day of judgment, the responsible character of a Christian bishop.

At college Curran was distinguished by his wit, his sociality, and his irregularities, rather than by his learning; though he was sufficiently. attentive to his studies to obtain a scholarship, and had ambition enough to begin to read for a fellowship, though he wanted perseverance, or a sufficient impetus to obtain it, as he soon laid aside the design. It was during the second year of his residence in Dublin that he fixed on the law as his future profession; and we shall give, in the words of his filial biographer, the singular cir cumstance that first happily suggested this change in his destination.

"He had committed some breach of the college regulations, for which he was sentenced by the censor, Dr. Patrick Duigenan, either to pay a fine of five shillings, or to translate into Latin a number of the Spectator. He found it more convenient to accept the latter alternative; but on the appointed day the exercise was not ready, and some unsatisfactory excuse was assigned. Against the second offence a heavier penalty was denounced-he was condemned to pronounce a Latin oration in laudem decori from the pulpit in the college chapel. He no longer thought of evading his sentence, and accordingly prepared the panegyric; but when he came to recite it, he had not proceeded far before it was found to contain a mock model of ideal perfection, which the doctor instantly recognised to be a glaring satire upon himself. As soon, therefore, as the young orator had concluded, and descended from his station, he was summoned before the provost and fellows to account for his behaviour. Dr. Duigenan was not very popular, and the provost was secretly not displeased at any circumstance that could mortify him. He therefore merely went through the form of calling upon the offender for an explanation, and listening with indulgence to the ingenuity with which he attempted to soften down the libel, dismissed him with a slight reproof. When Mr. Curran returned among his companions, they surrounded him to hear the particulars of his acquittal. He reported to them all that he had said, and all that he had not said but that he might have said;' and impressed them with so high an idea of his legal dexterity, that they declared, by common acclamation, that the bar, and the bar alone was the proper profession for one who possessed the talents of which he had that day given such a striking proof. He accepted the omen, and never after repented of his decision." (Vol. I. p. 16-18.)

At this period of his life, Curran was supported partly by the funds appropriated to the sizers, and partly by very

VOL. I.NO. I.

scanty remittances from Newmarket, which, culpably heedless of the privations that were undergone to procure them, he but too generally squandered away in entertaining his companions, or devoted to the maintenance of some illicit and profligate connections which he had formed, and which, though chiefly promiscuous, the well meant remonstrances of his tutors could not induce him to abandon. But, amidst all the vice and irregularity of his conduct, his studies were still prosecuted, though not with all the vigour which a mind like his might with ease have devoted to them; and, singular as it may appear, the subtleties of metaphysics were then the favourite object of his pursuit. These, however, were abandoned, when, like Swift, and Goldsmith, and Burke, his illustrious countrymen, he turned his back upon his alma mater, without or title or degree to give him an interest in its fame; but carrying with him, on the contrary, the seeds of dissatisfaction and contempt for its government and institutions, which matured with the maturity of his life. His journey to London, where he was to enter on the drier studies of the law, as detailed in one of his own letters, is pregnant with encouragement to those sons of genius-poor they may be, though unfortunate we will not call themwho have to fight their way, through privation, and neg-. lect, and contumely, to riches and to honour here, and to a reputation that will never die. The future ornament, and pride, and boast of the Irish bar, with his whole wardrobe, inheritance, and fortune, in a single box, carried to the packet by the maid-servant of his humble lodgings, arrived at Parkgate:

"I laid," he tells us, or rather tells his friend, “ my box down on the beach, seated myself upon it, and, casting my eyes westward over the Welch mountains towards Ireland, I began to reflect on the impossibility of getting back without the precarious assistance of others. Poor Jack! thought I, thou wert never till now so far from home but thou mightest return on thine own legs. Here now must thou remain, for where here canst thou expect the assistance of a friend?" (I. 32.)

But friends were found, and he did return to his native land; and when a few short years had rolled by, he recrossed the narrow sea that divides it from England, one of the most illustrious of her illustrious men. We must not, however, anticipate; for ere this revolution had taken place, it was much that he had to struggle with of difficulty and of labour in his path. Imposed upon by a landlord at the first spot of

English ground which he had visited, he marched with his box on his shoulder to a waggoner's at the other end of the village, where he entered it for London; and himself sallied forth toward the city of Chester on foot, a stranger in a strange land. Such was Curran's humble debut upon the shore of a country which now vies in admiration of his talents with that which has the honour of calling him her own. A stage-coach brought the young adventurer safely to town, and he was there entered" quocunque modo," as one of his biographers has not unaptly observed for of his means at this period of his life we are not satisfactorily informed a student of the Middle Temple; and according to the laudable custom of that and its three fellow honourable societies, ate his due portion of mutton, and swallowed a sufficient quantity of wine, to qualify him for his call to the bar. He, however, did more during his two years' residence in London than is, we fear, usually done by the majority of the students of his native country, who, when compelled, as a remnant of national vassalage, which ought to be done away with, to keep two years of their terms in England, are generally far more familiar with our theatres than our courts, and read more poetry than they study law: for Curran seems to have devoted some considerable proportion of his time to the severer preparatory labours of the profession he had chosen. He was also a regular attendant on the debating societies, which in that day began to offer themselves as schools of oratory to aspiring genius, and really trained within their walls to habits of public speaking and selfpossession, some of the brightest ornaments of the last generation of the English, as well as of the Irish bar. And well would it have been for the best interests of society, had this been the only effect of such institutions; or that a larger portion of evil had not far outweighed the good, which in this, and other individual instances, they unquestionably did produce, and under proper regulations might produce again. Their gross and wicked perversion to the purposes of revolutionary faction, and of an infidel philosophy, falsely so called, have deservedly brought them into such disgrace with every one who has a regard to his character, that a barrister of the present school would consider it a stigma, rather than an honour, to have it recorded of him, that his first appearance as a speaker was as one of the leading orators of a public forum. The very first efforts of Curran's elocution were not, however, made on quite so public a theatre; but forming one of a society of his fellow-students, for the most part also of his

