ger of the example, it still would not be denied; the indolent should have all the benefit or all the mischief of such a precedent; but, in truth, Mr. Curran never was a mere gifted idler. He might not, indeed, have been always found with a book before him, he might not have been nominally a severe student, but for the course of forty years he kept his faculties in perpetual exercise; and if all that he created in public, or in the society of his friends, had been composed in the retirement of the closet, it would have scarcely been asserted that idleness was the habit of his mind. In his youth he was a formal student, to a greater extent than is generally supposed. Before he had attained the age of twentyfive, when he was called to the bar, independent of his classical acquirements, which have never been doubted, his acquaintance with general literature was far from inconsiderable; he was perfectly familiar with all the most popular of the English poets, historians, and speculative writers. He had, at the same age, with little assistance but that of books, acquired more than a common knowledge of the French language. If he did not pursue a long consecutive course of legal reading, he was yet perpetually making a vigorous plunge, from which he seldom returned without some proof that he had reached the bottom. For several years after his admission to the bar, he devoted more of his mornings and evenings to the study of his profession than his most intimate friends at the time could have believed to be compatible with his convivial habits and public avocations. His frame was never robust, but it was extremely patient of fatigue; and no matter how great the exhaustion of the day, or the evening, a very few hours sleep completely restored it; this natural felicity of constitution he confirmed by early rising, constant exercise, the daily practice of cold bathing, and similar methods of invigorating the system. Indeed, when it is recollected that Mr. Curran, at the period of his life at present under consideration, was looking to the bar alone for the means of future subsistence, and for the gratification of his ambition, it is utterly incredible that he should have neglected the ordinary arts by which success was to be attained. According to the concurring accounts given by himself and his cotemporaries, he neglected none of them. Eloquence was at that time not only the most popular, but one of the shortest roads to eminence at the Irish bar; and from the moment of the discovery of his powers as a speaker, he began, and continued, to cultivate them with the utmost assiduity. His enunciation (as has been already observed) was naturally impeded, his voice shrill, and his accent strongly provincial, or (to use his own expression) “in a state of nature;" to remove these defects, he adopted the practice of daily reading aloud, slowly and distinctly, and of most studiously observing and imitating the tones and manner of more. skilful speakers. The success of this exercise and study was so complete, that among his most unrivalled excellencies as an orator, were the clearness of his articulation, and a peculiar, uninterrupted, graduated intonation; which whatever was the subject, whether tender or impassioned, melodised every period. His person was without dignity or grace-short, slender, and inelegantly proportioned. To attain an action, that might conceal as much as possible these deficiencies, he recited perpetually before a mirror, and selected the gesticulation that he thought best adapted to his imperfect stature. To habituate his mind to extemporaneous fluency, he not only regularly attended the debating clubs of London, but, both before and after his admission to the bar, resorted to a system of solitary exercise, of which the irksomeness cannot be well appreciated by those who have never practised it. He either extracted a case from his books, or proposed to himself some original question; and this he used to debate alone, with the same anxious attention to argument and to diction, as if he were discussing it in open court. There is nothing in all this to excite any won der; but certainly the person who early submitted to these modes of labour, and frequently resumed them, cannot be considered as careless or incapable of application. It may be a matter of curiosity with some, to know the writers, that, having been Mr. Curran's early favourites, may be supposed to have had an influence in forming his style. Some of his letters, already given, discover in different passages a preference for the manner of Sterne; a similar resemblance appears more frequently, and more strongly, in several others of about the same date, which have not been introduced. It was from the "Letters of Junius," that he generally declaimed before a glass.* Junius and Lord Bolingbroke, were the English prose writers, whom he at that time studied as the most perfect models of the declamatory style. Among the English poets, he was passionately fond of "Thomson's Seasons." He often selected exercises of delivery from "Paradise Lost," which he then admired, but subsequently (and it is hoped that few will attempt to justify the change) his sensibility to the beauties of that noble poem greatly subsided.† In this list, the sacred writings must not be omitted; independent of their more solemn titles to his respect, Mr. Curran was from his childhood exquisitely alive to their mere literary excellencies; and in his maturer years seldom failed to resort to them, as to a source of the most splendid and awful topics of persuasion. *The single exercise that he most frequently repeated for the purpose of improving his action and intonation, was the speech of Antony over Cæsar's body, from Shakspeare's Julius Cæsar. This he considered to be a master-piece of eloquence, comprising in itself, and involving in its delivery, the whole compass of the art. He studied it incessantly, and pronounced it with great skill, but though he delighted his auditors, he never entirely satisfied himself; he uniformly recommended it as a lesson to his young friends at the bar.