purest morality. He was never the momentary apologist of vice or profligacy. An instinctive, innate horror of every thing low or corrupt, a religious devotion to public and private principle, and a rooted conviction that both were inseparably intwined together in their ethical relations, a contempt for money, the surest indication of a lively sensibility to the wants and sufferings of others, were the chief outlines of his domestic life and habits. His life,' says his son, (and we regret that on account of the bad taste discovered in the composition, we cannot adopt more of the biographical sketch prefixed to these volumes,) his life was one continued, gentle, moral lesson. It ⚫ was impossible in his society, not to become enamoured of virtue.'

Thus lived, and thus died a man whom every age does not witness. Never was there an individual exposed to the stormy elements of political strife, who experienced more of the proverbial levity of the people ;-of that people whose political and moral depression he deplored, and devoted his whole life to meliorate. The object of their fondest idolatry one day, he was, on the next, rejected and decried; in 1798, denounced as an enemy to his country; deified afterwards as the strenuous assertor of the constitution; traduced again, as the betrayer of the civil liberties of Ireland; in 1812, elected by the unanimous voice; and in 1818, almost stoned to death in the midst of his native city.

To the honour of England, never insensible to native or to foreign worth, his death was universally mourned, and the sighs of the great and the good attended him to his grave. The interest of the sad solemnities was deepened by the unostentatious attendance at his funeral of all that was elevated in rank, or ennobled by talent; the warmest of his political opponents joining in the procession, as if solicitous to bury in his tomb the passing animosities and contentions of the hour. The spot of earth dedicated to his mortal remains, adjoins that which encloses the dust of Pitt and of Fox. Atqui hæc sunt indicia solida et expressa; hæc signa probitatis, non fucata • forensi specie, sed domesticis inusta notis veritatis.**

Concerning the character of Mr. Grattan's eloquence, a greater variety of opinion may be fairly indulged, than can be entertained of the manly and undeviating rectitude of his public career. Though not liable to all the exceptions which sound criticism and correct taste may justly take to that which is called the Irish school, his mode of speaking was far from being untinctured by its vices. His best and most popular

Cicero. Orat. pro Plancio.

harangues may be said to be a string of antitheses. He appeared more solicitous to produce effect by strong and pointed sentences, than by continuous and systematic reasoning. We certainly perceive, and to a great degree we feel in this extraordinary orator, a style, glowing, animated, enthusiastic. At the same time, we find it incongruous, and not in the best taste of composition, all the members of the piece being pretty equally laboured and expanded, without any due selection or subordination of parts. He is generally too epigrammatic, and his manner wants variety. There is an eloquence far beyond this, the eloquence of reason, the eloquence of Fox, which, conscious, as it were, of its native might, threw off, as it started on its gigantic course, the trappings and incumbrances of a vulgar rhetoric. He did not trust himself, like Demosthenes, to the athletic and invincible strength of argument. Infected with the prevailing taste of his countrymen, he could not resist the temptations which figurative and coloured diction holds out to ardent and impassioned minds. We have already alluded to his love of point and antithesis. It was this fault, a fault seldom redeemed by the brightest excellencies, that imparted what may be called a mannerism to his public speaking, and upon many occasions, counteracted the strength and impetuosity of his reasoning, leaving the understanding neutral and unconvinced, while it sated and tired the ear with a ceaseless jingle of sentences and epigrams.

How far the peculiar style of Mr. Grattan was influenced by the character of what is called Irish eloquence, might be curious as a matter of inquiry; but we shall not now pursue it. It would be injustice, however, to his great powers, to class him with those public speakers who best illustrate, by their vices and defects, the peculiar qualities of that school. Mr. Curran in many instances, and Mr. Charles Philipps in all his speeches, are admirable specimens of the worst deformities of that style of eloquence. They furnish us with all the diagnostics of the disease,—a perpetual affectation, the glitter of discordant imagery, common-places tricked out in the tarnished finery and ragged embroidery of that indigence which appears still more indigent from its ostentation. But their master vice is, that they sacrifice every thing to effect. The fact to be stated, the inference to be enforced, are as nothing to the diction and the manner. The decorations of the discourse are considered as holding no connexion with the matter. How completely at variance with the precepts of antiquity is a style thus constituted! Etenim ex rerum cognitione efflorescat et redundet oratio, que nisi subest res ab oratore percepta et cognita, inanem quandem habet elocutionem, et pæne puerilem.' Every topic,

whether primary or subordinate, is clothed in the same costliness of attire. There are no under-parts,-no repose: all is effort and elevation. The result of this is, the combination of meanness and magnificence, alternate opulence and indigence, -an image of those decayed palaces which travellers have noticed as the residence of the decayed noblesse of Genoa,-gilding and cobwebs, frescoes and moths, arabesques and filth.

It is not easy to assign a satisfactory cause for this national peculiarity. Much may be attributed to temperament; much also to political causes. The history of Ireland is that of a national struggle. Her energies have been cradled in storms. Long and continued excitements themselves create a language. The common speech, reduced to rule, and modified by that correct and fastidious taste which discourages all beauties but those which are conventional, and recognises no graces but those which accord with the chastest propriety, is far too feeble and cold for the impassioned impulses which are generated and kept alive by an undying sense of oppression, and a ceaseless hatred of the oppressor. Hence there is a perpetual dread of doing imperfect justice to their own conceptions; and lest the thought should be too languidly expressed, the Irish orator rushes into the opposite extreme of expressing it too artificially. Hence, also, his language is studded and thick-set with figures, overwhelming the meaning which they were called in to illustrate; and taste and good sense are alike shocked by those mixed and broken metaphors which are such fatal deformities in speaking and in writing.

