained it,
-Thomas Addis Emmet was deeply implicated, nor
-did his younger brother go unsinged by the travelling
-flame. Sitting once by the pianoforte in
-Thomas Moore’s rooms, listening to <i>Let Erin
-Remember</i>, he stood up suddenly, with a brief<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
-pregnant speech, such as was habitual with him:
-“O that I were at the head of twenty thousand
-men, marching to that air!” As it was, he made
-one of the nineteen of her best spirits whom his
-University then thought fit to dismiss without benisons.
-One of these was no fiery undergraduate, but
-a Fellow and a famous scholar, Dr. Whitley Stokes.
-Their chief offence was that they had refused to tell
-what they knew of others who shared their outspoken
-opinions. There is no need here to dwell
-upon the memorable rising of 1798, or upon the
-rooted general opposition to that Union with Great
-Britain which wholesale bribery was so soon to consummate.
-One need but bear in mind that the
-Anglo-Irish (chiefly the Presbyterians and members
-of the dominant Church, the landed classes, who
-had nothing to gain and everything to lose by their
-championship of disenfranchised Catholics and the
-countless poor) came angrily to the fore as the
-defenders of nationalism, at a time when exile, the
-dungeon, and the axe, active for two generations,
-had deprived Ireland of the last of her native
-Jacobite gentry. Saurin, the great jurist, had
-written: “Whether it would be prudent in the
-people to avail themselves of that right would be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
-another question; but if a Legislative Union were
-forced on the country against the will of its inhabitants,
-it would be a nullity: .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. [To take issue
-with it] would be a struggle against usurpation, not
-resistance against law.” Emmet had only to cross
-the street from his College to hear the debates in
-either House of Parliament, to hear the like doctrine
-from Grattan in his glory; and with “malignants”
-of the loftiest character, like Lord Cloncurry,
-then the Rt. Hon. Valentine Lawless, he and his
-associated every day. It was inevitable, with such
-counsels of perfection brought to bear upon his daring
-and his entire disinterestedness, that Robert Emmet
-should attempt a popular emancipation, and succeed
-but in ruining himself. It was a poignant case of
-chronological and topographical misplacement. In
-his expulsion, or rather, withdrawal from College
-(for he had anticipated the action of the authorities),
-his father, of course, approved and stood by him,
-although Robert’s entry upon any professional career
-was fatally compromised. His “highly distinguished
-family, striking talents, and interesting
-manners,” could not mend that. He may even
-have taken at once the plain godly oath of the United
-Irishmen, and become an active agent for the cause.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
-Within the twelvemonth he had bestirred himself
-so effectually that a warrant was actually issued for
-his arrest. For some reason or other it was not put
-in force: even thus early there began to be woven
-about him the web of curious cross-purposes in
-which, in the end, he was to be caught and strangled.
-It became advisable to go to France, to see the
-First Consul and Talleyrand on an all-important
-matter. It would be well to reach a quiet place
-beyond espionage, where inhibited rites might go
-on. The young conspirator had military histories
-in process of annotation, plans of campaign in
-mountainous districts to perfect, seditious conferences
-to hold with colleagues and subordinates,
-and, incidentally, even poems to commit for his
-sad country’s sake. And there was another excellent
-reason why he found it convenient to go
-away.</p>
-
-<p>One of Robert Emmet’s college mates was
-Richard, youngest son of the John Philpot Curran,
-“ugly, copious, full of wit and ardour and fire,” the
-Curran of “fifty faces and twice as many voices,”
-of Byron’s lasting admiration. Richard had a
-sister Sarah, aged not quite eighteen when Robert
-Emmet, three years her senior, fell in love with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
-her. Sentimental invention has placed their first
-meeting at a ball in a Wicklow country-house;
-but it would rather seem as if, in the compact
-society of a gay little city like Dublin before the
-Union, they must have known each other fairly well
-from childhood, especially as the two families were
-then acquainted. That fatal mutual affection was
-to endure long vicissitudes and to prove invincible.</p>
-
-<p>We must infer from a passage in Mr. W. H.
-Curran’s <i>Life</i> of his father that Emmet’s reserve, for
-once, but imperfectly concealed evidences of some
-strong passion, political or extra-political, or both,
-from the oracular host of the Priory at Rathfarnham.
-Parenthetically, and without emphasis, Mr. Curran
-saw fit to warn his household against too implicit a
-cherishing of their engaging visitor. That Sarah’s
-interest in him was particular, that it was already
-awakened and deepening, seems never to have
-been surmised. According to such evidence as
-we have, it looks as though he had declared to
-her the state of his feelings before he went to Paris.
-It was not an hour, however, when Sarah dared to be
-happy. Her family had but just gathered together
-after a most harrowing break-up; she herself had
-been away for several years under the roof of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
-beloved clergyman in Lismore, and her homecoming
-was recent. Her mother, how driven to
-that point of revolt we know not, had eloped in
-1794 with a too sympathetic neighbouring vicar.
-Sarah was fourteen then, and of a peculiarly sensitive
-temperament; and she had worshipped her mother.
-Her sensitiveness was not allayed by her father’s
-increased mental aloofness from his family, after his
-misfortune. Incomparably genial, when he chose, to
-strangers, he visited his resentments in private upon
-his children, her children, especially upon his son
-Henry, who stood in lifelong dread of him. The
-one little daughter of his inordinate love, Gertrude,
-had died by accident at twelve years old.</p>
-
-<p>Sarah’s sad young face was typically Irish, her
-noble and touching beauty stamped in every feature
-with irony, melancholy, and fatalism. To her lover,
-with his head full of all poetic ideas, she must
-have looked like the very spirit of Innisfail. His
-intensely sanguine and resolute nature may have
-kept him from reading in such a face their own
-common rune of sorrow. It is clear that his forgetting
-her, while he was absorbed in the grave business
-abroad, was out of the question. No one knows, he
-tells Mme. la Marquise de Fontenay, in one of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
-few recovered letters, what his return to Ireland and
-to “the sorrows before him” is costing. Memories
-of the past (of that long-distanced past which is
-proper to blasted youth) must assail him; and it
-will be hard to affect that he has not known “tender
-ties, perhaps,” which he is forbidden to resume. The
-lad was writing in French, and does it in character.
-But then, as ever, he was radically sincere. His
-thoughts seem to have turned towards Dublin,
-from motives of filial duty. His father and mother
-had agreed to the elder brother’s first suggestion
-from Paris that Robert should be induced to go to
-America with him; and Robert felt that so generous
-a permission laid its own obligation on him not to
-accept the parting. Everything seemed to conspire
-to restore him to Ireland. And with his yet-to-be-liberated
-Ireland, like</p>
-
-<p class="center">
-“Flame on flame and wing on wing,”<br />
-</p>
-
-<p class="unindent">shone the remote sweetness of Sarah Curran. He
-was told that revolutionary hopes were ripening
-fast; he was thus lured back in October, 1802. His
-absence had lasted nearly three years.</p>
-
-<p>The separation had probably taught Sarah something
-more of her own heart. Immediately<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
-Emmet’s visits to the Priory were resumed, as if in
-the general stream of homage which brought so
-many enthusiastic young men into Mr. Curran’s
-presence, at evening, to listen and gather wisdom.
-Dr. Emmet died in April, much lamented, and by
-his will Robert came into possession of considerable
-ready money. He spent it instantly, effectively,
-and entirely on preparations for armed resistance.
-No one suspected it; those in his confidence were
-yet faithful. Still less did others suspect the now
-plighted attachment, the innocent love hungry for
-joy, and yet hurried on to dark ends through
-devious and hidden ways. Mr. Curran’s strenuous
-opposition, on all grounds, was necessarily taken for
-granted, until some prodigious success should befall
-Emmet, and as if by a spell free the daughter who
-so feared her father. Sarah knew detail by detail of
-the conspiracy as it arose, and was fain with all her
-soul to encourage its progress. For the two sensitive
-creatures under so complicated a strain there passed
-an anxious and exciting year. The most disagreeable
-surprise of Mr. Curran’s life was yet to come
-before it ended.</p>
-
-<p>Robert Emmet took lodgings under an assumed
-name in Butterfield Lane, in the suburb of Rathfarnham.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
-His agents came to him by night and reported
-their progress. The record of all he had meant to
-do, drawn up with manly composure at the brink of
-the grave, may be read elsewhere. As has been
-noted, his plan for the capture of Dublin and the
-summoning of the patriotic Members of Parliament
-was clearly founded on an inspiring precedent,
-that of the Revolution of 1640 in Portugal,
-when but two-score clever and resolute men served
-to deliver the whole country from the yoke of
-Spain. But when the hour of Ireland’s destiny
-struck, every clock-wheel went wrong. If the failure
-were not so piteous, because of one’s interest in the
-doomed wizard and his suddenly disenchanted wand,
-it would be grotesque. Emmet had studied with
-enormous industry, and arranged with masterly precision,
-directing, among pikes and powder in his
-dingy depôts, each needful move and counter-move
-for a concerted rising; he thought it strange that
-in every conceivable way, major and minor, the whole
-scheme simultaneously miscarried.</p>
-
-<p>If one could believe him as free as he believed
-himself, one might regret that he maintained too
-perfect a secrecy, and counted too much upon
-the elasticity of Irish impulse. He had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
-careful to avoid what he thought the error of the
-United Irishmen in establishing too many posts
-for revolutionary action, and confiding knowledge
-of preliminaries to innumerable persons all over
-the country, some of whom would be almost
-certain to play him false. He worked in the
-dark, with but a dozen friends at his elbow,
-spending his money freely but heedfully on manufacturing
-and storing weapons of war in Dublin.
-He looked towards a moment when a disaffected
-legion would arise at a summons, like the men
-from the heath in <i>The Lady of the Lake:</i> a legion
-which he could arm and command and weld, in
-one magic moment, for Ireland’s regeneration. He
-leaned overmuch, not on human goodness, but on
-human intelligence in making opportunity: and it
-failed him. He was like the purely literary playwright
-labouring with the average theatre audience;
-he was never in the least, for all his wit, cunning
-enough to deal scientifically with a corporation on
-whom hints, half-tones, adumbrations, are thrown
-away; the law of whose being is still to crave a
-presentation of the “undisputed thing in such a
-solemn way.” As drama through its processes, act
-after act, does well to assume that we are all blockheads,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
-and then, as the case requires, to modify,
-so any flaming revolutionary genius would do well
-to trust nothing whatever to a moral inspiration
-only too likely to be non-existent. It is a terribly
-costly thing to be, as we say, equal to an emergency,
-before the emergency is quite ready to be equalled.
-And that was Emmet’s plight. A French fleet had
-been promised to begin military operations towards
-the end of August, but an unforeseen explosion in one
-of Emmet’s Dublin magazines led him to declare
-his toy war against the English Crown prematurely.
-The local volunteer troops were to be reinforced by
-others, well armed, from the outlying counties, at
-the firing of a rocket agreed upon; the Castle was
-to be seized as the chief move, and a Provisional
-Government, according to printed programme, set
-up. The time for assembling was hurriedly fixed
-for July 23, 1803, early in the evening. The gentlemen
-leaders and the trusty battalions failed to appear,
-kept away by mysterious quasi-authentic advices;
-appeared instead, as time wore on, many unknown,
-unprepossessing insurgents, the drunken refuse of the
-city taverns. The cramp-irons, the scaling-ladders,
-the blunderbusses, the fuses for the grenades, were not
-ready; signals had been delayed or suppressed; the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>
-prepared slow-matches were mixed in with others;
-treachery was at work and running like fire in oil
-under the eyes of one who could believe no ill of
-human kind. Beyond Dublin, the Wicklow men
-under Dwyer, an epic peasant figure, received no
-message; the Wexford men waited in vain for
-orders all night; the Kildare men, whom Emmet
-meant to head in person, actually reached the city,
-and left it again. They had met and talked with
-him, and were not satisfied with the number and
-quality of the weapons, chiefly primitive inventions
-of his own; and because Dublin confederates were
-not produced for inspection (such was Emmet’s
-caution where others were concerned), the canny
-farmers returned homewards, spreading the ill word
-along the roads that Dublin had refused to act.
