1

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 or

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 pe licy, deemed it absolutely necessary to raise an aristocratic interest, an interest of property and education among them, and to give them rational

expectations of partaking in the benefits of a constitution which, as Mr. Burke has somewhere said, is not made for great, general, 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 understood.

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.

moment more opportune for the restoration of liberty than this, in which I have the honour to address you.

England now smarts under the lesson of this American war; the doctrine of Imperial legislature she feels to be pernicious; the revenues and monopolies annexed to it, she has found to be untenable; she has lost the power to enforce it; her enemies are a host pouring upon her from all quarters of the earth; her armies are dispersed; the sea is not hers; she has no minister, no ally, no admiral; none in whom she long confides, and no general whom she has not disgraced. The balance of her fate is in the hands of Ireland. You are not only her last connexion; you are the only nation in Europe that is not.. her enemy. Besides, there does, of late, a certain damp and spurious supineness overcast her arms and councils, miraculous as that vigour which has lately inspirited yours;-for with you, every thing is directly the reverse. Never was there a parliament in Ireland so possessed of the confidence of the country; you are the greatest political assembly now sitting in the world; you are at the head of an immense army; nor do we only possess an unconquerable force, but a certain unquenchable public fire, which has touched all ranks of men, like a visitation.

Turn to the growth and spring of your country, and behold and admire it. Where do you find a nation who, upon whatever concerns the rights of mankind, expresses herself with more truth or force, perspicuity or justice? Not the set phrase of scholastic men, not the tame unreality of court addresses, but the genuine speech of liberty, and the unsophisticated oratory of a free nation.

'See her military ardour, expressed not only in 40,000 men, conducted by instinct, as they were raised by inspiration, but manifested in the zeal and promptitude of every young member of the growing community. Let corruption tremble. Let the enemy foreign or domestic tremble. But let the friends of liberty rejoice at these means of safety and this hour of redemption. Yes. There does exist an enlightened sense of rights, a young appetite for freedom, a solid strength and a rapid fire, which not only put a declaration of right within your power, but put it out of your power to decline one. Eighteen counties are at your bar: they stand there with the compact of Henry, with the charter of John, and with all the passions of the people.

I read Lord North's proposition. I wish to be satisfied, but I am controlled by a paper, I will not call it a law;-it is the sixth of George the 1st. (The act was read.) I ask the gentlemen of the long robe,-Is this the law? I ask them whether it is not practice? I appeal to the judges of the land, whether they are not in the course of declaring that the Parliament of Great Britain, naming Ireland, binds her? I appeal to the magistrates of justice, whether they do not, from time to time, execute certain acts of the British Parliament? I appeal to the House, whether a country so circumstanced is free? Where is the freedom of trade? Where is the security of property? Where is the liberty of the people? I here, in this Declaratory Act, see my country proclaimed a slave! I see the judges of the realm, the oracles of law, borne down

by an unauthorised foreign power,-the authority of the British Parliament against the law! I see the magistrates prostrate, and Parliament silent. I therefore say with the voice of 3,000,000 of people, that notwithstanding the export of sugar, beetle-wood, and panellas, and the export of woollens and kerseys, nothing is safe, satisfactory, or honourable, nothing except a declaration of right. What are you, with 3,000,000 of men at your back, with charters in one hand and arms in another, afraid to say you are a free people? Are the cities and the instructing counties who have breathed a spirit that would have done honour to old Rome, when Rome did honour to mankind, are they to be free by connivance? Are the military associations, those bodies whose origin, progress and deportment have transcended, equalled at least, any thing in modern or ancient story, are they to be free by connivance? What man will settle among you? Where is the use of the Naturalization bill? Who will leave a land of liberty and a settled government for a kingdom controlled by the Parliament of another country, whose liberty is a thing by stealth, whose trade a thing by permission, whose judges deny her charters,-where the chance of freedom depends upon the hope, that the jury shall despise the judge stating a British act, or a rabble stop the magistrate who executes it, rescue your abdicated privilege, and save the constitution by trampling on the government, by anarchy and confusion?'

These are ardentia verba. Towards his peroration, the Orator is still more powerful.

There is no policy left for Great Britain but to cherish the remains of her empire, and do justice to a country who is determined to do justice to herself, certain that she gives nothing equal to what she received from us when we gave her Ireland.

With regard to this country, England must resort to the free principles of government, and forget that legislative power which she has exercised to do mischief to herself. She must go back to freedom, which, as it is the foundation of her constitution, so it is the main pillar of her empire. It is not merely the connexion of the crown, it is a constitutional annexation, an alliance of liberty, which is the true meaning and mystery of the sisterhood, and will make both countries one arm and one soul, replenishing from time to time in their immortal connexion, the vital spirit of law and liberty from the lamp of each other's light. Thus combined by the ties of common interest, equal trade and equal liberty, the constitution of both countries may become immortal, a new and milder empire may arise from the errors of the old, and the British nation assume once more her natural station, the head of mankind.

That there are precedents against us, I allow. Acts of power I would call them, not precedents; and I answer the English pleading such precedents, as they answered their kings, when they urged precedents against the liberty of England. Such things are the weakness of the times; the tyranny of one side, the feebleness of the other, the law of neither. We will not be bound by them; or rather, in the