Yet, there are persons who, with a fond nationality, or infected with the contagion of bad example, vaunt of this style as the consummation of eloquence; and the names of Burke and Sheridan are cited as its authorities. An outrageous violation of just classification! They were born in Ireland, it is true; but the accident of birth does not constitute them Irish orators. They were nurtured to fame and greatness in England; and Irish eloquence is as remote from their style and manner, as the Latinity of Apuleius is from that of Livy, or the Achilleid of Statius from the elegance and purity of Virgil. True it is, that amid the vast and inexhaustible variety of Burke, there are insulated passages and specific sentences which may give some countenance to the notion; thrown out in those seasons in which great sublimities are driven to the verge of their contiguous deformities, and swelling and unmanageable conceptions, struggling for expression, and finding expression in its ordinary forms and established usages inadequate to their purpose, offend against the ordinances of a severe and exact taste. But this seldom happens. Burke is of no rhetorical sect of

school. His style is as unbounded in its varieties, as was his mind. Lofty and impassioned, grave and ethical, profound and philosophical, his diction is a gigantic stream, reflecting on its surface the diversified objects which it overtakes in its course. While you are criticising him in one form and modification, he starts up in another. But as for the characteristic vices of the Irish school, his philosophy was too deep, his taste too severe, to tolerate the licentious extravagance of a false rhetoric. We think also that no slight injustice has been done to the illustrious subject of the present article, by classing him among Irish orators. In early life, Mr. Grattan was uninfected with antithesis, and this is nearly the only feature of similarity which renders him liable to such a classification. It grew upon him towards the close of his career; but his earlier speeches were free from it.

It is much to be lamented that of his early speeches scarcely a memorial exists. But the true criterion of their excellence, is what they have effected for Ireland. Mr. Grattan found her in a depressed and half-civilized state: his unwearied and triumphant patriotism raised her to a place among nations. Before Mr. Grattan, Ireland had scarcely a merchant, or a manufacturer, or a name of note in literature. No conjuncture could have been more critical than that which first placed him upon the stormy theatre of her politics; none more calculated to try the genius and the resources of a public man. Power and violence were on one side; on the other, slavery and disorder. The usual result of this unhappy state of things was soon felt; and the history of Ireland continued as it began,-a series of alternations between exorbitant authority, sullen submission, secret repinings, and open rebellions.

Of these evils, no small part arose from the spirit of the Popery laws; laws, the declared object of which was, to reduce the Catholics of Ireland to a miserable populace, pars despectissima gentis, without property or education. They divided the nation into two distinct bodies, without common interest, sympathy,, or connexion. One of these bodies was to possess all the franchises, all the property, all the education: the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf. This violence of conquest and tyranny of regulation, continued without intermission for nearly a hundred years, had, reduced them to the condition of a mob without estimation themselves, and holding in no estimation the rank and influence of others. To remedy this disorder, Mr. Grattan and the few who accorded, in his views of policy, deemed it absolutely necessary to raise an aristocratic interest, an interest of property and education among them, and to give them rationa!

expectations of partaking in the benefits of a constitution which, as Mr. Burke has somewhere said, is not made for great, gene'ral, and proscriptive exclusions.'

On the 19th of April, 1780, Mr. Grattan, who had entered on his political career, animated with the most ardent resolution to restore the independence of Ireland, introduced his celebrated Declaration of Irish Rights; the first step towards the recovery of that legislative power of which she had been arbitrarily deprived for centuries. That our readers may clearly apprehend the subject of his great speech on this occasion, we will premise a few things which must be previously under

stood.

The right of Ireland to make laws, was first invaded by the 10th Hen. VII. in a parliament held before the Deputy Sir Edward Poynings, which enacted, That no parliament should be held in Ireland without a certificate under the great seal, of the acts that were to be passed; that they should be affirmed in England by the King in council; and his licence to summon a parliament was to be obtained under the great seal of England, Thus the English privy-council acquired the power to alter or suppress acts of the Irish Legislature, and the Irish Parliament lost the power either to originate, to alter, or to amend. But, besides this invasion of her legislative rights, she lost also her judicial privileges. The celebrated Case of Ireland' which was burned by the hands of the hangman, was the protest of Molyneux, a spirited writer, against this usurpation. The English House of Lords persisted in reversing on appeal the decrees of the House of Lords in Ireland. But the disputes on this memorable subject produced the arbitrary act of the 6th George I, declaring that Ireland was a subordinate and dependent kingdom; that the King, Lords, and Commons of England had power to make laws to bind Ireland; that the House of Lords of Ireland had no jurisdiction, and that all proceedings before that court were void. The Irish nation reluctantly yielded, until the spirit of the times began to awake, and the arming of the volunteers gave weight and efficacy to their remonstrances. They had obtained a free trade from Great Britain; and many other circumstances conspired to rouse them to a sense of their condition, and a manly aspiration after their rights. These circumstances are well alluded to by Mr. Grattan.

If this nation,' said he, after the death-wound given to her freedom, had fallen on her knees in anguish, and besought the Almighty to frame an occasion in which a weak and injured people might recover their rights, prayer could not have asked, nor God have furnished, a