excluded from political liberty three-fourths of the nation whose liberties it professed to defend, including men of large property, men of ancient family, men of high rank, men of professional eminence, men of high education, men of unblemished character: and which could believe that so manifest a sham could long continue to exist before the face of the sun. Henry Grattan, the founder of the independence of Ireland, was not thus blinded. He did not see, what seems so plain to us, that a free and independent Parliament really representing the Irish nation must soon have come into collision with the English Parliament, and that civil war would have been the only possible result; but he did see that a little band of tyrants trampling upon their fellow-countrymen, though they might be the instruments and tools of the English nation, could not long be its equals and rivals. He strove to stem the tide of corruption and tyranny, and to open to the Irish nation access to the free State, of which he was the founder. When he found all his efforts unavailing, he retired in disgust from public life, and buried himself in the lovely scenes of his villa among the Wicklow mountains. He felt what he afterwards declared in the Parliament at Westminster "when the Irish Parliament rejected the Catholic petition, on that day, she voted the Union. Many good and pious reasons she gave, and she lies there with her many good and her pious reasons."

But in 1782, when Plunket became a member of the Historical Society, and an eager witness of the parliamentary debates, even statesmen such as Grattan anticipated for the Parliament of Ireland a career of glory. What wonder if the young student caught the enthusiasm. This must be borne in mind, if we would do justice to his feelings eighteen years later.

His undergraduate years went rapidly by. He was specially distinguished in the debates of his fellow-students, and his biographer wisely publishes what has been preserved of his early speeches, which it is in several ways interesting to compare with those of his later life. He left the college with a store of classical taste and accomplishments which were a fund of pleasure through his whole life: and even in old age "it particularly pleased him to cap quotations from the great Greek and Latin authors with those who were fresh from school and college studies, a competition in which he was always successful." Even more important, perhaps, in his profession and in Parliament was the diligent practice with which he had cultivated his natural talent for oratory. Another acquisition of almost greater value he made in Trinity College; a store of friends,

it lasted, but forgiven and bitterly regretted by both." Mr. Plunket says

The following touching circumstance was told me by Hunter, the eldest and favourite child of the Archbishop.

own words :

Mrs. Margaret
I give it in her

"The last time I visited Old Connaught I took my eldest boy to see Lord Plunket, and he took us with him to see the pleasure grounds and garden. As we walked and conversed, he stopped short, facing me, and said, 'Margaret, your father would once have sacrificed his life for me.' I replied, 'My Lord, I think he would have done so to the last hour of his life.' He paused, with his hands behind his back, as his custom was, and looking full in my face, he said, 'Margaret, I treated your father very badly,' and tears dropped heavily upon his shoes. I replied, 'Well, my Lord, he forgave you and loved you to the last, and trusted to meet you again where that quarrel might all be forgotten.' He said, with solemn emphasis, 'God grant it, God grant it.' I never saw him again, as he was forbidden to converse with me, so much did it agitate him to refer to those bygone days” (vol. i., p. 257).

We know so little of the man, and so much of the politician, that it would have been a loss, indeed, had so beautiful a gleam of personal character been unrecorded.

College days are but too soon over. While Magee was studying for his fellowship, Plunket was keeping term at Lincoln's Inn (for the Irish Bar required a year's terms to have been kept in London) and studying "Fearne on Contingent Remainders." His pecuniary difficulties tempted him to leave the law for some less ambitious, but more quickly remunerating pursuit, but he was courageously backed by his noble-hearted sisters. His sister Catharine, when forcing on him a small loan of money, which he had at first refused, insists that he shall repay her with heavy interest "as soon as he is AttorneyGeneral, as she expects he will be speedily." His progress was what, at least in our days, would be reckoned uncommonly quick. He was called to the bar in January, 1787, and in June wrote to a friend: "I made my first public exhibition a fortnight ago in the Court of Exchequer, and gained a good deal of credit by it. I have some prospect of being employed next winter in a business of some consequence before the Lords in which I am to be the sole counsel; on the whole, I find myself likely to get business much faster than I had any right to expect."