-Each imaginable prospect grew darker than its
-alternative. But the curtain had to rise now,
-let results be what they might. About nine o’clock,
-Emmet being in such a state of speechless agitation
-as may be conceived, one Quigley rushed in with
-the false report that the Government soldiery were
-upon them. There was nothing to do but sally
-forth in the hope of augmented numbers, once the
-move was made. The poor “General,” in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
-green-and-white-and-gold uniform, at the head of
-some eighty insubordinates, took in the bitter situation
-at a glance: he foresaw how his holy insurrection
-would dwindle to a three-hours’ riot, how his
-dream, with all its costly architecture, was ending
-like snow in the gutter. Hardly had he set out
-on foot, with drawn sword, through the town,
-accompanied by the faithful Stafford and two or
-three associates, followed confusedly by the uncontrollable
-crowd, when an uproar rose from the
-rear; there was a sudden commotion which ended
-in wounds and death to a citizen and an officer;
-then the spirit of rowdyism, private pillage, and
-indiscriminate slaughter took the lead. While it
-ran high, Arthur Wolfe, Lord Kilwarden, Lord
-Chief-Justice, the one unfailingly humane and deservedly
-beloved judge in all Ireland, was killed.
-He was driving in from the country with his
-daughter and his nephew, the Rev. Richard Wolfe;
-finding the carriage stopped in Thomas Street, he
-put his grey head out at the window in the pleasant
-evening light, announcing the honoured name which,
-as he thought he knew, would be his passport
-through the maddest mob ever gathered. A muddle-brained
-creature, quite mistaken as to facts, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
-acting in revenge for a wrong never inflicted, unmercifully
-piked him: a fate paralleled only by the
-unpremeditated assassination in our own time of
-that other kindest heart, Lord Frederick Cavendish.
-It is significant that some in the ranks afterwards
-made separately in court the unasked declaration
-that had they been near enough, Lord Kilwarden’s
-life should have been saved at the expense of their
-own. Such, indeed, was the general feeling. It
-has been carelessly stated that Emmet was not far
-from the scene of the outrage, and arrived, in a
-fury, just too late to prevent the second horror,
-the stabbing to death of Mr. Wolfe; and that it
-was he who took the unfortunate Miss Wolfe, to
-whom no violence was offered, from the carriage.
-But records now show conclusively that (as he
-once said) he had withdrawn from that part of
-Dublin before the murders came to pass. He had
-addressed his followers in Francis Street, setting his
-face against useless bloodshed, and made for the
-mountains hard by, commanding those who retained
-any sense of discipline to go along with him.
-A quick retreat was the only sagacious course to
-follow in this gross witless turmoil, so contrary to
-his purpose: for his printed manifesto had expressly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
-declared life and property were to be held sacred.
-His secret, up to this point, was practically safe,
-and his losses reparable. The “rebels” abroad
-that night were but diabolical changelings; he
-would break away with the few he could rely
-upon, nurse hope to life with the courage that
-never failed, and take his chances to fight again.
-He reached safety, unchallenged; Dwyer even then
-implored for leave to call out on the morrow his
-disappointed veterans for a new assay; but Emmet
-was firm. No lust of revenge on fate, no recoil from
-being thought, for one hot moment, a coward, could
-shake him from his shrewd and rational acceptance
-of present defeat. He had no personal ambition,
-no vicarious tax to pay it. Ireland could wait the
-truer hour. He seems never once to have bewailed
-aloud the miserable end of his own long minute
-study of military strategy, the foul check to aspirations
-founded in honour, and breathed upon by the
-dead of Salamis and Thermopylæ.</p>
-
-<p>It is an almost incredible fact that the authorities,
-meanwhile, whether aware or unaware of the projected
-outbreak, were virtually off their guard, and
-the garrison was so little in condition to repel an
-onset that not a ball in the arsenal would fit the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
-artillery! Public attention in Great Britain was
-fixed on the difficulties with France, and this preoccupation
-everywhere affected social life. Dublin
-had been almost deserted on July 23; the Castle
-gates stood wide open, without sentries. Two
-entire hours passed before the detachments of horse
-and foot arrived to clear the streets. “Government
-escaped by a sort of miracle,” as <i>The Nation</i>
-remarked half a century after, “by a series of
-accidents and mistakes no human sagacity could
-have foreseen, and no skill repair.” Though there
-was treachery behind and before as we now see,
-Emmet, mournfully closing his summary of events,
-took no account of it. “Had I another week [of
-privacy], had I one thousand pounds, had I one
-thousand men, I would have feared nothing.
-There was redundancy enough in any one part to
-have made up in completeness for deficiency in the
-rest. But there was failure in all: plan, preparation,
-and men.” Three days after the abortive
-rising, the disturbance was completely over and
-the country everywhere quiet. The whole number
-of the slain was under fifty.</p>
-
-<p>None among those who have written of Robert
-Emmet have noted for what reason the news of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
-the death of Lord Kilwarden must have been to
-him a last desperate blow. Quite apart from his
-natural horror of the blundering crime, he had the
-most intimate cause to lament it. Lord Kilwarden
-was the person in all the world whom John Philpot
-Curran most revered: “my guardian angel,” he
-was wont to call him, summing up in the words all
-his tutelary service of long years to a junior colleague.
-It would have gone hard with Mr. Curran,
-so high was partisan passion at the time, if, in his
-defence of the State prisoners during the terrible
-series of prosecutions in the ’98, he had not been
-protected, day after day, by the strong influence of
-Kilwarden. Emmet, if he could have leaned for
-once on a merely selfish motive, might have looked
-forward, as to the blackness of hell, to that hour
-when Curran should learn that his dearest friend’s
-indirect murderer was none other than his daughter’s
-betrothed lover. Apprehensions of danger to his
-sweetheart must have haunted Robert Emmet
-through the sleepless nights among the outlawed
-folk on the wild fragrant Wicklow hillsides.
-Below, in a little port, was a fishing-smack under
-full sail, which meant liberty and security, would
-he but abandon all and come away. But the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
-insistent beat of his own heart was to see his
-beautiful Sarah again; to learn how she looked
-upon him, or whether she would fly with him now
-that his first great endeavour was over, and only the
-rag of a pure motive was left to clothe his soiled
-dream and his abject undoing. It was a mad deed;
-but Robert Emmet, in relics of his tarnished regimentals,
-stole back to Dublin. He was so young
-that the adventure took on multiple attractions.</p>
-
-<p>He hid himself in a house at Harold’s Cross,
-where he had masqueraded once before, when his
-country’s need constrained him. Now he was
-there chiefly because the road in front ran towards
-Rathfarnham, and because, at least, he could sometime
-or other watch his own dear love go by. A
-servant, a peasant wench who was devoted to him,
-Anne Devlin, carried letters under her apron to the
-Priory, carried letters “richer than Ind” back to
-the proscribed master. She was a neighbouring
-dairyman’s daughter, and her coming and going
-were unquestioned. Forty years after, in her
-pathetic old age, she told Dr. Madden how Miss
-Sarah’s emotion would all but betray her: “When
-I handed her a letter, her face would change so, one
-would hardly know her.” And again: “Miss Sarah<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
-was not tall, her figure was very slight, her complexion
-dark, her eyes large and black, and her look
-was the mildest, the softest, and the sweetest look
-you ever saw!” All this is beautifully borne out
-by the Romney portrait, save that the pensive face
-which Romney must have begun to paint before the
-time of her betrothal (for after 1799 he painted
-hardly at all) is not olive-skinned and not black-eyed.
-The eyes are, in truth, very dark, but of
-Irish violet-grey. Every Anne Devlin in the world
-would have called them “black.” But one hastens
-to contradict a hasty phrase: there is but one Anne
-Devlin, a soul beyond price, who suffered afterwards
-and without capitulation, for her “Mr.
-Robert’s” sake, tortures of body and mind which
-read like those in the <i>Acta Sanctorum</i>. Her name
-will be with his when that “country shall have taken
-her place among the nations of the earth;” until then
-there is no fear but that those who care for him will
-keep a little candle burning to his most heroic friend.</p>
-
-<p>At every house where Emmet lived, as “Mr.
-Huet” or “Mr. Ellis,” during his fugitive and
-perilous months, he had his romantic trap-doors,
-and removable wainscots, and sliding panels. Even
-at Casino, his own home in the country, closed after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
-his father’s death, with its summer-house and decaying
-garden, he provided like subterfuges and
-inventions of his own, for he had a turn for mechanism
-as well as for the plastic arts. It is hard to be
-both a hunted rebel and an anxious lover, to have
-equal necessity for staying in and for sallying forth!
-Just so had “Lord Edward,” dear to every one who
-knew him, managed to exist, in and out of a hole,
-before his seizure and death. It has been justly
-said that “a system of government which could
-reduce such men as Robert Emmet and Lord
-Edward Fitzgerald to live the life of conspirators,
-and die the death of traitors, is condemned by that
-alone.” It seems hardly possible but that Robert
-and his Sarah made out to meet again, as they had
-met after the lamentable no-rising, when for a night
-and a morning he had lingered in the alarmed city
-before escaping into the mountains. One may be
-not far wrong in believing that the girl was by this
-time too overwrought, dismayed, and grief-stricken,
-to come to any immediate decision about joining
-him, and breaking away while there was yet opportunity.
-He must have realised fully the alternative,
-whether she did so or not, that to remain in Ireland
-was but to beckon on his fate. At any rate, on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
-August 23, at his humble dining-table, he was
-suddenly apprehended. The informer has never
-been discovered; from the Secret Service Money
-books we know that he received his due £1000.
-The captor was Major Sirr, the unloved fowler of
-that other young eagle of insurrection but just mentioned,
-Lord Edward Fitzgerald. He was able to
-recognise Emmet by the retrospective description
-obligingly furnished by Dr. Elrington, Provost of
-Trinity, of an undergraduate whom he had not loved.
-The captive was bound and led away, bleeding from
-a pistol wound in the shoulder. He had tried to get
-off, and some rough treatment followed, for which
-apologies were tendered. “All is fair in war,” said
-the prince of courtesy. The Earl of Hardwicke,
-then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, writes two days
-after, in his usual covertly kind way, of the arrest
-of young Emmet, now consigned to Kilmainham
-Gaol on the charge of high treason. “I confess I
-had imagined that he had escaped,” he says to his
-brother, his confidential daily correspondent. “His
-having remained here looks as if he had been in expectation
-of a further attempt.” Not yet was the
-Lord Lieutenant aware of the love-story intertwined
-with the one-man insurrection.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>When enclosed in his cell, Emmet became the
-object of apparent concern and affection on the
-part of two acquaintances: the accomplished advocate
-and litterateur, Mr. Leonard M’Nally, and Dr.
-Trevor, Superintendent of Prisons. If these persons
-had stepped out of an ancient epic or some fancied
-tragedy to show what human genius could do by
-way of creating hypocrites, no plaudit ever yet given
-could be worthy of the play. They were both moral
-monsters, paragons of evil, beyond the Florentine or
-Elizabethan imagination. How they played with
-the too noble and trusting creature in their hands,
-how they tricked him with illusory plans of escape,
-and beguiled him into inditing documents which
-were promptly handed over to headquarters, need
-not detain us, though it supplies a long thrilling
-chapter in the humanities. Emmet’s first move was
-to empty his pockets of coin for the gaoler, under
-the man’s promise that he would carry in person a
-communication to Miss Curran. The recipient was
-not that distracted maid, but the Attorney-General.
