man James was elected. The approbation of the Privy Council_being_necessary to confirm the election of the Lord Mayor, both parties appealed to that body on behalf of their respective candidates. The case was argued before them, Doctor Duigenan defending Alderman James, and George Ponsonby, and Mr. Curran, Alderman Howison. The result was that the council sent the parties to a new election.

It was on this occasion, that Mr. Curran made a splendid speech, in which he alluded to Lord Clare, and portrayed his character in colours which could not be mistaken, and the brilliancy of which will never fade. His description of Ireland was spirited and patriotic; his description of Lord Clare was just, eloquent and severe, and conveyed the most caustic satire in the most polished style, which latter quality is not always to be found in Curran's speaking. But a long metaphorical invective was not perhaps the best mode of encountering Lord Clare. Curran had beforehand mentioned that he meant to attack him; so that he was immediately stopped: for though the Lord-lieutenant (who is the head of that court) was present, yet Lord Clare assumed the right to direct, and accordingly he cleared the chamber. This, however, did not prevent the publication of the speech and the invective. But if Curran had pressed very hard on the legal opinion of the Chancellor, which in point of law was quite wrong, and had delivered some very hard sentences before he could have been stopped, he would have borne him down, and his success would have been more complete. Curran, however, did neither.

The Chancellor never forgave this attack; the picture was too like; there was no mistaking it, and in consequence he fatally revenged himself

CHAP. I.]

MR. CURRAN.

3

upon Curran; for the speech cost him his chief practice at the bar. The judge set himself so sternly against the advocate, that he deprived him of almost all his business in chancery, and may be said to have driven him from his court. Even here, however, Curran could have gained the advantage, if he had read; for Lord Clare knew nothing profoundly. But Curran was not master of the business of the court, and wanted application.

The following extracts from this celebrated speech may be considered somewhat copious; but they merit attention from the consequences they produced, and which afford a melancholy spectacle; how effectually, how cruelly, and how irresponsibly, tyranny could be exercised in Ireland, even in a Court of Justice.

Speaking of the law that regulated the Corporation, and which Mr. Grattan's father had brought in,-Mr. Curran observed

"At the time of this statute, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen exercised the exclusive power of election to the chief magistracy without any interference of the Commons. The immediate mischief of such a Constitution, with respect to the metropolis itself, I have touched on before. The people were borne down, the magistracy depraved, the law was relaxed, and public tranquillity was at an end. These mischiefs were more than enough to induce the citizens of Dublin to call loudly, as they did, upon the justice of the legislature for Parliamentary redress. But the wisdom of that legislature formed an estimate of the mischief from considerations that probably did not enter into the minds of the contending parties; namely, from the then state of Ireland as an individual, and as a connected country; as as an individual depressed in every thing essential to the support of political or civil independency,-depressed in common, in opulence, and in knowledge; distracted by that civil and religious discord suggested by ignorance and bigotry, and inflamed by the artifice of a cruel policy, which divided in order to destroy; conscious that liberty could be banished only by disunion, and that a generous

nation could not be completely stripped of her rights until one part of the people was deluded into the foolish and wicked idea that its freedom and consequence could be preserved, or supported only by the slavery or depression of the other:-in such a country it was peculiarly necessary to establish at least some few incorporated bodies, which might serve as great repositories of popular strength. Our ancestors learned from Great Britain to understand their use and their importance; in that country they had been hoarded up with the wisest forecast, and preserved with a religious reverence, as an unfailing resource against those times of storm, in which it is the will of Providence that all human affairs should sometimes fluctuate; and as such they had been found at once a protection to the people, and a security to the Crown. My lords, it is by the salutary repulsion of popular privilege, that the power of the monarchy is supported in its sphere: withdraw that support, and it falls in ruin upon the people, but it falls in a ruin no less fatal to itself, by which it is shivered in pieces.

"Our ancestors must therefore have been sensible that the enslaved state of the corporation of the metropolis, was a mischief that extended its effects to the remotest borders of the island. In the confederated strength and the united councils of great cities, the freedom of the country may find a safeguard, which extends itself even to the remote inhabitant who never put his foot within their gates.

"But, my lords, how much these considerations have been enforced by a view of Ireland, as a connected country, deprived as it was of almost all the advantages of an hereditary monarch: the father of his people, residing at a distance, and the paternal beam reflected upon his children through such a variety of mediums, sometimes too languidly to warm them, sometimes so intensely as to consume; a succession of governors differing from one another in their tempers, in their talents, and in their virtues, and, of course, in their systems of administration; unprepared in general for rule by any previous institution, and utterly unacquainted with the people they were to govern, and with the men through whose agency they were to act.

