that seemed the climax of this exciting contest. "Just when Mr. Egan had risen to speak, the doors of the House of Commons were thrown open, and Henry Grattan, who had been returned for Wicklow the night before, entered the house. His form was emaciated by sickness, and his face was worn with anxiety; his limbs tottered; he was obliged to lean upon his friends Arthur Moore and George Ponsonby; he advanced slowly to the table. Acting on the impulse of his really noble nature, Castlereagh rose at the head of the Treasury bench, and remained standing and uncovered while the patriot took the oaths. Grattan then moved slowly to his seat, selecting a place beside Mr. Plunket, and having obtained permission to speak sitting, he addressed the House for nearly two hours in a speech of great power."-Life of Lord Plunket. An Unready Writer.-Grattan was utterly incapable (said Curran) of writing the simplest thing with rapidity. Upon one occasion he lost an important motion in the Irish House of Commons by his defect in this respect. The House being with him, the Speaker asked him to commit his motion to writing. Four lines would have embraced it, but Grattan wrote and tore, and wrote and tore, till, the House losing its patience, a ministerial member proposed that instead of a formal resolution of the House, the minister should give a verbal pledge, to which Grattan assented, and thus the motion was lost. "Dragons' Teeth."-On the 24th of November, 1779, Mr. Grattan proposed the following short and decisive resolution in the Irish Parlia ment: "That at this time it would be inexpedient to grant new taxes." This was carried against the Government by a majority of 123. On the ensuing day it was moved that the appropriated duties should be granted for six months only. This also was carried against the Government by a majority of 38. It was in this debate that Mr. Burgh, then Prime Serjeant, made a brilliant speech, which produced electric effects in the house and galleries, but which in a letter from the Viceroy was termed "great violence." They rose in a mass and cheered him repeatedly as he concluded—“Talk not to me of peace; Ireland is not in a state of peace; it is smothered war. England has sown her laws like dragons' teeth, and they have sprung up in armed men.”—Grattan's Life and Times. Negative Defence.-On one occasion, in the Irish Parliament, Mr. Fitzgibbon had attacked Mr. Grattan, who was not at that time present. Mr. Yelverton defended his absent friend, saying, "The learned gentleman has stated what Mr. Grattan is; I will state what he is not. He is not styed in his prejudices; he does not trample on the resuscitation of his country, or live like a caterpillar on the decline of her prosperity; he does not stickle for the letter of the constitution with the affectation of a prude, and abandon its principles with the effrontery of a prostitute." A Pitiful Failure.-When Dr. Lucas, a very unpopular man, ventured on a speech in the Irish Parliament, and failed altogether, Henry Grattan said, "He rose without a friend, and sat down without an enemy." Waiting for the Signal.—“ I have heard," says Lord Byron, "that when Grattan made his first speech in the English Commons, it was for some minutes doubtful whether to laugh at or cheer him. The début of his predecessor, Flood, had been a complete failure, under nearly similar circumstances; but when the ministerial part of our senators had watched Pitt (their thermometer) for the cue, and saw him nod repeatedly his stately nod of approbation, they took the hint from their huntsman, and broke out into the most rapturous cheers. Grattan's speech, indeed, deserved them; it was a chef-d'œuvre." When he rose (says Phillips) every voice in that crowded house was hushed-the great rivals, Pitt and Fox, riveted their eyes on him. He strode forth and gesticulated-the hush became ominous-not a cheer was heard-men looked in one another's faces and then at the phenomenon before them, as if doubting his identity; at last, and on a sudden, the indication of the master spirit came. Pitt was the first generously to recognise it; he smote his thigh hastily with his hand-it was an impulse when he was pleased-his followers saw it and knew it, and with a universal burst they hailed the advent and the triumph of the stranger. HENRY FLOOD. (1732-1791.) 8 A Wooden Oracle.-One of Flood's methods of "disquieting minister (remarks Phillips) was the plying him with inconvenient questions. On one of these occasions, in the Irish Parliament, the Secretary referred him to some subaltern who was absent. "Well, well,” said he, "I must be content to wait. Formerly the oak of Dodona uttered its own oracles; but the wooden oracle of our Treasury is compelled to give his responses by deputy." Whipping the "Whip."