-The Lord Lieutenant wrote to the Hon. Charles
-Yorke on September 9 as follows: “A curious
-discovery has been made respecting Emmet, the
-particulars of which I have not time to detail to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
-you fully. There were found upon him two letters
-from a woman, written with a knowledge of the
-transactions in which he had been engaged, and
-with good wishes for the success of any future
-attempt. He has been very anxious to prevent
-these letters being brought forward, and has been
-apprehensive that the writer was arrested as well as
-himself. Till yesterday, however, we were entirely
-ignorant of the person who had written these letters,
-which are very clever and striking. The discovery
-was made last night by a letter from Emmet, intercepted
-on its passage from Kilmainham Prison to
-Miss Sarah Curran, youngest daughter of Curran
-the lawyer. Wickham has seen him, and he professes
-entire ignorance of the connection; but I
-think he must decline being counsel for Emmet in
-a case in which his daughter may be implicated. It
-is a very extraordinary story, and strengthens the
-case against Emmet.” A rumour of the fate of his
-letters was allowed to reach Emmet, and cut him to
-the quick. He wrote at once begging that the third
-letter (surely with news of his arrest, and with such
-assurances and sorrowful endearments as the occasion
-called for), might not be withheld; and in
-exchange for the service demanded, knowing that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
-the Government already feared what that eloquent
-tongue might have to say in court, he offered to plead
-guilty, and go dumb to the grave. He who had
-staked so much on the purity of his public motive,
-he who cared only, and cared fiercely, for the clearing
-of his name from the misconceptions of posterity,
-he who was one of the elect souls loving his love so
-much because he loved honour more—he, Robert
-Emmet, was willing to forfeit every chance of his
-own vindication for the sake of the sad girl brought
-into abhorrent publicity by his rashness. He said
-he had injured her; he pleaded for the delivery of
-the letter, and offered his own coveted silence as the
-price of it. “That was certainly a fine trait in his
-character,” said Grattan, who looked upon him as a
-visionary broken justly upon the wheel of things
-ordained. Sarah never received her letter. But
-the discovery that there had been a correspondence
-between herself and the arch-rebel was a highly
-important-looking circumstance, and with all apologies
-to its distinguished owner, the Priory at Rathfarnham
-was ordered to be searched. Mr. Curran
-was not at home, but he returned in season to meet
-Major Sirr and the armed escort riding down his
-drive-way, and aglow with virtuous wrath at the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
-possibility of suspicion alighting upon him or his,
-he went to clear himself before the Privy Council.
-Though his action secured its ends, being voluntary
-and merely formal, it was a singular humiliation to
-the paternity concerned. But the culminating shock
-he had to endure arose from another cause. Sarah’s
-apartments had been searched; Emmet’s glowing
-letters, openly alluding to his purposes, had been
-seized, and tied up and carried away. Here was
-complicity indeed! and the knowledge of it came
-upon him like a thunderbolt.</p>
-
-<p>Within a few days, towards the end of this month
-of August, Mr. Curran himself received a letter
-from Robert Emmet. It was neither signed nor
-dated, and opened abruptly, waiving all formalities,
-not from any hidden defiance, but from entire
-absorption in the mournful retrospect it called up.
-As we know from Lord Hardwicke’s communication,
-Emmet had retained Mr. Curran for his counsel, and
-it was thought fitting that the latter should decline
-the brief for the defence. Of course Mr. Curran
-threw it up; no man could have done otherwise.
-But his general turmoil, and the apparent motives of
-it, are not a particularly noble spectacle. The young
-prisoner, meanwhile, had something to say to him.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>“I did not expect you to be my counsel. I
-nominated you, because not to have done so might
-have appeared remarkable. Had Mr. ——<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> been
-in town, I did not even wish to have seen you, but
-as he was not, I wrote to you to come to me at once.
-I know that I have done you very severe injury,
-much greater than I can atone for with my life;
-that atonement I did offer to make before the
-Privy Council by pleading guilty if those documents
-were suppressed.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. My intention was not to leave
-the suppression of those documents to possibility,
-but to render it unnecessary for anyone to plead for
-me, by pleading guilty to the charge myself. The
-circumstances that I am now going to mention I do
-not state in my own justification. When I first
-addressed your daughter I expected that in another
-week my own fate would have been decided. I
-knew that in case of success many others would
-look on me differently from what they did at that
-moment; but I speak with sincerity when I say that
-I never was anxious for situation or distinction myself,
-and I did not wish to be united to one who
-was. I spoke to your daughter, neither expecting
-nor (under those circumstances) wishing that there
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>should be a return of attachment, but wishing to
-judge of her dispositions, to know how far they
-might be not unfavourable or disengaged, and to
-know what foundation I might afterwards have to
-count on. I received no encouragement whatever.
-She told me she had no attachment for any person,
-nor did she seem likely to have any that could make
-her wish to quit you. I stayed away till the time
-had elapsed, when I found that the event to which
-I allude was to be postponed indefinitely. I returned,
-by a kind of infatuation, thinking that to myself
-only was I giving pleasure or pain. I perceived no
-progress of attachment on her part, nor anything in
-her conduct to distinguish me from a common
-acquaintance. Afterwards I had reason to suppose
-that [political] discoveries were made, and that I
-should be obliged to quit the kingdom immediately.
-I came to make a renunciation of any approach to
-friendship that might have been formed. On that
-very day she herself spoke to me to discontinue my
-visits; I told her it was my intention, and I
-mentioned the reason. I then for the first time
-found, when I was unfortunate, by the manner in
-which she was affected, that there was a return of
-affection, and that it was too late to retreat. My<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
-own apprehensions also I afterwards found were
-without cause; and I remained. There has been
-much culpability on my part in all this, but there
-has also been a great deal of that misfortune which
-seems uniformly to have accompanied me. That I
-have written to your daughter since an unfortunate
-event [the arrest], has taken place, was an additional
-breach of propriety for which I have suffered well;
-but I will candidly confess that I not only do not
-feel it to have been of the same extent, but that I
-consider it to have been unavoidable after what had
-passed. For though I shall not attempt to justify
-in the smallest degree my former conduct, yet,
-when an attachment was once formed between us
-(and a sincerer one never did exist), I feel that,
-peculiarly circumstanced as I then was, to have left
-her uncertain of my situation would neither have
-weaned her affections nor lessened her anxiety; and
-looking upon her as one whom, if I lived, I hoped to
-have had my partner for life, I did hold the removing
-of her anxiety above every other consideration. I
-would rather have the affections of your daughter in
-the back settlements of America, than the first situation
-this country could offer without them. I know
-not whether this will be any extenuation of my<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
-offence; I know not whether it will be any extenuation
-of it to know that if I had that situation in my
-power at this moment I would relinquish it to
-devote my life to her happiness; I know not whether
-success would have blotted out the recollection of
-what I have done; but I [do] know that a man with
-the coldness of death on him need not to be made to
-feel any other coldness, and that he may be spared
-any addition to the misery he feels, not for himself,
-but for those to whom he has left nothing but
-sorrow.”</p>
-
-<p>It is apparent from this page that the great Mr.
-Curran had not withheld from one under misfortune
-some crumbs of that verbal opulence for which he
-was famous. Emmet’s disclaimer of any eagerness
-on Sarah’s part in reciprocating his devotion is a
-knightly one. The interpretation of her maidenly
-conduct, purely chivalric, was designed to exculpate
-her in her over-lord’s eyes.</p>
-
-<p>Poor Sarah, thus rudely informed by events of her
-Robert’s arrest, in an hour of unprecedented torment,
-did not lack the tender consideration from the Chief
-Secretary and the Attorney-General, which her innocent
-misery deserved. Lord Hardwicke, too, directed
-that no action of any kind should be taken against<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
-her. But the stress of this last summer day was too
-much for her after the intense emotional life she had
-been bearing so long alone. In the breath of her love’s
-exposure and of her father’s anger head and heart
-seemed to break together, and for months to come
-she was to be wholly and most mercifully exempt
-from the “rack of this rough world.” On September
-16, the Home Secretary was able to felicitate the
-Lord Lieutenant from Whitehall on his generous
-treatment of the implicated rebel at the Priory:
-“Your delicacy and management,” he says, “with
-regard to the Curran family is highly applauded.
-The King is particularly pleased with it. It is a sad
-affair. Mademoiselle seems a true pupil of Mary
-Wollstonecraft.” This, of course, amounts to the
-accusation that gentle little Sarah, with her sweet
-eyes and her “most harmonious voice,” was guilty of
-doing her own thinking, and of doing it, which was
-worst of all, upon political matters. It supplies us,
-at any rate, with evidence of the wide and deep
-grounds for Emmet’s true passion for the girl whose
-national ideals could so fearlessly keep pace with
-his own. Heart and brain, soul and body, she
-would have been his perfect mate. Her father’s
-harshness was the one element needed to perfect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
-Sarah’s desolation. Her real life closed without
-conscious pain, and remained for a decent space
-buried. She never had to look in the face the
-day of Emmet’s death, the all-significant day
-“under her solemn fillet;” for that had tiptoed past
-her while her reason slept. The good sister Amelia,
-afterwards Shelley’s friend and portrait-painter in
-Italy, as soon as Sarah could be moved, took her
-away from the intolerable home, and left her with
-loving Quaker friends, the Penroses of Cork.
-During all the time of her affliction and illness at
-the Priory, Mr. Curran is said never to have looked
-upon his youngest daughter’s face; and from the
-hour of her leaving Dublin, presumably under an
-allowance made for her support, he seems neither
-ever to have sent her a message, nor to have thought
-of her again.</p>
-
-<p>There are several historic instances of a like
-fatherliness in fathers, a century ago. Mr. Curran
-doubtless felt outraged in every fibre, and not more
-indignant at the independent conduct of his meek
-domestic vassal than at the astounding ignorance in
-which she had contrived to keep him. Yet there
-were powerful pleas for compassion in such a case
-inherent in his own history. In early manhood he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
-himself had figured as collaborator in a similar headlong
-falling in love, a similar breach of parental
-discipline. John Philpot Curran had been for a
-short time tutor in the family of a fellow-Whig, Dr.
-Richard Creagh of Creagh Castle, near Spenser’s
-Doneraile, when with Miss Creagh, a young lady of
-beauty and of moderate fortune, he contracted a
-private marriage. The discovery brought on storms;
-but on further reflection Dr. Creagh saw fit to
-forgive the offenders, to receive them once more
-beneath his roof, and even to allow his daughter’s
-portion to be expended without stint on Mr. Curran,
-until he had completed his legal studies in London,
-and begun to establish his inevitable ascendancy at
-the Bar. The match, however, seems never to have
-been a happy one. Conjugal differences seldom
-lack their annotation. Without adopting the adjective
-missiles of either faction, let it suffice to say
-that they parted, in the summary fashion of which
-we are already aware. Mr. Curran had earned
-a right, he may have thought, to his opinion of
-women. The memory of his calamity may well
-have operated to make him both excessively exacting
-as to female behaviour and pitiless towards any
-supposed violation of it. In one touching story<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
-of domestic ruin, at least, he had a deplorable
-influence. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick, in his <i>Life,
-Times, and Contemporaries of Lord Cloncurry</i>, records
-that after the Lady Cloncurry’s trespass, her
-generous husband would have taken her back,
-“were it not for his well-beloved J——n P——t
-C——n, who urged him, in strong and persuasive
-language, to the contrary.” Moreover, an Irish
-father is as likely as not to cherish spacious ideas
-of his own governing prerogative, and refuse to
-be tied in the matter to “anything so temporal,”
-as Lowell says in another application, “as a responsibility.”
-Mr. Curran could have bespoken for
-his children other destinies if they had ever known
-freedom of the heart at home.</p>
-
-<p>Again, his attitude towards Emmet may have
-seemed to him no exaggerated hatred, but the mere
-tribute of virtuous scorn. In that, however, he
-was self-deceived. To any publicist in Ireland with
-the seed of compromise in him, even if the compromise
-never amounted to the smallest sacrifice
-of actual principle, Robert Emmet’s straight career
-must have been like a buffet in the face. Naked logic
-was Emmet’s element, and the expedient his negligible
-quantity. Every agitation sincerely founded<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
-on a popular need breeds, in time, its extremists.
-They are the glory and the difficulty of all reform.
-It might have been said of Emmet, as at the outset
-of the Oxford Movement it was said of Hurrell
-Froude, that “the gentleman was not afraid of
-inferences.” Curran’s thoughts dwelt in no such
-simplified worlds. Like all the best Irishmen of
-his blazingly brilliant day, he was for Parliamentary
-Reform and Catholic Emancipation, and against the
-Union. It was even he who appeared to defend the
-revolutionists of 1798, who had obtained the writ
-of <i>habeas corpus</i> for Wolfe Tone on the very morning
-set for his execution under court-martial (a
-reprieve frustrated by suicide), and who was the first
-to plead, though with vain eloquence, at the bar of
-attainder for the Fitzgerald heirs. But though his
-convictions seemed close enough to Emmet’s, there
-was wide variance in their bearing and momentum.
-Initial or generic differences take on an almost
-amatory complexion when contrasted with those
-springing from the final consideration in like minds.
-Both men vehemently desired the framing of fresh
-good laws, and the unhampered operation of existing
-good laws, for Ireland. To Curran, incorruptible
-as he was, England was an excellent general superintendent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
-and referee to set over the concerns of
-other nations, including his own, provided that she
-could be got to abstain scrupulously from undue
-interference, and hold tenure under a more than
-nominal corporal withdrawal. Poor Emmet’s ideal
-of Irish independence was remote enough from this.
