ever beyond the range of his family and his sycophants; a cipher in the national sum,-a toy to be played with by the shuttlecocks of ministers-a nonentity among mankind. To quote one sentence on this topic is, we are persuaded, as much as any reader of these pages will endure-" The empire was lost when the King was in possession of his senses, it was recovered only when he was deprived of them." This is the summary way of accounting for the Peninsular glories, and the conquest of the universal enemy.

Henry Grattan was born in Dublin, on the 3d of July 1746. His father was a barrister, for many years Recorder of Dublin, and member of Parliament for the city from 1761 until 1766, when he died. It was his ill luck to have for his colleague in Parliament Dr Lucas, an individual who, having failed in his profession of medicine, adopted the more thriving one of demagogue, acted as the disturber of the public peace for some years, was a prodigious discoverer of grievances, and after wasting his life, and impoverishing his family, died, bequeathing to the nation a demand for the payment of his debts, and the pensioning of his descendants.

As

the Doctor was wholly ignorant of law, and his colleague, the Recorder, was a sound lawyer, they quarrelled of course upon every possible subject. Lucas appealed to the mob, and of course had them on his side, the Recorder appealed to common law and common sense, which in those times had no one on their side. The lawyer was of course universally worsted, and, as the narrative says, suffered this paltry contest to embitter, if not to shorten his days. If this be true, the lawyer was as great a fool as the demagogue. An ancestor of Grattan had been a senior fellow of the Dublin College. His son, Grattan's grandfather, a country gentleman, resided near Quilca, Dr Sheridan's house, which has been made so familiar to us from the life of Swift. It was by this neighbourhood that Swift became acquainted with the five brothers, who seem to have been considerable favourites even with the tetchiness of the celebrated Dean Swift, who, in a letter to Lady Betty Germain, thus writes:

"I went and told my Lord Duke (Dorset, then viceroy) that there was a certain family here called the Grattans, and

"Dublin, Dec. 30th, 1735.

"MY LORD,-Your Grace fairly owes me one hundred and ten pounds a-year in the church, which I thus prove: I desired you would bestow a preferment of one hundred and fifty pounds a-year to a certain clergyman. Your answer was, that I asked modestly, that you would not promise, but grant my request. However, for want of good intelligence, and of being (after a cant word used here) an expert kingfisher, that clergyman took up with forty pounds a-year, and I shall never trouble your Grace any more on his behalf. Now, by plain arithmetic, it follows that one hundred and ten pounds remain, and this arrear I have assigned to one Mr John Jackson, a cousin-german of the Grattans, who is vicar of Santry, and has a small estate, with two sons and as many daughters, all grown up. He has lain some years as a weight upon me, which I voluntarily took up on account of his virtue, piety, and good sense, and modesty, almost to a fault. Mr Jackson is condemned to live on his own small estate, part whereof is his parish about four miles from hence, where he has built a family house more expensive than he intended. He is a clergyman of long standing, and of a most unblemished character; but the misfortune is, he has not one enemy to whom I might appeal for the truth of what I say."

The mention of the Marlay family, from whom Grattan was descended in the female line, introduces an anecdote worth relating, for the benefit of those who are fond of civil war. "Radical changes" in countries and constitutions may be happy topics to round the periods of an itinerant orator, or indulge the theories of a philosopher of the Reviews; but to those who have any thing to lose, they are terrible things, and even to those who have nothing to lose, they are not much better in the end. Sir John was a man of large fortune

at the commencement of the tumults in 1640, a royalist, as was every honest man in the kingdom, and about that period mayor of Newcastle. Being summoned to surrender by the Earl of Leven, at the head of the Scottish army (1644), he replied, like the honourable man that he was, "that he would not betray his trust or forfeit his allegiance." The town was stormed, and his assailants were so infuriated by the spirit of his defence, that the general was obliged to place a guard of soldiers over his house. He had another result of the turn of popular freedom to undergo, for he was returned in the list of the principal persons sent to London to be tried, and was termed "that atheistical mayor and governor of the town, a most pestilent and desperate malignant, and enemy to all goodness." "Such," says the biographer," was the fanaticism of the times." A fanaticism, however, which is copied every day of his life by his faction, and which would realize its menaces with even more desperate fidelity. Marlay, who had been so opulent as to be called the rich knight," was robbed of all his fortune by the republicans, and sustained the still heavier loss of three sons in battle: his life was spared, and it seems to have been the only thing that was left to him. It is painful, even at this distance of time, to record, that this brave and sincere man was neglected by that contemptible and selfish profligate, Charles II. But the family evidently held a certain consideration among the loyalists; for his son was afterwards a captain in the Duke of Ormond's regiment, and his grandson, a barrister, rose rapidly through the ranks of his profession, till he arrived at the Chief Justiceship of the King's Bench in Ireland. The daughter of this distinguished public officer was the mother of Grattan.