fellow-countrymen, who met together in a more private manner for the purposes of discussion, his maiden speech, like that of many others who have afterwards risen to a distinction nearly as elevated as that which he attained, was confined to the trembling enunciation of the initiatory_sentence of his harangue; and "Mr. Chairman," stammered out again and again, was all that this great, but unpractised orator could say. Dismayed at about a dozen friendly faces which surrounded him, he was struck dumb in their presence, the resistless force of whose eloquence afterwards led the feelings and the judgment of juries captive at his will; whose undaunted spirit lectured the privy council in their duty; whose voice shook the senate of his country, and made her judges tremble on the bench. It was in vain that to encourage the bashful novice, (for even Curran was bashful once,) his friends cried, "Hear him, hear him!" for, as he himself good naturedly confesses, there was nothing to hear. Nor is it easy to say what might have been the effects of a discomfiture severely felt, in proportion as the anticipations of a triumphant display had been vain-gloriously high, but that our hero was soon put upon his mettle, by being tauntingly addressed at some of the societies which he still frequented (the Devils' we believe it was) as Mr. Orator Mum. Then it was that he found words and utterance, and lost the sense of fear, whilst he poured forth upon his unequal assailant that full tide of vituperative eloquence which, when time and practice had matured a talent that Nature had bestowed, was so peculiarly his forte, as it was also the dread and the chastisement of other and of greater men than he whose puny malice and paltry wit seems first to have given it vent.

But besides this timidity natural to the first efforts of an ingenuous mind, Mr. Curran had other and more formidable difficulties to surmount, before he became the powerful orator that the internal qualities of his mind seemed to have destined him for, as clearly as Nature appeared, in a strange fitful mood, to have denied him all the exterior graces of the suasive art. The Demosthenes of Ireland, like the Demosthenes of Greece, had from his boyhood so considerable a confusion in his utterance, that he obtained from his schoolfellows the nick name of the stutterer; and if to cure himself of this defect the Athenian orator daily declaimed with pebbles in his mouth to the dashing billows of the ocean, the speaker of modern times, upon whom, if upon any one, his mantle may be said to have fallen, as painfully, as perseveringly strove, by daily reading aloud with a slow and dis

tinct enunciation, to remove the impediments under which he laboured. This habit, and a close observation and imitation. of the tones and manner of more skilful speakers, wore off the rust of his strong provincial accent, softened the natural shrillness of his voice, and gave him, in their stead, a clearness of articulation, and a melodious and graduated intonation, that imparted to his elocution a charm which few of his cotemporaries could equal, and none of them excelled. Without dignity or grace of person; short; slender; inelegantly proportioned, and plebeian in the extreme in the cast of his countenance; in order to conceal as much as possible the deficiencies in his appearance, of which he was fully conscious, he recited perpetually before a mirror, that he might catch the gesticulation that had in it the most of gracefulness which, in his circumstances, it was possible to attain. The style of his elocution, if not formed upon the model, was strongly impregnated with the peculiarities which he purposely imbibed from the frequent perusal of Sterne, Junius's Letters, and the works of Lord Bolingbroke. Thomson, and Milton, among the modern poets, were those whose works he at this period of his life the oftenest read, and the most admired; though with respect to our great national' epic, the judgment of his after life sadly and singularly degenerated from the warmer, yet correcter taste of his earlier years. Of the ancients, Virgil was his favourite; and his

more congenial tenderness," as the filial piety of one of his biographers terms it, attracted, we are told, his attention every day, whilst he satisfied himself with laying it down as a rule to read once a year the works of Homer, whose fire yet lightened fifty times in his speeches, for one of the softer touches of the Mantuan bard.

Such and so unremitting were the preparations of Curran for the exercise of that profession, amongst whose members he was enrolled, by his call to the Irish bar, in the Michaelmas term of 1775; carrying with him into this new field of action, as a stimulus to exertion, a pregnant wife, to whom he was united in the last year of his studentship, and a load of debt to a few real friends, who had generously assisted in affording him the means of preparation for the bar, where the display of his talents would, they were assured, soon enable him to repay their willing loans. Nor were their hopes disappointed, or even long deferred; for it appears from the authentic evidence of his fee-book, that it was Curran's happy lot to escape the purgatory to which many of the brightest ornaments of his profession have for years been doomed-that of