"Sometimes, my lords, it is true, a rare individual* has appeared among us, as if sent by the bounty of Providence, in compassion to human miseries, marked by that dignified simplicity of manly character, which is the mingled

*Mr. Grattan.

CHAP. I.] BEFORE THE PRIVY COUNCIL.

-

5

result of an enlightened understanding, and an elevated integrity, commanding a respect that he laboured not to inspire, and attracting a confidence which it was impossible he could betray. It is but eight years, my lords, since we have seen such a man amongst us, raising a degraded country from the condition of a province, to the rank and consequence of a people worthy to be the ally of a mighty empire, forming the league that bound her to Great Britain, on the firm and honourable basis of equal liberty and a common fate, standing and falling with the British Empire;' and thus stipulating for that freedom which alone contains the principle of her political life in the covenant of her federal connexion.

"But how short is the continuance of these auspicious. gleams of public sunshine!—how soon are they passed, and perhaps for ever! In what rapid and fatal revolution has Ireland seen the talents and the virtues of such men give place to a succession of sordid parade and empty pretension, of bloated promise and lank performance,- of austere hypocrisy and peculating economy. Hence it is, my lords, that the administration of Ireland so often presents to the reader of her history, not the view of a legitimate government, but rather of an encampment in the country of a barbarous enemy; where the object of the invader is not government, but conquest; where he is of course. obliged to resort to the corrupting of clans, or of single individuals pointed out to his notice by public abhorrence, and recommended to his confidence only by a treachery so rank and consummate, as precludes all possibility of their return to private virtue or to public reliance, and therefore only put into authority over a wretched country, condemned to the torture of all that petulant, unfeeling asperity with which a narrow and malignant mind will bristle in unmerited elevation,-condemned to be betrayed, and disgraced, and exhausted by the little traitors that have been suffered to nestle and to grow within it, making it at once the source of their grandeur and the victim of their vices, reducing it to the melancholy necessity of supporting their consequence, and of sinking under their crimes, like the lion perishing by the poison of a reptile that finds shelter in the mane of the noble animal while it is stinging him to death.

"But to what end offer argument to such men? A little and a peevish mind may be exasperated, but how shall it

be corrected by refutation? How fruitless would it have been to represent to that wretched Chancellor that he was betraying those rights which he was sworn to maintain,* and that he was involving a Government in disgrace and a kingdom in panic and consternation; that he was violating every sacred duty and every solemn engagement that bound him to himself, his country, his sovereign, and his God! Alas! my lords, by what argument could any man hope to reclaim or to dissuade a mean, illiberal, and unprincipled minion of authority, induced by his profligacy to undertake, and bound by his avarice and vanity to persevere. He would probably have replied to the most unanswerable arguments by some curt, contumelious, and unmeaning apothegm, delivered with the fretful smile of irritated self-sufficiency and disconcerted arrogance; or even if he could be dragged by his fears to a consideration of the question, by what miracle could the pigmy capacity of a stunted pedant be enlarged to a reception of the subject? The endeavour to approach it would have only removed him to a greater distance than he was before: as a little hand that strives to grasp a mighty globe is thrown back by the reaction of its own effort to comprehend. It may be given to an Hale or an Hardwick to discover and retract a mistake; the errors of such men are only specks that arise for a moment upon the surface of a splendid luminary; consumed by its heat, or irradiated by its light, they soon purge and disappear. But the perverseness of a mean and narrow intellect are like the excrescences that grow upon a body naturally cold and dark no fire to waste them, and no ray to enlighten, they assimilate and coalesce with those qualities so congenial to their nature, and acquire an incorrigible permanency in the Union with kindred frost and kindred opacity. Nor indeed, my lords, except where the interest of millions can be affected by the folly or the vice of an individual, need it be much regretted that to things not worthy of being made better it hath not pleased Providence to afford the privilege of improvement."

Lord Chancellor.-"Surely, Mr. Curran, a gentleman of your eminence in your profession must see that the conduct of former privy councils has nothing to do with the question before us. The question lies in the narrowest compass; it is merely whether the Commons have a right of * Sir Constantine Phipps, whose conduct became the subject of much complaint.