-He had read somewhere that his country used to
-be a proud kingdom, and not a petted province.
-Surely, Curran in his latter years, when he “sank”
-(the word is Cloncurry’s, and used of his friend) to
-office, could have no patience with a Separatist son-in-law.
-But the Master of the Rolls continued to
-be a great man, and Emmet at twenty-five ceased
-to be a fool.</p>
-
-<p>The trial came off before Lord Norbury, Mr.
-Baron George, and Mr. Baron Daly on September
-19, 1803, at the court-house in Green Street. It
-is an extraordinary circumstance that it lasted eleven
-hours in a crowded room, the prisoner standing for
-all that time in the dock without proper food or
-rest. Mr. Emmet firmly refused to call any witnesses,
-to allow any statement by his counsel, or to
-furnish any comment upon the evidence. Long
-afterwards, Mr. Peter Burrowes told Moore of the
-continual check put upon his own attempts to disconcert<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
-those who were giving testimony. “No,
-no,” Emmet would protest, “the man is speaking
-the truth.” The indictment was in part
-strengthened by the reading in court of passages
-of his own captured love-letters to Miss Curran.
-Thanks to the consideration of the Attorney-General
-the reading was brief and as non-committal
-as possible, Miss Curran’s name being of course
-suppressed. The Attorney-General (Mr. Standish
-O’Grady) showed, throughout the poor girl’s
-troubles, a most fatherly solicitude towards her,
-and pleaded for her with her own father, without
-appreciable results.</p>
-
-<p>Emmet had other annoyances to bear. Mr.
-Conyngham Plunkett, as counsel for the Crown,
-took an unfair advantage of the silence of the
-counsels for the prisoner (Messrs. Ball, Burrowes,
-and M’Nally), and delivered at great length a very
-able oration, in which, <i>more Hibernico</i>, he had rather
-more to say of the Creator of men, and of His
-implicit support of the existing Government, than
-was strictly necessary; neither did he forget to
-recommend “sincere repentance of crime” to “the
-unfortunate young gentleman.” And when Emmet
-himself was invited to speak, and did so, or would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
-have done so, to really magnificent purpose, he was
-causelessly and continually interrupted by the presiding
-judge, lectured on the virtues and the standing
-of his long-deceased elder brother, and on the
-abominable anomaly of “a gentleman by birth”
-associating with “the most profligate and abandoned
-.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. hostlers, bakers, butchers, and such persons!”
-A sprig of lavender was handed him by some woman
-in the close court-room; it was snatched away as
-soon, on the groundless suspicion that it had been
-poisoned by one who would save the youth from his
-approaching fate. The jury, without leaving the
-box, brought in a verdict of guilty. It was to them
-a clear case. As the Earl of Hardwicke wrote to
-his brother, the Honourable Charles Yorke, “it was
-unanimously admitted that a more complete case of
-treason was never stated in a court of justice.” Of
-Emmet himself he adds conclusively: “He persisted
-in the opinions he had entertained, and the
-principles in which he had been educated.”</p>
-
-<p>It was late in the evening when the Clerk of the
-Crown, following the usual form, ended: “Prisoner
-at the bar, what have you therefore now to say why
-judgment of death and execution should not be
-awarded against you according to law?” Emmet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
-was weary, but had body and mind under triumphant
-control, and he filled the next half-hour with
-words which were overwhelming at the time, and
-will never fail to thrill the most casual reader who
-can discern in them the victory of the human spirit
-over the powers which crush it. It is an immortal
-appeal. The rich phrases, the graceful, quick
-gestures, were unprepared and born of the moment.
-We are told that Emmet walked about a little, or
-stood bending hither and thither, in his earnestness.
-“He seemed to have acquired a swaying motion,
-when he spoke in public, which was peculiar to
-him; but there was no affectation in it.” It was a
-habit which the young man shared with a great contemporary
-singularly free from mannerisms: the
-Grattan to whom he used to listen, spell-bound, in
-his early years. Emmet has been misreported in
-one important particular. He had a fine understanding
-of the uses of irony; but it is his praise
-that he was also scrupulously, persistently, and invincibly
-courteous. To know him is to know that
-sentences such as those figuring in some reports of
-his speech, about “that viper,” meaning (Mr.
-Plunkett), or “persons who would not disgrace
-themselves by shaking your (that is, Lord Norbury’s)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
-blood-stained hand,” are, as attributed to him,
-all but impossible. The truth seems to be that
-his admirers, finding him unaccountably lacking
-in invective, and the vituperative power of the
-Gael, have amended, between them, this evidence of
-his undutiful shortcomings. It were a pity to summarise
-or paraphrase that living rhetoric, so fit in
-its place. We are disposed to forget nowadays
-that emotional speech is natural speech: its many
-and seemingly exuberant colours are but primal
-and legitimate, whereas it is our subdued daily
-chatter which is artificial. Emmet did not occupy
-himself with refuting the charge of having revolted
-against existing political conditions with “the scum
-of the Liberties behind him,” for he had a concern
-more intimate. It had been reported broadcast, and
-it had been taken for granted at the trial, that he
-had become an agent of France because he sought
-to deliver the country over to French rule. Hopeless,
-there and then, of being understood on the
-main issue, he was determined to make himself
-plain in this. He admitted that he had indeed
-laboured to establish a French alliance, but expressly
-under bond that aided Ireland, once freed, should
-be as completely independent of France as he would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
-have her of England. He sought, as he said, such
-a guarantee as Franklin had secured for America.
-For the reassertion of his own position as a patriot,
-Emmet spent his last energies. Like some few
-other selfless reformers known to history, he had
-taken little pains to proclaim himself, and in consequence
-had been translated into terms of expected
-profit and personal ambition, in the generalising
-minds of bystanders. It was nothing to him to go
-to his untimely grave legally convicted of Utopianism,
-precipitation, madness, or even of monstrous
-wickedness; but why he had plunged into such
-folly, or such crime, or such pure passion for
-freedom, as the case might be, seemed to demand
-some explanation from the person best qualified to
-give it. To risk that his informing intent should be
-misread hereafter, was more than he could bear.
-And thus it came about that, reserved as he always
-was, humble as he always was, he blazed out at last,
-and feared not to base himself proudly on “my
-character.” The word recurs: its numerical strength
-is almost equal to that of the beloved other one,
-“my country.” This was clearly a tautologous
-egotist, this young belated Girondin, to those who
-knew him not. As he talked on, in his beautiful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
-round tones, into the night, the dingy lamps begun
-to sputter as if tired of their unexpected vigil.
-“My lamp of life is nearly extinguished,” he said,
-looking sadly down. And then: “My race is run.
-The grave opens to receive me, and I sink into
-its bosom. I have but one request to make, at my
-departure from this world: it is the charity of its
-silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no
-man who knows my motives dare now vindicate
-them, let not prejudice nor ignorance asperse them.
-Let them rest in obscurity and peace; let my
-memory remain in oblivion, and my tomb remain
-uninscribed, until other times and other men can
-do justice to my character. When my country
-shall have taken her place among the nations of the
-earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be
-written. I have done.” There was perceptible
-emotion in every breast but his, when sentence of
-death by hanging and beheading was given at half-past
-ten o’clock, and ordered to take place next day.</p>
-
-<p>Emmet’s strong slight frame had stood the long
-ordeal perfectly, and his mood had wings. He
-whispered cheerfully through the grating: “I
-shall be hanged to-morrow!” as he passed John
-Hickson’s cell on his way back to his own.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>We know he read the Litany there; and he
-also indulged a turn for secular, and even profane
-employment. In fact, it pleased Mr. Robert
-Emmet to draw himself (he drew exquisitely) as
-a posthumous serial in two parts. Some one found
-and recognised the grim <i>R. E., head</i>, the disconcerted
-<i>R. E., body</i>, on separate scraps of paper:
-they lay on his little table, when all was over,
-witnesses to the detached humour possible to an
-easy conscience. His industry was great during the
-few remaining hours. He possessed a lock of his
-absent Sarah’s hair, which she may have given him
-years before: this he wished to wear in his dying
-hour. As he sat plaiting it minutely, and tenderly
-fastening it into the fold of his velvet stock, he was
-noticed and questioned. Fearing that the treasure
-might be taken from him, he said that his occupation
-was “an innocent one.” The only persons
-allowed to see him were the chaplains and M’Nally,
-the fine flower of infamy, happy in Government
-pay, who to the end played with success the part
-of the assiduous friend. It was he who brought
-to Emmet on his final morning the news, then ten
-days old, of his mother’s death. The son took it,
-as he took all his losses, with what Mr. W. H.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
-Curran briefly calls his “unostentatious fortitude.”
-After an instant of silence he looked up and found
-his voice. “It is better so,” he answered quietly.
-Her delicate proud heart had broken at the menace
-hanging over her darling: that much he had divined
-at once. She had written, during that last year, that
-she was “a parent supremely blest” in the virtues
-and dispositions of her children.</p>
-
-<p>Mr. M’Nally was intimate with Mr. Curran, for
-whom he had an affection as genuine as he was
-capable of feeling. It was like “Janus” Wainewright’s
-affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt
-from the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to
-divers and sundry. It is possible, therefore, that
-Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his much-deceived
-client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a life-in-death
-which also was surely “better so.” But this
-is mere conjecture, as Emmet would never have
-inquired; rather than name his “nut-brown maid,”
-the truly “banished man” would still have endured
-all the inner turmoil of lonely love,</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-  <div class="poetry">
-<div class="verse"><span style="margin-left: 6em;">“—surges</span></div>
-<div class="verse">Which wash both Heaven and Hell.”</div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p>No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
-went forth to his death through the Dublin streets, a
-young lady, believed to be Miss Curran, was seen in
-a carriage despairingly taking leave of him, and fluttering
-a handkerchief until he was out of sight, when she
-sank in a swoon. It is not the fashion of persons of
-deep feeling, save on the stage, to have recourse at
-solemn moments to fluttering handkerchiefs. If any
-young lady interested in Robert Emmet were abroad
-in a carriage on that autumn morning, it would be
-his only sister, Mrs. Holmes, fated to outlive him
-but one melancholy year. As for poor lovely Sarah,
-she had disappeared like an underground stream
-during his last weeks and days, ever since her letters
-were seized as spoils of war. Major Sirr is believed
-to have destroyed them all, in due course, not without
-a flow of tears! The sweet lady was indeed an
-object of pity; and Emmet, putting in never a stroke
-of conscious work, had a most unaccountable faculty
-for melting hearts. The reign of Sensibility was not
-over; able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning
-to be carried out of the pit, more dead than
-alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something in
-Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern
-men habituated to political offenders. The honest
-turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting at his feet, only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
-to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and
-it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing
-him, could with difficulty steady his voice, though
-he was popularly believed to revel in pronouncing
-capital sentence.</p>
-
-<p>Emmet busied himself with letters in his cell. He
-slept and ate as usual; and his firm handwriting
-witnessed the unshaken soul within. Several of his
-last letters have been recovered; two or three have
-been published, in Mr. W. H. Curran’s <i>Life</i> of his
-illustrious father, in Dr. Madden’s moving but
-chaotic <i>Memoirs of the United Irishmen</i>, and elsewhere.
-On the day set for his execution Robert
-Emmet wrote to his old friend Richard Curran:—</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot">
-
-<p>“<span class="smcap">My dearest Richard</span>: I find I have but a few
-hours to live; but if it was the last moment, and the
-power of utterance was leaving me, I would thank
-you from the bottom of my heart for your generous
-expressions of affection and forgiveness to me. If
-there was any one in the world in whose breast my
-death might be supposed not to stifle every spark of
-resentment, it might be you. I have deeply injured
-you; I have injured the happiness of a sister that you
-love, and who was formed to give happiness to every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
-one about her, instead of having her own mind a
-prey to affliction. Oh, Richard! I have no excuse
-to offer, but that I meant the reverse: I intended
-as much happiness for Sarah as the most ardent love
-could have given her. I never did tell you how
-much I idolised her. It was not with a wild or unfounded
-passion, but it was an attachment increasing
-every hour, from an admiration of the purity of her
-mind, and respect for her talents. I did dwell in
-secret upon the prospect of our union; I did hope
-that success, while it afforded the opportunity of
-our union, might be a means of confirming an attachment
-which misfortune had called forth. I did
-not look to honours for myself; praise I would have
-asked from the lips of no man: but I would have
-wished to read, in the glow of Sarah’s countenance,
-that her husband was respected. My love, Sarah!
