BY HIS SON.
Edited, with Notes, Illustrations, &c.
By SHELTON MACKENZIE, D.C.L.
The Life of Curran is identified with the latest years of Ireland's nationality. He was known, tried, and trusted as a true Patriot. During the Reign of Terror, in 1798, got up by the Government of that day in order to betray the Irish Parliament into a parchment Union with Great Britain—sinking the country from a Kingdom to a Province—Curran manifested an independence and fearlessness, as advocate for the accused, during the State Trials, which endeared him to the people from whose ranks he sprung. To use the words of Thomas Davis (who resembled him in many things) he was "a companion unrivalled in sympathy and wit; an orator, whose thoughts went forth like ministers of nature, with robes of light and swords in their hands; a patriot, who battled best when the flag was trampled down; and a genuine earnest man, breathing of his climate, his country, and his time."
He was the centre of the flashing wits, the renowned orators, the brilliant advocates, and the true patriots of Ireland's last days of independence. The Biography by his Son, rich as it is in personal details, is capable of great improvement by the addition of numerous facts, anecdotes, and traits of character, relating to Curran and his contemporaries, which have transpired since its publication in 1819. Dr. Shelton Mackenzie, who has long been preparing for this task, undertakes to enrich the present edition by collecting and introducing these desirable illustrations. The work, thus completed, will in truth be a record not only of Curran and his eminent associates, but of the stirring and troublous times in which they lived. It will thus combine Biography and History, with Anecdote, unusually copious and "racy of the soil."
Footnotes
[1]In Lockhart's Life of Scott, this renowned Song is attributed to "the poetical Dean of Cork" (Dr. Burrowes, who wrote "The Night before Larry was stretched"), but really was written by Milliken, a poetical lawyer of whom Maguire says (O'Doherty Papers, vol. ii., p. 181) that not even Christopher North himself—
"Be he tipsy or sober,
Was not more than his match, in wine, wisdom, or wit."
[2] There is a popular belief in Ireland that the sunbeams dance on the wall on Easter Sunday morning. In my youth I have often got up at early dawn to witness the phenomenon.