-C. In criticising Milton, Mr. Curran always dwelt upon what others have considered among the most splendid and attractive parts of his work, the scenes in Paradise; in objecting to which, he contended that the human characters introduced are detached and solitary beings, whose peculiar situation precluded them from displaying the various social feelings and passions, which are the proper subjects of poetic emotion. For a vigorous and eloquent answer to this objection, see Hazlitt's observations on Paradise Lost, in his Lectures upon the English Poets.-C. Of all the profane writers, Virgil, whom he considered "the prince of sensitive poets," Before quitting the subject of Mr. Curran's youthful habits, it is proper to mention the pleasure that he took in occasionally mingling in the society of the lower orders of his countrymen: he was a frequent attendant at the weddings and wakes of his neighbourhood. Being from his infancy familiar with the native Irish language, he lost nothing of whatever interest such meetings could afford. They appear to have had considerable influence on his mind; he used to say himself, that he derived his first notions of poetry and eloquence from the compositions of the hired mourner over the dead.* It was probably amidst those scenes that he acquired the rudiments of that thorough knowledge of the Irish character, of which he afterwards made so amusing an use in enlivening a company, and so important a one in confounding a perjured witness. It may have been too in this humble intercourse that some even of his finer tastes and feelings originated or were confirmed. Out of Ireland the genius of its natives is, in general, but partly known. They are, for the most part, represented as comical and impetuous, qualities which, lying upon the surface, strike the stranger and superficial observer; but with these they unite the deepest sensibility. It is the latter that prevails; and if their pathetic sayings had been as sedulously was his favourite. For a considerable part of his life, he made it a rule to read Homer once a year; but the more congenial tenderness of Virgil attracted him every day.-C. *It may be necessary to inform some English readers, that the practice of formal Jamentations over the dead is one of the ancient customs of the Irish, which is continued among the lower orders to the present day. In the last century, it was not usual upon the death of persons of the highest condition. The ceremony is generally performed by women, who receive a remuneration for composing and reciting a "Coronach" at the wake of the departed. In some parts of Ireland, these women used formerly to go about the country, to "look in "upon such elderly persons as might soon require their attendance; and to remind them, that whenever the hour might arrive, a noble Coronach should be ready. Mr. Curran's father-in-law, Dr. Creagh, was so molested by one of these dispiriting visitors, and had such an aversion to the usage, that in the first will he ever made, he thus begins, after the usual preamble, "requesting it as a favour of my executors, that, neither at my wake nor at my funeral, they will suffer any of the savage howlings, and insincere lamentations, that are usually practised upon these serious and melancholy occasions, but to see the whole of my burial conducted with silence and Christian decency."--O. recorded as their lively sallies, it would be seen that they can be as eloquent in their lamentations as they are original in their humour. Of these almost national peculiarities, so opposite, yet to constantly associated, Mr. Curran's mind strongly partook; and in his, as in his country's character, melancholy predominated. In his earliest, as well as his latest speculations, he declined to take a desponding view of human affairs-he appeared, indeed, more frequently in smiles to relax his mind, or to entertain his companions; but when left entirely to his original propensities, he seems to have ever wept from choice. [If Mr. O'Regan's account can be relied on, Curran's predisposition for eloquence may be traced to an event which occurred while he was a child, at a wake, in his native Newmarket. The story runs thus: "At one of those national carnivals, where the common excitements of snuff, tobacco, and whiskey, and the fruits of plundered orchards, are abundantly supplied, Mr. Curran felt the first dawn, the new-born light, and favourite transport which almost instantly seized upon his imagination, and determined his mind to the cultivation and pursuit of oratory. It was produced by the speech of a tall, finely-shaped woman, with long black hair flowing loosely down her shoulders; her stature and eye commanding; her air and manner austere and majestic. On such occasions, nothing is prepared: all arises out of the emotion excited by the surrounding circumstances and objects. "Some of the kindred of the deceased had made funeral orations on his merits: they measured their eulogies by his bounties; he was wealthy; his last will had distributed among his relations his fortune and effects; but to this woman, who married without his consent, to her, his favourite niece, a widow, and with many children, he carried his resentment to the grave, and left her poor and totally unprovided for. She sat long in silence, and at length, slowly, and with a measured pace, approaching the dead body from a distant quarter of the room, with the serenest calm of meditation, laying her hand on his forehead, she paused: and, whilst all present expected a passionate and stormy expression of her anger and disappointment, she addressed these few words to him: 'Those of my kindred who have uttered praises, and poured them forth with their tears, to the memory of the deceased, did that which, by force of cbligation, they |