-it was not thus that I thought to have requited your
-affection. I did hope to be a prop round which
-your affections might have clung, and which would
-never have been shaken; but a rude blast has
-snapped it, and they have fallen over a grave. This
-is no time for affliction. I have had public motives
-to sustain my mind, and I have not suffered it to
-sink; but there have been moments in my imprisonment<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
-when my mind was so sunk by grief on her
-account that death would have been a refuge. God
-bless you, my dearest Richard. I am obliged to
-leave off immediately.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Robert Emmet.</span>”
-</p></div>
-
-<p>This touching letter has been printed before, but
-the two which follow, long lost and newly found,
-have never been made public. The original letters
-seem to have disappeared. The contemporary
-copies figure in the Hardwicke or Wimpole
-collection, which has very recently been made
-accessible to readers by the issue of the current
-Catalogue of Additional Manuscripts at the British
-Museum. The shorter of them was intended by
-Emmet for Thomas Addis Emmet and his wife
-Jane Patten, his brother and sister-in-law. With
-it was sent a long historical document, called <i>An
-Account of the late Plan of Insurrection in Dublin,
-and the Causes of its Failure</i>. Hurriedly penned,
-in order to give the beloved relatives a unique and
-direct knowledge of all that the writer had meant
-and missed, it is a masterly detailed statement, as
-free from all traces of morbidity, or even of agitation,
-as if it had been drawn up “on happy mornings
-with a morning heart,” in the tents of victory.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
-Thanks to the practised duplicity of Dr. Trevor,
-to whose care it was confided, Mr. Thomas Addis
-Emmet, then in Paris, never received it; he complained
-bitterly of its suppression, and was only
-towards the close of his life enabled to read it
-through the medium of the press. But neither he
-nor any of his American descendants, inclusive of
-the distinguished compiler of the quarto, privately
-printed in New York, entitled <i>The Emmet Family</i>,
-seems to have suspected the existence of the little
-personal note in which the <i>Account</i> was enclosed.
-The official draft of it figures in Hard. MS.
-35,742, f. 197:—</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot">
-
-<p>“<span class="smcap">My dearest Tom and Jane</span>: I am just
-going to do my last duty to my country. It can
-be done as well on the scaffold as in the field. Do
-not give way to any weak feelings on my account,
-but rather encourage proud ones that I have possessed
-fortitude and tranquillity of mind to the last.</p>
-
-<p>“God bless you, and the young hopes that are
-growing up about you. May they be more fortunate
-than their uncle, but may they preserve as
-pure and ardent an attachment to their country as
-he has done. Give the watch to little Robert; he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
-will not prize it the less for having been in the
-possession of two Roberts before him. I have one
-dying request to make to you. I was attached to
-Sarah Curran, the youngest daughter of your
-friend. I did hope to have had her my companion
-for life; I did hope that she would not only have
-constituted my happiness, but that her heart and
-understanding would have made her one of Jane’s
-dearest friends. I know that Jane would have loved
-her on my account, and I feel also that, had they
-been acquainted, she must have loved her for her
-own. None knew of the attachment till now, nor
-is it now generally known; therefore do not speak
-of it to others. [I leave her]<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> with her father and
-brother; but if those protectors should fall off, and
-that no other should replace them, [take]<a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> her as
-my wife, and love her as a sister. Give my love
-to all friends.”</p></div>
-
-<p>It is to be feared that “little Robert” (the eldest
-of the children, afterwards Judge Robert Emmet of
-New York) did not receive his legacy. According
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>to what testimony can be gathered, the watch which
-Emmet carried to the last was either presented to
-the executioner, or passed over to him with some
-understanding which has not transpired. Poor
-Emmet’s seal, a beautiful design of his own for the
-United Irishmen, went safely into friendly keeping;
-but most of his personal belongings worn on the
-scaffold, including his high Hessian boots and the
-stock with the precious hair sewed inside the lining,
-were actually sold at auction in Grafton Street,
-Dublin, during December, 1832. In this letter to
-his brother and sister, how piercing is the “I did
-hope,” iterated to them as to Richard Curran! It
-reminds us what a network of beneficent will and
-forethought made up that intense nature, and how
-the perishing leaf was but in the green. When the
-Lord Lieutenant, in the course of his industrious
-correspondence with his brother, sent to him, as a
-literary curio, a copy of Robert Emmet’s letter
-(Robert himself being newly dead), in reference
-to it, he hastens to add this significant sentence:
-“The letter to his brother will not be forwarded;
-but the passage respecting Miss Sarah Curran has
-been communicated to her father.” The Chief
-Secretary and Lord Hardwicke were joint contrivers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
-of what seems to us (from the point of
-view of the most helpless of the persons chiefly
-concerned) an unnecessary if not unfeeling move.
-And Mr. Curran promptly replied to the former,
-the Right Honourable William Wickham, on the
-morrow (Hard. MS. 35,703, f. 158):—</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot">
-<div class="right">
-“<i>Sept. 21st, 1803.</i><br />
-</div>
-
-<p>“<span class="smcap">Sir</span>: I have just received the honour of your
-letter, with the extract enclosed by desire of His
-Excellency. I have again to offer to His Excellency
-my more than gratitude, the feelings of the
-strongest attachment and respect for this new instance
-of considerate condescension. To you also,
-sir, believe me, I am most affectionately grateful
-for the part that you have been so kind as [to] take
-upon this unhappy occasion; few would, I am well
-aware, perhaps few could, have known how to act
-in the same manner.</p>
-
-<p>“As to the communication of the extract, and
-the motive for doing so, I cannot answer them in
-the cold parade of official acknowledgment; I feel
-on the subject the warm and animated thanks of
-man to man, and these I presume to request that
-Lord Hardwicke and Mr. Wickham may be pleased<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
-to accept: it is, however, only justice to myself to
-say, that even on the first falling of this unexpected
-blow, I had resolved (and so mentioned to Mr.
-Attorney-General), that if I found no actual guilt
-upon her, I would act with as much moderation as
-possible towards a poor creature that had once held
-the warmest place in my heart. I did, even then,
-recollect that there was a point to which nothing
-but actual turpitude or the actual death of her
-parent ought to make a child an orphan; but even
-had I thought otherwise, I feel that this extract
-would have produced the effect it was intended to
-have, and that I should think so now. I feel how
-I should shrink from the idea of letting her sink so
-low as to become the subject of the testamentary
-order of a miscreant who could labour, by so foul
-means and under such odious circumstances, to
-connect her with his infamy, and to acquire any
-posthumous interest in her person or her fate.
-Blotted, therefore, as she may irretrievably be from
-my society, or the place she once held in my affection,
-she must not go adrift. So far, at least,
-‘these protectors will not fall off.’</p>
-
-<p>“I should therefore, sir, wish for the suppression
-of this extract, if no particular, motive should have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
-arisen for forwarding it to its destination. I shall
-avail myself of your kind permission to wait upon
-you in the course of the day, to pay my respects
-once more personally to you, if I shall be so
-fortunate as to find you at leisure. I have the
-honour to be, with very great respect, your
-obliged servant,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">John P. Curran</span>.”</p>
-</div>
-
-<p>But it is time to return to our death-doomed
-“miscreant.” At half-past one, on the afternoon of
-September 30, the order was given to start. The
-scaffold had been built in Thomas Street, nearly
-opposite S. Catherine’s Church. He was dressed all
-in black, and maintained the serene and undemonstrative
-demeanour which was thought scandalously
-unbefitting by some spectators and some scribes. On
-the principle that the game was up, that “no hope
-can have no fear,” Robert Emmet became, not indifferent,
-but beautifully gay towards the end, as gay
-in irons as Raleigh or Sir Thomas More. He was
-quite sure that he had nothing to repent of, now
-that the account was cast and cancelled. Of course
-his care-free conduct was misconstrued: it passed
-officially for “effrontery and nonchalance,” and the
-single-minded Christian, never quite out of touch<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
-with the Church in which his holy mother had
-brought him up, was darkly given forth as an impenitent
-atheist. The ordinary attitude of the revolutionary
-late eighteenth-century mind was irreligious
-enough, but it was not Robert Emmet’s. One of
-his colleagues in the dream and the disaster, Thomas
-Russell, an elder figure in Emmet’s never-marshalled
-“army,” and a nobly interesting one, was extraordinarily
-pious: as pious as General Gordon. On
-the scaffold at Downpatrick (brought to that by his
-thwarted outbreak in the North), he recalled, for a
-memory well suited to encourage him, “my young
-hero, my great and dear friend, a martyr to the
-cause of his country and to liberty.” Russell’s hospitality
-of mind was not such that he could have
-made an exemplar of an infidel. But there is so
-much proof on this point, that the old charge may
-be laid aside in that limbo of all inaccuracies for
-which the invention of printing is responsible. The
-Englishman at the helm of affairs in Dublin, by no
-means (as we have seen) a wholly unsympathetic
-annalist, bequeaths us an account of Emmet’s final
-interview with the chaplains. It cannot escape
-the reader that two distinct issues were, in the
-minds of those worthy gentlemen, vaguely blended.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
-No person in Mr. Robert Emmet’s situation, unless
-he repented of his politics, had any chance of being
-considered otherwise than unsound in his religion.
-Individualism, looked upon as the exact science it
-undoubtedly is, was not quite at its best in the self-righteous
-era of George the Third, and under the
-Establishment which was regulated by a now almost
-obsolete basilolatry.</p>
-
-<p>“Mr. Gamble, the clergyman who attends the
-prisoners in Newgate, visited [Mr. Emmet] yesterday
-evening, and again this morning, in Kilmainham
-Prison, in company with the Reverend Mr. Grant,
-a clergyman who resides at Island Bridge. In the
-report which they have made to me of what passed
-in their communications with Mr. Emmet, they
-state that though their conversation did not produce
-all the good they had hoped, it had nevertheless
-the effect of bringing him to a more calm, and
-in some respects a better temper of mind, than they
-had reason to expect from a person professing the
-principles by which they supposed him to be directed.
-They repeatedly urged to him those topics which
-were likely to bring him to a better feeling, and
-acknowledgment of the crime for which he was to
-suffer, but were not successful in persuading him to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
-abjure those principles by which he was actuated in
-his conspiracy to overthrow the Government. He
-disclaimed any intention of shedding blood; professed
-a total ignorance of the murder of Lord
-Kilwarden, before which, he declares, he had left
-Dublin; and also professed an aversion to the French.
-He declared that though persons professing his principles,
-and acting in the cause in which he had been
-concerned, were generally supposed to be Deists, that
-he was a Christian in the true sense of the word;
-that he had received the Sacrament, though not
-regularly and habitually, and that he wished to
-receive it then; that what he felt, he felt sincerely,
-and would avow his principles in his last moments;
-that he was conscious of sins, and wished to receive
-the Sacrament. The clergymen consented to join
-in prayer with him, and administered the Sacrament
-to him, considering him as a visionary enthusiast,
-and wishing him to bring his mind to a proper
-temper and sense of religion.</p>
-
-<p>“On their way to the place of execution they
-conversed with him upon the same topics, but
-could never persuade him to admit that he had
-been in the wrong. In answer to their question
-whether, if he had foreseen the blood that had been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
-spilt in consequence of his attempt, he would have
-persisted in his design to overthrow the Government,
-he observed that no one went to battle
-without being prepared for similar events, always
-considering his attempt as free from moral reproach
-in consequence of what he conceived to be the
-goodness of the motive that produced it. At the
-place of execution he was desirous of addressing the
-people. He intended to have declared that he had
-never taken any oath but that of the United Irishmen,
-and by that oath he meant to abide. The
-clergymen who were present explained to him that
-an address to that effect might possibly produce
-tumult and bloodshed, and that it ought not to be
-permitted. He was therefore obliged to acquiesce,
-and did so without appearing to be disturbed or
-agitated.” (Hard. MS. 35,742, ff. 191 <i>et seq.</i>)</p>
-
-<p>What Robert Emmet did say to the people,
-a sentence seemingly of puzzling platitude, was, in
-him, one of profound truth: “My friends, I die
-in peace, and with sentiments of love and kindness
-to all men.” There is another and more animated
-contemporary account of his exit in <i>The Life and
-Times of Henry Grattan</i>. The whole passage may
-as well be quoted:—</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>“Robert Emmet [was] devoid of caution, foresight,
-and prudence: ardent, spirited, and impetuous.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
-He was an enthusiast, he was a visionary. Without
-a treasury, without officers, without troops, he
-declared war against England and France, and prepared
-to oppose both!—the one, if she sought to
-retain possession of Ireland, and the other, if she
-attempted to invade it. With a few followers, he
-rose to take the Castle of Dublin and defeat a
-disciplined garrison. He put on a green coat and a
-cocked hat, and fancied himself already a conqueror.