His sons, beginning life with the advantages of their father's rank, made a respectable figure. One was a member of Parliament, another rose to be a colonel in the army, and a third became bishop of Waterford.

When a boy, Grattan gave a proof of his early spirit, by refusing to remain at a school where he had been insulted by the master. The pedant, not content with disapproving of his translation of a passage in Ovid, ordered him to kneel in presence of the

boys, and desired the footman to call him "an idle boy." The footman had decency enough to decline the office, and little Harry Grattan, insisting on being subjected to the chance of such indignities no longer, left the school. In 1763 he entered Dublin College, where he became acquainted with Foster, afterwards Speaker of the House of Commons, and Fitz-Gibbon, afterwards Lord Chancellor. Politics raged in Ireland at this period, and perverted all the inconsiderate, all the ambitious, and all the poor, thus leaving the common sense and common principle of the country in a hopeless minority. Grattan, in the giddiness and ignorance of youth, a Whig, quarrelled with his father, whose better knowledge, and more mature experience, had made him a Tory, and the quarrel went so far that the family mansion was willed to another. This act seems to have weighed heavily on the son, and to have produced a good deal of the melancholy tone which characterises his early letters. In one of those letters to an intimate friend, he writes in this strain—“ If you want my company, I am sure I want yours. A fluctuation of sentiment, a listless indolence, and the gloomy reflections that arise from it, make the chaos of my mind. But of this no more. A man who is not happy finds his principal comfort in painting his own disquietude." Those were the feelings of a philosopher of one-andtwenty; but we soon find them still more strongly excited by the still more painful reality. His father died; and, as it appears, without sufficient reconciliation. On this occasion he thus writes to his friend Broome :—

"I am determined upon the first occa sion to retire with you to some country lodging, where we may enjoy each other's society, poverty, and independency. I am at present as retired as possible, perfectly unconcerned about the time to come, very

little concerned about the time present; melancholy, and contemplative, yet not

studious. I write this letter from Bellcamp (the family mansion), where I have been these three days, without any of the family, and where I intend to continue some days longer in the same solitude. I employ myself writing, reading, courting the muse, and taking leave of that place where I am a guest, not an owner, and of which I shall now cease to be a spectator. I tell myself by way of consolation, that

happiness is not the gift of any one spot,

however ancient and native."

He adds, in the same spirit, " per. haps the time may come, when fortune 'patre valentior,' may smile on me, and enable my old age to resign my breath where I first received it.-Farewell."

power.

At this time he wrote verses, but whatever might be his poetic diligence, he was never destined to exhibit poetic It is a remarkable circumstance, that congenial as oratory and poetry seem to be, no one name on record has been eminent in both, from the days of Cicero to our own; both requiring the same ardour of imagination, copiousness of language, and knowledge of man and nature. A great gulf has lain between, which, like the valleys of the Andes, whose edges seem to touch, yet whose depths are beyond the light of the sun, seems to have been within reach of the easiest transit, yet is all but impassable. But Grattan was evidently aware that if fame was to be achieved by him, it was not through the favour of the nine. He writes to his friend, who had asked him for some poetry," the compositions you demand of me, are incorrect and illegible. My muse is at best but a slattern, and stumbles frequently in her passage. She visits me but seldom, and her productions are rather the efforts of her mind, than the nature of it. When her works are polished and rendered legible, they shall be sent to you."

The political history of Ireland, if written without either perversion or partiality, would be a document next in value to a true history of the Revolution of France. If the latter showed the violences of the mob, the former demonstrated the basenesses of party. If the Revolution found its emblem in the tiger, that, once tasting of human blood, refused all other food, Irish party found its natural similitude in the monkey, at once burlesque and mischievous, gluttonous of all that it could get, and destroying all that it could not devour-ridiculous to look at, yet hazardous to play with ; at once teasing and treacherous, dangerous and disgusting.