-Flood once affrighted the "whipper-in" of the Irish House, as he crossed him during his speech, presumedly to pursue his usual negotiations among the members. "What," he cried, "is that I see? Shall the Temple of Freedom be still haunted by the foul fiend of bribery and corruption? I see personified before me an incarnation of that evil principle which lives by the destruction of public virtue." Retaliation.-Lord Byron relates that Courtenay silenced Flood in the English House by a crushing reply to a hasty début of the rival of Grattan in Ireland. I asked Courtenay (for I like to trace motives) if he had not some personal provocation; for the acrimony of his answer seemed to me, as I read it, to involve it. Courtenay said he had; that, when in Ireland (being an Irishman), at the bar of the Irish House of Commons, Flood had made a personal and unfair attack upon himself, who, not being a member of that House, could not defend himself; and that some years afterwards the opportunity of retort offering in the English Parliament, he could not resist it. He certainly repaid Flood with interest, for Flood never made any figure, and only made a speech or two afterwards, in the English House of Commons. I must except, however, his speech on reform, in 1790, which Fox called the best speech he ever heard upon that subject." Transplanted Too Late.-Grattan, in a review of some of his Irish contemporaries, thus wrote of Flood, after the death of the latter: "Mr. Flood, my rival, as he has been called-and I should be unworthy the character of his rival if in his grave I did not do him justice-he had faults, but he had great powers, great public effect. He persuaded the old, he inspired the young; the castle vanished before him. On a small subject he was miserable; put into his hand a distaff, and, like Hercules, he made sad work of it; but give him the thunderbolt, and he had the arm of a Jupiter. He misjudged when he transferred himself to the English Parliament; he forgot that he was a tree of the forest, too old and too great to be transplanted at fifty; and his seat in the British Parliament is a cantion to the friends of union to stay at home, and make the country of their birth the seat of their action." JOHN PHILPOT CURRAN. Independence.-Lord Longueville returned Curran to the Irish Parliament in 1783 for a pocket borough, under an idea of his own (says Phillips) that a barrister with a growing family, and totally dependent on his profession for subsistence, would scarcely suffer his principles to interfere with his interests. On the very first occasion, however, he not only voted against his patron, but, by at least an energetic speech, proved the total fallacy of all his anticipations. Lord Longueville of course warmly remonstrated; but what was his astonishment to find Curran not only persevering in his independent opinions, but even appropriating the only five hundred pounds he had in the world to the purchase of a seat, which he insisted on transferring as an equivalent for that given to him by Lord Longueville. A Parenthetical Speech.-Curran was once asked how a member of Parliament had spoken. The answer was, His speech was a long parenthesis." He was asked to explain. "Why," said he, "don't you know that a parenthesis is a paragraph which may be omitted from beginning to end, without any loss of meaning?" The Extinguisher.-Of a certain Serjeant Hewitt Curran once remarked, "His speech put me exactly in mind of a familiar utensil called an extinguisher: it began at a point, and on it went widening and widening, until at last it fairly put out the subject altogether." Airing a Vocabulary.-An able speaker, but addicted to lofty language, had made a speech in the House of Peers, at which Curran was present. He was asked what he thought of the debate. I had," said he, "only the advantage of hearing Lord airing his vocabulary." The Ghost of a House.-On the union of the Legislatures, the Irish Parliament House was turned into a bank, and various changes took place in the structure; among the rest, the interior was gutted, and the handsome dome taken down. Hearing of Castlereagh's remark that the house looked like a traitor that had undergone the sentence of the law," Curran, in allusion to that noble lord's activity in carrying the Union, said, “Ay, no man is likelier to make that remark-a murderer is always afraid of ghosts." Deliberate Aim.