-If no lives had been lost he probably would not have
-suffered, although Lord Norbury was the judge who
-tried him.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. When asked the usual question
-why sentence should not be passed on him, he
-exclaimed: ‘Sentence of death may be pronounced:
-I have nothing to say. But sentence of infamy shall
-not be pronounced: I have everything to say.’ He
-was as cool and collected before his death as if
-nothing was to happen. Peter Burrowes saw him
-on his way, and related a circumstance that occurred
-as he was going to execution. He had a paper that
-he wished to be brought to Miss Curran, to whom
-he was strongly attached: he watched his opportunity,
-and in passing one of the streets, he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
-caught a friendly eye in the crowd, and making a
-sign to the person, got him near; then he dropped a
-paper. This was observed by others, and the person
-who took it up was stopped: the paper was taken
-from him and brought to the Castle. Mr. Burrowes
-and Charles Bushe saw it, and said it was a very
-affecting and interesting letter.”</p>
-
-<p>And so to poor Emmet, Fate, in her most
-diabolical mood, had for the last time played the
-postman. He shook hands with the masked executioner,
-removed his own stock, and helped to
-adjust both the cap and the noose. The correspondent
-of the <i>London Daily Chronicle</i>, after a
-fervent “God forbid that I should see many persons
-with Emmet’s principles!” adds in unwilling tribute—and
-those were the days when a hanging was a
-favourite spectacle with persons of elegant leisure—“As
-it was, I never saw one die like him.” When
-all was over, and the head, with every feature composed
-and pale as in life, had been held up with the
-formula proper to traitors, that and the body were
-brought back to the gaol, and shortly after buried in
-the common ground, Bully’s Acre, none of Emmet’s
-few living kindred appearing then to claim it. His
-parents were not long dead; his only brother was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
-in exile; his sister was a delicate woman, probably
-crushed by her latest grief, and her husband, Mr.
-Robert Holmes, a most serviceable friend, was in
-prison; John Patten, Thomas Addis Emmet’s
-brother-in-law, was far away; St. John Mason, a
-cousin of the Emmets, and one heart and soul with
-them in all that pertained to the wished-for welfare
-of Ireland, was, like Mr. Holmes, and for the same
-reason, the tenant of a cell. Others, more remotely
-connected by affection with Robert Emmet, might
-have come forward in time had any one realised the
-blight, the paralysis, which events had imposed
-simultaneously on the entire family. It seems
-pretty conclusive from a valuable pamphlet just
-published by Mr. David A. Quaid (though the
-facts are not yet verified), that Robert Emmet
-was laid to rest in his father’s vault in the churchyard
-of St. Peter, Aungier Street. There one may
-leave that sentinel dust until the day of conciser
-habit than his own shall carve the good word above
-it which he foreknew.</p>
-
-<p>Sarah Curran’s quiet annals are ungathered by any
-one hand, but the main outlines are henceforth discernible,
-and some celebrated writers have found
-them of interest. Washington Irving, in <i>The Broken<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
-Heart</i>, has given her an exquisite immortality; and
-the pathetic central incident of his narration is also
-the inspiration of Moore’s haunting song: <i>She is
-far from the land</i>. It was not, however, at the
-Rotunda in Dublin, but in a festal room in the
-friendly house where, after the death of her
-betrothed, she lived on in a dispirited convalescence,
-that she wandered away from the company, and
-sitting alone on the stair, began singing softly a
-plaintive air, “housed in a dream, at distance from
-the kind.” This happened at Woodhill, in Cork. Her
-voice seems to have been singularly beautiful: there
-was a general development of musical genius in her
-father’s family. The incident was reported at firsthand
-to Irving, as to Moore. To those who knew
-her story, the little forgetful act was poignant
-enough: for she was singing to the dead. In her
-sorrow, her deprivations, her entire withdrawal from
-the world, Miss Curran was blest with tender friends
-and champions. The poet just named, who was
-one of Robert Emmet’s early comrades, knew how
-admiration followed her like her shadow.</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-  <div class="poetry">
-<div class="verse">“And lovers are round her, sighing:</div>
-<div class="verse"><span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,</span></div>
-<div class="verse"><span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">For her heart in his grave is lying.”</span></div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Among those who looked with infinite sympathy
-and respect on the gentle girl moving like a soulless
-phantom in an unreal world, was a very young
-Englishman, barely her senior, a newly commissioned
-captain of Royal Engineers, a lineal descendant of
-Strafford, and full of Strafford’s strong singleness of
-heart. Henry Robert Sturgeon was third son of
-William Sturgeon, Esquire, and the Lady Henrietta
-Alicia Watson-Wentworth; grandson of the first,
-and nephew of the second Marquis of Rockingham.
-He conceived for Sarah Curran an instinctive
-affection, ardent and profound, and free from stain of
-self as Emmet’s own. It was as if Emmet, absented
-for ever, had breathed himself into another for the
-comfort and protection of the well-beloved. But
-the well-beloved would not be comforted nor protected:
-not though she knew, as she knew perfectly,
-both what her suitor’s worth was, and what were his
-fortune and standing in the great world; not
-though every member of the Penrose family,
-devoted to him, encouraged his hope; not though
-all of them, of their own accord, interceded with
-their ward and guest. In the <i>Literary Souvenir</i> for
-1831, there is an agreeable paper of fifteen pages
-entitled <i>Some Passages in the History of Sarah Curran</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
-signed “M.” It has been conjectured that the
-writer was one of the Crawfords of Lismore, who
-had been very kind to Sarah when her mother’s flight
-broke up the Curran household. Whoever “M.”
-was, her devotion to her friend, of whose character
-and mental qualities she had the highest opinion, is
-conspicuous, and one may glean much information
-from what she has to tell us. Captain Sturgeon,
-she says in the slightly stilted Georgian phrases, was
-everything which is good. “Had not her heart
-been seared by early grief and disappointment, he
-could not have failed to have experienced the most
-flattering reception.” Sarah herself was entirely
-open with him: one would expect no less of her
-nobly sweet nature. “She pleaded his own cause
-for him by proving how little he deserved a divided
-affection;” but “the constancy and tenderness of
-her attachment to Emmet seem only to have rendered
-her the more interesting.” Two difficult years and
-more went by for Henry Sturgeon. He never
-wavered in his purpose: much as society sought
-after him, there was but one woman in the world to
-that patient and dedicated lover. Time was on their
-side. Sarah was gaining some measure of content
-and also of health, although she never definitely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
-rallied from the heartbreak of 1803. It touched
-her at last that as she was, as she had told him so
-often that she was, with no life to live and nothing to
-give him, he prayed her still to become his wife, to
-lend him the one ultimate privilege of humblest
-service, from which otherwise he would be debarred.
-Some expectation of leaving the south of Ireland, or
-the actual arrival of orders from headquarters, seems
-to have lent a sudden heightened earnestness to his
-addresses; and Sarah, being pressed, gave her sad
-consent. They were married at Glanmire Church,
-near Woodhill, in the February of 1806.</p>
-
-<p>A dismal wedding it must have been! “M.”
-was told by one of the bridesmaids, long after, of
-the melancholy drive in the closed carriage, with the
-bride in tears. For a time Captain Sturgeon’s
-affairs kept him in England; then he was transported,
-with his regiment, to Malta and Sicily.
-The first journey, fully a half-year after the marriage,
-must have taken him and his wife through
-the capital, the Dublin of all racking memories, for
-we hear of Mrs. Sturgeon visiting Mr. James
-Petrie’s studio there. From the sketches he had
-made of Robert Emmet in the court-room, and
-from the mask in his possession, he had painted a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
-portrait unhappily not wholly successful. But we
-know what peculiar interest belongs to a portrait,
-when there is, and can be, but one; and no person,
-surely, in all the world, can have longed to scan this
-one with the longing of Sarah Sturgeon. Dr. William
-Stokes, the biographer of George Petrie, says that
-George, then the artist’s little son, happened to be
-alone, playing in his father’s studio, when a veiled
-lady entered and went over to the easel. He never
-forgot her nor the moment. “She lifted her veil,
-and stood long in unbroken silence, gazing at the
-face before her; then suddenly turning, moved with
-an unsteady step to another corner of the room, and
-bending forwards, pressed her head against the wall,
-heaving deep sobs, her whole form shaken with a
-storm of passionate grief. How long that agony
-lasted the boy could not tell; it appeared to him to be
-an hour. Then with a supreme effort she controlled
-herself, pulled down her veil, and quickly and
-silently left the room. Years after, the boy learned
-from his father that this was Sarah Curran, who
-had come by appointment to see her dead lover’s
-portrait, on the understanding that she should meet
-no one of the family.”</p>
-
-<p>Captain Sturgeon was glad of the duty which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
-turned his face southwards, as he could not but
-believe that the softer climate would help his frail
-Sarah. It is curious that Moore, in making her the
-unconscious heroine of his lovely lyric, should have
-placed the scene of her abstracted singing “the
-wild song of her dear native plains,” and of her
-abstracted turning from “lovers around her sighing,”
-in Italy! quite as if Captain Sturgeon, “curteis
-and mylde, and the most soofering man that ever I
-met withal,” had no existence. The poet, in all
-probability, heard late of the incident, and thus
-did not assign it to Woodhill. Only too accurate
-was one foreboding stanza:</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-  <div class="poetry">
-<div class="verse">“Nor soon will the tear of his country be dried,</div>
-<div class="verse"><span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">Nor long will his love stay behind him.”</span></div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<p>But before 1808 set in, Sarah’s strength seemed
-to be establishing itself in the kindly foreign air;
-in that and in her growing happiness her husband
-began to reap the moral reward he had so hardly
-won. Abruptly, and not without alarm, the English
-in Sicily were driven homewards by the descent of
-the French on those shores. Captain and Mrs.
-Sturgeon hurried aboard a crowded transport bound
-for Portsmouth. The poor lady had great excitement<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
-and considerable hardship to undergo, and in
-the course of that most luckless voyage was prematurely
-born her only child. The deep-seated
-sadness of her soul, as if unjustly alienated from
-her, returned in all its fulness after his death. She
-settled with her husband at Hythe in Kent, and
-there she made haste to die. The laburnums were
-coming into blossom when she entered upon her
-eternity, six-and-twenty years old. She had a meek
-request to make of her father, who was oftentimes
-as near to her new home as London: it was that
-she might be buried in a garden grave at the Priory,
-where the sister who died in childhood had been
-laid. One need have no very romantic imagination
-to guess that the remote green spot bordering the
-lawn (a natural trysting-place screened by great trees
-that grow near the little grave), was dear to her also
-for another’s sake, for some old association with
-him who loved her in his hunted youth. For his
-own reasons, Mr. Curran, approached on the subject,
-saw fit to refuse. During the first week of
-May, 1808, Sir Charles Napier thus wrote his
-mother: “I rode over to Hythe this morning to
-see poor Sturgeon, who has lost his little wife at
-last, the betrothed of Emmet. Young Curran is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
-here: his sister was gone before his arrival. They
-are going to take the body to Ireland.” It was
-Richard Curran, faithful in every human relationship,
-who went on to his brother-in-law. The
-bereaved two brought Sarah home to her own
-country, to the tomb in Newmarket of the grandmother
-of whom she had been fond, and for whom
-she was named: Sarah Philpot. The headstone was
-prepared, and seen by some local antiquary, and
-remembered; but it disappeared before it was
-placed. Emmet’s love sleeps, like Emmet, without
-an epitaph.</p>
-
-<p>The letter which Richard Curran wrote to “M.”