We must hasten over the years of his practice. He pleaded before a committee of the Irish House of Commons on the university election. The Provost Hutchinson, founder of the Donoughmore family, had used the influence of his official situation to force his son into Parliament by very gross intimi

dation and corruption. It is curious to find that one exercise of his power was to force the future Archbishop Magee to undergo the ceremony of ordination by a Protestant bishop against his will. Magee applied to the provost for a dispensation to enable him to go to the bar. It was refused by Hutchinson "from a sense of duty," and then offered, together with other privileges, producing about £100 per annum, on condition of his breaking his promise to the other candidate, and voting for the provost's son. There were worse cases still. The committee consisted of fourteen. One was unable to attend. Of the remaining thirteen, seven were for unseating Mr. Hutchinson, and six the other way. But the chairman was one of the minority, and by Act of Parliament had power to vote in the place of the absent member. He thus made the votes seven against seven, and then gave his casting vote. Thus the chairman preserved the seat of the provost's son by giving three votes. This committee sat in 1791. It is interesting, because among its members were two young aristocrats of promise, both of whom voted against corruption. One was Lord Edward Fitzgerald; the other, Arthur Wesley (as he then wrote his name), whose body sixtyone years later was borne in funeral pomp from Chelsea Hospital to Saint Paul's. So rapid was Plunket's rise that only ten years after his call to the bar he received a silk gown from Lord Chancellor Clare, and afterwards practised chiefly in the Courts of Equity.

In 1798 he was returned to the Irish Parliament for the close borough of Charlemont. Its patron, the celebrated earl who took his title from it, differed from him on the question of Catholic Emancipation, but the movement brought into prominence other subjects upon which they were cordially one. Plunket took his seat February 6th, and the rebellion broke out almost immediately afterwards. It was hardly suppressed when the proposal for a union was made, in vehement opposition to which Plunket won his parliamentary fame.

He has been most unjustly condemned by men who, knowing that he had first distinguished himself as a politician by the extreme violence as well as power with which he tore in pieces this most important measure of a Tory Government, and that in future life he was distinguished as a Conservative politician, have hastily concluded that he was a political apostate. Of his private feelings, we have already said, less is known than in the case of most politicians. His public conduct seems to have been quite consistent. It is plain that he had been from his earliest years what would now be called a Liberal

Conservative, or at least what would have been so called a few months back, before Mr. Disraeli had succeeded in throwing all parties and all principles into utter confusion. In his own days he would have been called a Constitutional Whig. In a word, he was, both politically and intellectually, a disciple of the ever-illustrious Edmund Burke. Young as he was when he entered the Irish Parliament, he had shown this long before. "Long before Tone was obliged to leave Ireland," says Mr. Cashel Hoey, the political opposition between him and Plunket "had even bred a personal estrangement between the two friends." Tone wrote in his journal at Paris, "My friend Plunket (but I sincerely forgive him) and my friend Magee, whom I have not yet forgiven, would not speak to me in Ireland, because I was a Republican." The "boy" of the Historical Society was "father to the man" who supported Government in the debates on the "Peterloo Massacre," and the war against Napoleon on his return from Elba. But the Union was an exceptional question. Writing in England in 1867, it is easy enough to see that it was a matter of necessity. At the time Sir Arthur Wellesley wrote from India "there must be no more debating societies in Ireland" (vol. i., p. 100). But both the measure itself, and still more the means by which it was carried, must have been inexpressibly loathsome to any tolerably sanguine and honest Irishman, and more especially to one like Plunket, a rising member of the Irish Bar. His patriotic feelings must have been excited to the utmost, and concentrated not on the great British empire, but upon Ireland; for his interest in politics began in the year 1782, when

The members of the Historical Society were night after night listening to the eloquence and sharing the enthusiasm with which Henry Grattan and his associates stirred the Irish people to assert their independent nationality. They saw an army of 90,000 volunteers assemble and line the streets of Dublin through which the patriot members walked to their regenerated assembly; and while every Irishman of ardent imagination regarded these events as the beginning of a meridian age of independence and prosperity, none foresaw the future of humiliation and disaster which closed the history of the last century in Ireland (vol. i., p. 84).

And whoever might gain or lose by the Union, it deprived, at a single stroke, the rising members of the Dublin Bar of society, position, and prospects, such as perhaps no other persons in Ireland had to lose. Plunket had just attained the position in which he could place himself in the first rank as a politician, without interrupting the professional career in which he was already earning a magnificent fortune. Suddenly it was proposed