-During a debate in the Irish Parliament in 1789, Curran replied, with severe sarcasm, to a speech of AttorneyGeneral Fitzgibbon, in which he had received a rather gross personal attack. The result of this reply was a hostile message from Fitzgibbon. Mr. Ogle was second to the Attorney-General. The parties were to fire by signal; Fitzgibbon did not do so, but, reserving his fire, took deliberate aim at Curran; and, having missed him, walked off the ground. Curran exclaimed to him, "It was not your fault, Mr. Attorney, if you missed me, for you certainly were deliberate enough." Effective Speaking, and its Method. It was said of Plunket by Sir Robert Peel, "He was, in my opinion, the most powerful and able advocate the Catholics ever had. I will say that he, more than any other man, contributed to the success of the Roman Catholic question." Plunket came (writes Mr. Hoey) in the interval of two great parliamentary eras— while the contemporaries of Pitt and Fox were gradually retreating from public life, and before Peel, Canning, or Brougham had yet risen to the full perfection of their powers. He spoke in a new and unexpected strain. It was more like the language of some great noble of the robe, speaking with the sense that the estates of the realm really hung upon his words, than the common partisan declamation of the House of Commons, which has no horizon but the opposite benches and the reporters' gallery. The greatest authorities in and out of the House declared that he reached the very highest style of parliamentary oratory. "I wish you had heard him," wrote Lord Dudley of his Peterloo speech in answer to Mackenzie (November, 1819). He assailed the fabric of his adversary, not by an irregular damaging fire that left parts of it standing, but by a complete rapid process of demolition that did not let one stone continue standing upon another." That single speech admittedly saved the Cabinet. Most marvellous tribute of all, hardly credible of the House of Commons-he is said, on several of the Catholic Claims debates, to have converted various votes to his side (so many as six, it is alleged, on one occasion) by very dint of conscientious conviction. Of the method of his public speaking he told Sheil that he always carefully prepared to the very syllable the best passages, and the best only, of his great speeches, and used these as a kind of rhetorical stepping-stones, trusting to his native fluency and force for sustaining the style. Sheil said, what all who ever heard and all who read Plunket will confirm, that so consummate was the art with which this was done, one could never discern where the prepared was welded into the extemporaneous. 66 Lord Lytton's portrait gallery affords us this picture of Plunket:"Mark where he sits, his calm brow downward bent, Listening, revolving, passive, yet intent. No sign without of what he feels or thinks; Tones slow, not loud, but deep-drawn from the breast, But, as he near'd some reasoning's massive close, Some grey old keystone, and hurl'd down with scorn." Attraction and Repulsion.-Speaking in the Irish House of Commons against the Union, Plunket used the following illustration to refute an argument of his opponents: "The two Parliaments may clash! So in Great Britain may King and Parliament; but we see they never do so injuriously. There are principles of repulsion-yes; but there are principles of attraction, and from these the enlightened statesman extracts the principle by which the countries are to be harmoniously governed. As soon would I listen to the shallow observer of nature who should say there is a centrifugal force impressed on our globe, and therefore, lest we should be hurried into the void of space, we ought to rush into the centre to be consumed there. No; I say to this rash arraigner of the dispensations of the Almighty, there are impulses from whose wholesome opposition eternal wisdom has declared the law by which we revolve in our proper sphere, and at our proper distance. So I say to the political visionary, from the opposite forces which you object to, I see the wholesome law of imperial connection derived; I see the two countries preserv ing their due distance from each other, generating and imparting heat, and light, and life, and health, and vigour; and I will abide by the wisdom and experience of the ages which are passed, in preference to the speculations of any modern philosopher." Something to take Down.-A remarkable effect (relates Lord Brougham) is said to have been produced by Plunket in the Irish House of Commons, upon some one calling out to take down his words. "Stop," said this consummate orator, "and you shall have something more to take down;" and then followed in a torrent the most vehement and indignant description of the wrongs which his country had sustained, and had still to endure. The Departed Great.- Mr. Plunket made perhaps his most brilliant speech on the motion for a committee on the Roman Catholic |