From the commencement of that century, Ireland, relieved from the intrigues of Popery, had been the most pacific portion of the empire. Peace was beginning to produce wealth; its natural consequence. The southern

provinces were beginning to exchange their wild pastures for corn fields; and the northern, Protestant and industrious, already enjoyed an active and extensive system of commerce and But this is a condition manufacture. of things, on which, whatever spirit of evil especially urges the disturbance of nations, always seems to look with peculiar hostility. There was also an unhappy opening left for his incursion. The political conflicts of Ireland had obstructed the Reformation. In those conflicts the people had become barbarous, and the Government insecure. their prejudices, their ignorance, and The factions of the country, Popish in their hostility to England, had successively followed the desperate policy of allying themselves with the Popish

continent. Thus Ireland, without the power to shake off either the yoke of Popery, or the influence of foreigners, was the slave of both, and received from both nothing but the wages of the slave-stripes and chains. From the period when the triumphs of Elizabeth's reign made England an empire, and thus awoke the jealousy of the great continental kingdoms, Ireland was adopted by France and Spain as the means which offered the most direct access to the very heart of her strength; important to alienate as an essential portion of British power; and to disable, if it could not be turned into the instrument of actual invasion. In all the attacks of France and Spain on England, the first object of their policy was to raise insurrection in Ireland; in some instances actual invasion was tried, and in all a spirit of disaffection was sedulously sustained. The influence of the Popish priesthood, superstitiously powerful over their followers, was sedulously employed to do the work of those sovereigns of whom the Pope was the vassal, while he himself was the vassal of the Pope. Thus was continued a perpetual treason by a perpetual imposture; thus the minister of the enemy ruled from the altar of the priest; and thus the policy of sovereigns, and the oath of the hierarchy, combined to make this unhappy land the scene of tumults, which, excited by foreign hostility, and unsubdued by foreign pacification, made it the channel that it has been for five centuries. England has been charged with this melancholy result-this conspiracy of man to defraud a great

country of the bounties of nature, and the benevolence of Government. But she might as well have been charged with the torrents which the Atlantic clouds pour upon the land. They were, like those torrents, the product of her position, the offspring of a great surrounding element of storm, unge. nerated by her own narrow and simple surface, and urged by impulses from distant shores and sources, which, to her, were as unseen and inscrutable as the wind "that bloweth where it listeth," and made itself known only by its foreign fury and its strange sound.

Thus Protestantism, first received with joy in Ireland, was suddenly retarded, and finally repelled. Thus, too, the incursion of a multitude of sects, following in the train of the civil wars, seized a large share of the legitimate territory of the Church of England; and thus, too, republican ideas, adopted with republican discipline, suggested ideas of revolution. In all instances of British history, since the days of Elizabeth, the first shaft at the state has been pointed to the Church. The great guardian of morals has been naturally assailed by the enemies of laws, and the desecration of the established altar has been held the essential step to the dismantling of the throne. Sectarianism was the true tempter of the revolt of America; sectarianism was the true tempter of the rebellion of Ireland. the immediate presence of England, the vigour of a powerful Government, and the existence of an Established Church, which, though impoverished, was neither ignorant nor idle, made the process essentially more cautious, tardy, and finally incomplete, than in the remote and mighty continent which England had conquered from the swamp and the savage.

But

The first attempt of the new-born patriotism of Ireland, was to shorten the duration of Parliament. Nothing could be more plausible; for the dislocation, into which all the affairs of the realm had been thrown by the civil war, had made the length of the Parliaments wholly undefined. In practice they were supposed to last during the life of the king; but, meeting only after long prolongations, (from 1666 they did not assemble for nearly thirty years,) thus virtually ceasing to exist, and, when they re-assembled, existing

only for routine, the country was governed, as it is now, by the Parlia ment of England. On the accession of George III., a bill for limiting the duration of Parliaments for seven years was brought in by Dr Lucas, the agitator, of whom mention has been already madę. After various disappointments, the bill, only altered from septennial to octennial, was, in 1768, passed into a law. On this point the agitator certainly had the game in his own hands; for, if Parliament were to exist at all, it ought to be sent back to the country at intervals which would compel it to look to character; the true question, however, being, whether a Parliament offer the fittest means to govern a country at once small and turbulent, and whose leading classes are as ready to be corrupt, as its populace to be intractable.