-about his dead sister was printed by her twenty-three
-years after. In it was enclosed a fragment of
-Sarah’s own:—</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot"><div class="right">
-“<span class="smcap">Radish’s Hotel, St. James’s Street</span>,<br />
-<span style="margin-right: 4em;">“<span class="smcap">London</span>, <i>May 8, 1808</i>.</span><br />
-</div>
-
-<p>“<span class="smcap">My dear Madam</span>: I know how heartily
-you’ll participate in the feelings with which I
-announce to you the death of your poor friend,
-my lamented Sarah. I would willingly spare myself
-this distressing office; but I cannot expose one
-whom she so loved to the risk of stumbling inadvertently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
-in a public paper on a piece of intelligence
-so affecting.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I wish also to convey to
-you a testimony that her thoughts never strayed
-from you, and that to the hour of her death you
-were the object of her affection. The enclosed
-unfinished letter is the last she ever wrote. In it
-you will find a very mitigated statement of her
-sufferings. I can anticipate the satisfaction you will
-derive from the strong sense of religious impressions
-which marks her letters; and I at the same time
-congratulate and thank you for having cultivated
-in her the seeds of that consoling confidence which
-cheered her departing moments, and stripped death,
-if not of its anguish, yet of its greatest horrors.
-The hopes held out by her physicians were, alas!
-more humane than well-grounded: she expired at
-half-past five, on the morning of the 5th inst., of a
-rapid decline. To describe my sorrow would be
-but to write her eulogy. You know all the various
-qualities with which she was so eminently gifted,
-and the consequent pangs I must feel at so abrupt
-and calamitous a dispensation. I am now on my
-way, with her afflicted widower, accompanying her
-remains, which she wished to lie in her native land.
-I enclose you a lock of her hair; it was cut off after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
-her death. Adieu, my dear madam. I make no
-apology for this melancholy intrusion, and I beg to
-assure you that one in whose acquirements and
-disposition she found so much that was kindred to
-her own, can never cease to be an object of most
-respectful esteem and attachment to a brother that
-loved her as I did.—I remain, your obliged friend
-and humble servant,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">Richard Curran</span>.”</p>
-
-<p><i>To</i> <span class="smcap">Mrs. Henry W——</span>.</p></div>
-
-
-<p class="center">[<i>Enclosure.</i>]</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot">
-
-<p>“<span class="smcap">My dear M——</span>: I suppose you do not know
-of my arrival from Sicily, or I should have heard
-from you. I must be very brief in my detail of the
-events which have proved so fatal to me, and which
-followed our departure from that country. A most
-dreadful and perilous passage occasioning me many
-frights, I was, on our entrance into the Channel,
-prematurely delivered of a boy, without any assistance
-save that of one of the soldiers’ wives, the only
-woman on board except myself. The storm being
-so high that no boat could stand out at sea, I was
-in imminent danger till twelve next day, when at
-the risk of his life a physician came on board from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
-one of the other ships, and relieved me. The storm
-continued, and I got a brain fever, which, however,
-passed off. To be short: on landing at Portsmouth,
-the precious creature for whom I had
-suffered so much God took to Himself. The inexpressible
-anguish I felt at this event, preying on
-me, has occasioned the decay of my health. For
-the last month the contest between life and death
-has seemed doubtful; but this day, having called
-in a very clever man here, he seems not to think me
-in danger. My disorder is a total derangement of
-the nervous system, and its most dreadful effects I
-find in the attack on my mind and spirits. I suffer
-misery you cannot conceive. I am often seized with
-icy perspirations, trembling, and that indescribable
-horror which you must know, if you have ever had
-the fever. Write instantly to me. Alas, I want
-everything to soothe my mind. O my friend!
-would to Heaven you were with me: nothing so
-much as the presence of a dear female friend would
-tend to my recovery. But in England you know
-how I am situated: not one I know intimately. To
-make up for this, my beloved husband is everything
-to me. His conduct, throughout all my troubles,
-surpasses all praise. Write to me, dear M——, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
-tell me how to bear all these things. I have, truly
-speaking, cast all my care on the Lord; but ah, how
-our weak natures fail; every day, every hour, I may
-say. On board the ship, when all seemed adverse
-to hope, it is strange how an overstrained trust in
-certain words of our Saviour gave me such perfect
-faith in His help, that although my baby was visibly
-pining away, I never doubted his life for a moment.
-‘He who gathers the lambs in His arms,’ I thought,
-would look down on mine, if I had faith in Him.
-This has often troubled me since——”</p></div>
-
-<p>Richard Curran, who took pains to send that broken
-letter to a woman who valued it above fine gold, was
-always a good brother. Concerning his dear Sarah he
-had to be reticent, too, in reticent company. A lady
-who knew W. Henry Curran long and well, heard him
-mention his youngest sister only once. They were
-searching for something in a garret, when an exquisite
-picture standing laced with cobwebs, the
-picture of a girl about eighteen, caught her eye.
-“My sister Sarah, by Romney,” Henry said shortly,
-seeing that he had to say something. “Family
-pride had been deeply hurt by the publicity attached
-to poor Sarah’s unfortunate love-episode.” The
-Romney, sold by auction when Henry Curran died,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
-is now the property of the Hon. Gerald Ponsonby;
-it has been beautifully engraved for Miss Frances
-A. Gerard’s <i>Some Fair Hibernians</i>, 1897. The
-delicately powdered hair, the low frilled dress with
-the line of black velvet about the neck, the gracious
-shoulders, the purely Irish mouth and eyes, half-scornful
-of life, half-resigned to it, which never
-knew illusion, and can never know abiding joy—-these
-are most tenderly painted, and remain among
-the things one does not forget. The last word of
-this haunting personality shall be loyal “M.’s”:—</p>
-
-<p>“In person Mrs. Sturgeon was about the ordinary
-size, her hair and eyes black. Her complexion was
-fairer than is usual with black hair, and was a little
-freckled. Her eyes were large, soft, and brilliant,
-and capable of the greatest variety of expression.
-Her aspect in general indicated reflection, and pensive
-abstraction from the scene around her. Her wit
-was keen and playful, but chastised [<i>sic</i>]; although
-no one had a quicker perception of humour or
-ridicule. Her musical talents were of the first
-order: she sang with exquisite taste. I think I
-never heard so harmonious a voice.”</p>
-
-<p>As for Captain Henry Sturgeon, he only betook
-himself anew to his post. His more active military<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
-career was now to begin. Throughout the Peninsular
-War he served as Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and
-later as Colonel of South Guides on the Duke of
-Wellington’s staff; and Wellington’s despatches
-ring again and again with his commended name.
-Riding across a vineyard during the fight near Vie
-Begorre, on a March morning of 1814, in the sixth
-year of his widowerhood, and the thirty-second of
-his age, he was shot dead in the saddle. He never
-had his dues in a profession where official recognition
-was then not stinted; and perhaps he cared
-little that it was so. <i>The Dictionary of National
-Biography</i>, which does not mention his all-significant
-marriage, yet quotes from <i>The War in the
-Peninsula</i> what is said of Henry Sturgeon: “Skilled
-to excellence in almost every branch of war, and
-possessing a variety of accomplishments, he used his
-gifts so gently for himself and so usefully for the
-service that envy offered no bar to admiration, and
-the whole army felt painfully mortified that his
-merits were passed unnoticed.” This is one comrade’s
-glowing praise of another. Has it gone
-unguessed, the cause of the neglect at home of one
-of the most brilliant and devoted officers of his
-generation? Can the cause be hidden from those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
-who have scrutinised the Government of that day,
-with its spites, its partisanships, its incapacity for
-distant outlooks, its severance from ideals? This
-Englishman, whatever his eminence of courage and
-skill might be, had been the husband of Emmet’s
-sweetheart; and Emmet was an Irish rebel and felon.
-The young soldier had probably weighed well what
-he was inheriting, before his marriage, and found all
-that endurable enough, until he died. In a world
-where earthly accidents wither away at a breath, and
-men of like temper see each other as they are, Henry
-Sturgeon must have smiled from the blood-wet
-Spanish grass straight into Robert Emmet’s eyes.</p>
-
-<p>One likes the unexpected epilogue, as one likes
-the mournful play. It is all satisfactory: “nothing
-but well and fair, and what may quiet us,” in the
-odd pattern of the plot. Emmet lives in it, and
-outlives. It is the compensation of a lot cast in a
-planet where even our own honourable action has a
-trick of turning hostile and smearing us, that there
-is something in the best of us which cannot be
-smeared. Robert Emmet’s large soul has, like a
-magician, pieced together his broken body, the
-symbol of his broken, mistimed, and because mistimed,
-unhallowed effort. But only his own soul<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span>
-has done it, and by a power within, shaking herself
-clear of censure. Mr. Henry Curran devotes to
-him a reticent paragraph obliquely affectionate.
-“He met his fate with unostentatious fortitude;
-and although few could ever think of justifying his
-projects or regretting their failure, yet his youth, his
-talents, the great respectability of his connections,
-and the evident delusion of which he was the victim,
-have excited more general sympathy for his unfortunate
-end, and more forbearance towards his
-memory, than are usually extended to the errors or
-sufferings of political offenders.” At the end of a
-hundred years, the feelings which may temperately
-be described as sympathy and forbearance do survive,
-ranged on the side of this political offender; but is
-it to be thought for a moment that five-and-twenty
-years of life, intellectuality, social standing, above
-all the capacity for being fooled (adorable as that
-may sometimes be), are alone able to commend any
-man to the remembrance of posterity? No: to
-dominate a moral distance there must be moral
-height. Emmet was magnanimous. The word was
-nobly applied to him by Lord Hardwicke, the head
-of the Government which hanged and beheaded him.
-Now to be magnanimous is not to possess a definite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
-grace or virtue: magnanimity, like a sense of humour,
-is a spirit, a solvent merely; to exercise it in any
-one emergency is to show greatness equal to all.
-Robert Emmet said that he had received, immediately
-on his return from France, official invitations from
-conspirators in high quarters at home: the “first
-men in the land” were those who “invited him over.”
-Of his truthfulness there was but one opinion.
-Said Curran, who loved him little: “I would have
-believed the word of Emmet as soon as the oath
-of any other man I ever knew.” The Attorney-General
-at the trial referred to the prisoner as “a
-gentleman to whom the rebellion may be traced, as
-the origin, life, and soul of it.” This was Emmet’s
-reply, when, after nightfall, his turn came to speak:
-“My lords, let me here observe that I am not the
-head and lifeblood of this rebellion. When I came
-to Ireland I found the business ripe for execution:
-I was asked to join in it.” And again: “I have
-been charged with that importance in the efforts to
-emancipate my country as to be considered the keystone
-of the combination of Irishmen, or, as it has
-been expressed, the life and soul of this conspiracy.
-You do me honour overmuch. You have given to
-the subaltern all the credit of the superior.” He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
-turned half-smiling to the presiding judge. “There
-are men concerned in this conspiracy who are not
-only superior to me, but even to your own conception
-of yourself, my lord.” At the final moment
-of his life Emmet stood motionless with a handkerchief
-in his hand, the fall of which was to be the
-signal for the cart to be drawn away. To the
-usual “Are you ready, sir?” he twice answered
-“No.” As it was, another and obeyed signal was
-impatiently given before he had dropped the handkerchief.
-Why did he hesitate? Was he perhaps
-expecting these concealed associates, his leaders and
-long-silent abettors, to reprieve or rescue him? So
-romantic a fancy, implying so much belief in human
-generosity, was only too natural to Robert Emmet.
-Many thinking heads, even under coronets, had been
-hot for reform in that unfavourable hour; there
-were many who desired the removal of religious
-disabilities, popular representation in Parliament,
-death to the vile system of local laws under which
-one witness, and only one witness, was sufficient to
-convict a man of high treason. Reform being disallowed,
-they declared themselves eloquently as ready
-to be driven to armed resistance against England:
-that is, towards total divorce and reconstruction. To<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
-poor Emmet alone, the thing so unavoidable which
-was good enough to long for and to talk about, was
-the thing good enough to do. The “first in the
-land” kept their heads; and in death as in life he
-kept their secret. There is a great unwritten chapter
-of perfidy behind his lonely ineffectual blow struck
-for national freedom. Anyone who has studied well
-these events of 1803, and weighed well the astonishing
-confidential information about the historical
-papers at Dublin Castle, which was given not long
-ago to Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, of New York,
-by Sir Bernard Burke, and incorporated in <i>The
-Emmet Family</i>, can hardly doubt that revelations
-on that subject are yet to come which will lengthen
-the story of Mr. Pitt, Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Under-Secretary
-Marsden, and their dealings with Ireland.