The author regards this bustling personage as the founder of Irish liberty. With such an architect, we cannot wonder at the extravagance of the fabric, or the speed of its downfal. He tells us that Lucas was another Swift, but without his talents. In Lucas this spirit of attack “seemed a sort of inspiration, for nothing was too high or too low for his resentment, or his ambition. He assailed every thing and every body, from the monarch who swayed the sceptre, down to the mayor who held the mace. He deemed their offences great, and his language was strong in proportion. He made political abuse a sort of trade, and made business by it, and popularity."

This is certainly neither an amiable character nor a respectable one; but it is the natural character of an agita tor, and might be the motto for the his tory of the living species. Of course this career, a hundred years ago, could not have been run with perfect ease; as there were no Papists in Parliament, the agitator was forced to rely upon himself and the rabble. He found a Ministry strong enough to stand by itself, and, being unable either to me nace it by the desertion of a faction, or overthrow it by the arts of a public conspiracy, Lucas was declared by the grand juries of Dublin to be a libeller, promoting insurrection, and "justifying the bloody rebellion raised in Ire land."

They ordered his writings to be burn ed by the common hangman. The Attorney-General filed an information

which their mediocrity of mind and baseness of nature were made. The fate of Lucas was similar. Sinking into utter obscurity in Parliament, and forgotten by the people, his death alone revived his memory. Faction made a pretext of his funeral to awake rabble passions; and the leaders of the party which had neglected him, attempted to retrieve their neglect by panegyrising him as a patriot when he was no more.

The viceroyalty of Lord Townshend in 1768, was the commencement of the new policy in Ireland. Some leading families of rank had hitherto conducted the affairs of the country by a kind of association. This instru ment, while manageable by the English minister, might be convenient to his ease, but it might also be detri mental to his higher views of policy. It was clamoured against and conceded. The people demanded to be governed by a Parliament, and Lord Townshend was sent over to break up the oligarchy. This new shape of government had the effect of bringing forth some men of remarkable ability. Among the rest was the new Speaker of the House of Commons, Mr Pery, a man little known in England, but who in Ireland enjoyed a great name in his day. One of the values of these volumes, is their containing a series of characters, which, as they could not be the result of the author's personal experience, we must presume that we owe to either the notes or the recollections of his distinguished father.

against him; the House of Commons voted him an enemy to his country, and ordered his arrest; the Lord. Lieutenant issued a proclamation for his apprehension; finally the corporation disfranchised him. All this storm of hostility had no effect on Lucas-it was the very thing for a demagogue. He ran away for a while, to show that he was persecuted; but his fears of Government could not be very strong, when he went no further than London. Even there, however, he claimed the privileges of martyr dom; for he dates from Westminster as "the present place of my pilgrimage." He naturally found England a more agreeable place of residence than Ireland, with all its discontents and disturbances gathering round his old age, and there he remained for ten years; but the dissolution of Parliament, which took place on the death of George the Second, was an ill omen to Lucas. His restless spirit was fired again by the hope of political bustle. The outlawry had been now taken off, and he was chosen one of the members for Dublin. A seat in Parlia ment is always the most injudicious object of a vulgar demagogue-it has stripped more asses of the lion's hide than any other contrivance on record. The vulgar brawling which answers the purpose of the streets, raises the contempt of the House; the ignorance which satisfies the populace, is disgusting to the better classes; the monotonous cry of grievances, which forms the staple of the street scribbler, palls upon the ear of the House; and the brutish demagogue, who has nothing to support him but his brawling, is no sooner heard than he is put down, and no sooner put down than he is forgotten. Parliament was the extinguisher which put out the vulgar lights of Hunt and Cobbett. The little reputation which they had made for themselves by brawling in taverns, and scribbling virulence in pamphlets, perished as soon as the House of Commons saw of what contemptible elements they were made. Their first speeches exhausted all their topics; and when they were once precluded from Billingsgate, they lost the only source of their eloquence. As they could give no knowledge to the House, the House would give them no attention; and they sank into the obscurity from which they had risen, and for

Edmund Sexton Pery had been a barrister. He came into Parliament in 1761. Of him it is said, that "some men have a creative fancy, Pery had a creative judgment. He saw many years further into futurity than any other public man. A skilful leader, he knew how to advance and how to retire. He was possessed of the rarest and greatest acquirement a public man can wish for a stern political fortitude that is proof against every temptation."

Pery had an opportunity of distinguishing himself in the chair on an important question in 1772. The Government desired to increase the number of commissioners of the reve

nue.

The House passed a resolution against the increase. Government, notwithstanding, enlarged the number