-And English gold and English terrorism had too
-truly won their way at last with Emmet’s humble
-colleagues at home.</p>
-
-<p>There are minor instances of Emmet’s magnanimity
-no less striking in their way. “We are all
-Protestants!” he said in a delighted and congratulatory
-spirit to Russell, implicated with him; he
-could not forget how much more heavily suspicion
-would bear upon those others yet shackled by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
-penal laws. To this beautiful inborn openness of
-mind was due his allusion before Lord Norbury (a
-judge as well-hated as Jeffreys, and for much the
-same reasons), to “that tyranny of which you are
-only the intermediate minister.” From his cell,
-within a few hours of the end, he sent a manly
-letter of thanks to the Chief Secretary, in which he
-addresses him thus:—</p>
-
-<div class="blockquot">
-
-<p>“<span class="smcap">Sir</span>: Had I been permitted to proceed with my
-vindication, it was my intention not only to have
-acknowledged the delicacy with which (I feel with
-gratitude) I have been personally treated, but also
-to have done the most public justice to the mildness
-of the present Administration in this country; and
-at the same time to have acquitted them, as far as
-rested with me, of any charge of remissness in not
-having previously detected a conspiracy, which,
-from its closeness, I know it was impossible to have
-done. I confess that I should have preferred this
-mode if it had been permitted, as it would thereby
-have enabled me to clear myself from an imputation
-under which I might in consequence lie, and to
-have stated why such an Administration did not
-prevent, but (under the peculiar situation of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
-country) perhaps rather accelerated my determination
-to make some effort for the overthrow of a
-Government of which I do not think equally highly.
-However, as I have been deprived of that opportunity,
-I think it right now to make an acknowledgment
-which justice requires from me as a man, and
-which I do not feel to be in the least derogatory
-from my decided principles as an Irishman.—I have
-the honour to be, sir, with the greatest respect, your
-most obedient humble servant,</p>
-
-<p class="sig">
-“<span class="smcap">Robt. Emmet</span>.”<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>(Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 196.)</p></div>
-
-<p>The Lord Lieutenant makes a comment on this,
-in that letter to his brother, the Home Secretary,
-from which much has already been cited:—</p>
-
-<p>“I enclose copies of two letters which he wrote
-this morning [September 20, 1803]. One of the
-acts of kindness to which he particularly refers, in
-his letter to Mr. Wickham, was his being removed
-from the cell at Newgate, in which he had been
-placed after the sentence, to his former apartment
-at Kilmainham, as had been originally intended.
-He had alluded to this in his conversation with the
-clergymen, and admitted that the general conduct<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
-of those who administered the Government was
-likely to conciliate the people, though he did not
-approve the form of the Government and the
-British connection, both of which he had been
-desirous to overthrow.”</p>
-
-<p>In regard to this forwarded letter, the Home
-Secretary utters his congratulatory mind, and gives
-his opinion of our hero:—</p>
-
-<p>“At the same time that one cannot but deplore
-the wicked malignity and wonder at the enthusiastic
-wildness which appears to have actuated the conduct
-of this miserable man, one cannot but admire the
-judgment, the temper, and delicacy which appear to
-have been manifested in the conduct of your Excellency’s
-Government towards this person, and all
-concerned or in any manner connected with him.
-I cannot but take advantage of this occasion to
-express the satisfaction I feel in observing that the
-justice, moderation, and mildness of your Excellency’s
-Government have extorted even from a
-condemned traitor the same sentiments of respect
-and reverence which we have been accustomed to
-hear from the loyal part of the community.”</p>
-
-<p>It does not seem to have been revealed to the
-Hon. Charles Yorke, that what “extorted” Emmet’s<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
-assurances was his own extreme, almost fantastic,
-chivalry; and that those assurances set off deeply
-by contrast, as he vehemently meant they should do,
-his abhorrence of the underlying system of which
-Lord Hardwicke’s conduct was merely the agreeable
-accident. Lord Hardwicke, at least, had understood.</p>
-
-<p>Even one intelligent modern has fallen foul of
-Emmet’s unusually scrupulous care in such matters,
-and of his attitude of regal courtesy, like that of
-the battling foes on Crécy field: such a care and
-such an attitude indicate, it is thought, “weakness
-of character!” What it really indicates is a diplomacy
-so high that if generally practised it might
-render human intercourse very difficult. We cannot
-all be as Apollo Musagetes, daring to employ
-nothing but the amenities, the major force, in a
-universe inured to cheap thunderbolts. As Thoreau
-shrewdly says: “The gods can never afford to have
-a man in the world who is privy to any of their
-secrets. They cannot have a spy here: they will at
-once send him packing!”</p>
-
-<p>A postulate of true magnanimity is modesty.
-Emmet’s was unique. It is the testimony of John
-Patten, who was well aware of his kinsman’s
-immense self-reliance, that “Robert had not one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
-particle of vanity in his composition. He was the
-most free from conceit of any man I ever knew.
-You might live with him for years .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and never
-discover that he thought about himself at all. He
-was vain neither of his person nor of his mind.”
-La Comtesse d’Haussonville cannot refrain, in her
-graceful memoir, from contrasting him with another
-excellent youth of genius, André Chénier, who very
-properly expressed his pang of self-pity in face of
-the guillotine. “<i>Et pourtant</i>,” he cried, striking his
-forehead with that gesture of Gallic candour which
-is so odd to us and so winning: “<i>et pourtant il y
-avait quelque chose ici!</i>” <i>Il y avait quelque chose ici</i>
-in Emmet too, although it was not great lyric
-poetry. He had almost every other capacity.
-The Rev. Archibald Douglas, in his old age, when
-Robert Emmet had been nearly forty years in his
-grave, summed up his conviction about him to
-Dr. R. R. Madden: “So gifted a creature does not
-appear once in a thousand years.”</p>
-
-<p>We have no portrait of Emmet which antedates
-his trial. Three artists in good repute sketched
-him, that day, on bits of waste paper or else on the
-backs of envelopes, and did it surreptitiously for
-dread of prohibition: these were Comerford, Brocas,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
-and James Petrie. The two first, viewing Emmet
-in profile, gained better results than the third; yet
-Petrie’s drawing serves as the basis of the only well-known
-engraved pictures. It was Petrie, moreover,
-who was allowed to take the death-mask of
-Robert Emmet. The good material accumulated
-was put to no very memorable use. The Petrie
-Emmet is somewhat heavy and glowering, and
-distinctly wry-necked. It is meant, in fact, to be
-impressive; and the note of artificiality disqualifies
-it as a true representation of its subject, a man of
-shynesses and simplicities. Comerford, on the other
-hand, and Brocas, as effectively, have given us a
-face to look at which one instinctively believes in.
-It is stamped with concentration and resolve, but
-has in it something serene and gentle and sweet,
-and it harmonises with all we can learn of Emmet’s
-physical appearance from the printed page. He
-was about five feet seven inches in height, wiry,
-slender, erect, healthy, full of endurance, quick
-of movement. His dark eyes were small and
-rather deep-set, and sparkling with expression; his
-nose was straight and thin, his mouth delicately
-chiselled. He had the powerful chin and jaw-bone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
-never absent from the bodily semblance of a strong-willed
-personality. The fine pendulous hair bespoke
-the enthusiast, but it was not worn long save over
-the forehead, which was noticeably broad and high.
-What gave a faun-like idiosyncrasy to the whole
-countenance was the slight upward curve of the
-perfect eyebrows at the inner edge. If we are to
-accept Brocas as our best authority (though his
-hand at work has somehow captured a momentary
-scorn not seen by Comerford), this idiosyncrasy
-had in it no touch of frowning severity such as was
-foreign, according to all report, to Emmet, but
-added rather a final whimsical attraction to a sad
-young face which a child or a dog would readily
-love. As Anne Devlin said once of “Miss Sarah’s,”
-it was “not handsome, but more than handsome.”
-The one face it resembles is the Giotto Dante.</p>
-
-<p>Some critics on the spindle side will find it
-easier to forgive an unsuccessful patriot than an
-uninventive and unauthoritative lover. Emmet in
-hiding near the Priory, between the no-rising and
-the arrest, had his almost certain chances of escape;
-but he could not persuade the girl, born, like
-Hamlet, to a tragic inaction, to strike hands with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
-him and make the dash for liberty. Habit sat too
-heavily on her defrauded spirit, and insufficient
-faith in herself kept her where she was. The
-secrecy of their relations seems to have hurt and
-weakened her. She could no more stand up then
-against her father’s displeasure than she could part
-long after with dejection and a sort of remorse,
-when the face of her outer world had beautifully,
-almost miraculously, changed. And Emmet loved
-her as she was, a day-lily on a drooping stem. To
-quarrel with them because no fleet-footed horse, as
-in a novel, pranced by night to Rathfarnham to bear
-them away together, is to quarrel with a perfected
-sequence. To mark the look of this Robert,
-hungry for the heroic, the look of this Sarah,
-mystical as twilight, is but to forecast casualties.
-Perhaps as every soul has a right to its own kind
-of welfare and happiness, so it has a right to its
-own kind of sorrow. The second alternative suits
-the innocent, although it shocks the moral sense
-of most persons far more than would the choice
-of error instead of truth. To be an Emmet at
-all meant to get into trouble for advanced ideals.
-To be a Curran meant to have a keen intelligence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
-always besieged hard, and eventually overcome, by
-melancholia, as John Philpot Curran’s was at the
-end, as Richard Curran’s was in his prime. Emmet
-and the young creature of his adoration were hardly
-used; but Fate chose not ill for them. A <i>révolution
-manquée</i> with an elopement; expatriation with a
-marriage certificate; a change of political front with
-the parental blessing—all look somehow equally
-incongruous and out of key with those sensitive
-faces elected, let us say, to better things. Their
-story, with all deductions which can be made, has
-already done something to deepen the sense of
-human love in the world, and to broaden the dream
-of human liberty. Perhaps either of those games
-may be considered as always worth the candle.</p>
-
-<p>Rashness, and the immediate ruin consequent upon
-it, two things which men can taste, smell, handle,
-hear, and see, are not redeemed, in their opinion,
-by anything so unsubstantial as motive. History, a
-tissue of externals, cannot afford to take account of
-that. Hence it falls out that certain spirits are
-finally given over, with their illegitimate deeds in
-arm, to folk-lore and balladry. Of these are
-Charlotte Corday, and John Brown of Ossawatomie,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
-and Robert Emmet. There is no need of exculpating
-them in the forum of the people, where they
-were never held to be at fault; and exculpation is a
-waste of words to the rest of us. We understand
-too well what social havoc these pure-eyed hot-hearted
-angels bring in their wake, when they condescend
-to interfere with our fixed affairs. They
-call into being in their own despite our most self-protective
-measures: measures, in short, which
-amount to an international coalition against the
-undesirable immigrant. Relentless inhospitality to
-such innovators, in every generation and in every
-clime, is the habit of this planet. Such as our
-affairs are, we do not seem to wish them made over
-into duplicates of those of the Kingdom of Heaven.
-The executed meddlers, however, often take on an
-unaccountable posthumous grace, and may even be
-approached upon anniversaries in a mood none other
-than that of affectionate congratulation. The
-anomaly of our own situation has passed with their
-death: though they never change, we grow up in
-time to be Posterity, and to see with them the
-ultimate correlations of things, in a region of intellectual
-space where nothing goes by its old name.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
-To be unbiassed and Irish is to love Robert Emmet;
-to be generously English is to love him; to be
-American is to love him anyhow.</p>
-
-<div class="poetry-container">
-  <div class="poetry">
-<div class="verse">“Aristogeiton! here is for thy sword</div>
-<div class="verse"><span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">A myrtle of Mount Vernon, plucked this day.”</span></div>
-</div>
-</div>
-
-<div class="center"><br /><br /><small>THE END</small></div>
-<hr class="full" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span></p>
-
-
-
-
-<div class="copyright">
-Printed by <span class="smcap">Ballantyne, Hanson &amp; Co.</span><br />
-Edinburgh &amp; London<br />
-</div>
-
-
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1">[1]</a> The name in the original MS. was probably Burrowes.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2">[2]</a> The bracketed words are conjectures of the present writer.
-The MS. has suffered greatly from the damp, so as to be practically
-illegible in places.</p></div></div>
-
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<div class="tnote"><b>Transcriber’s Note:</b> Page 84, “n” changed to “in” (in a very clever)
-</div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
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