[52]. “My reason,” said Mr. Ponsonby, on the hustings, “for proposing Mr. Barrington for the representation of the city of Dublin is—that I have known him as my friend, and I have known him as my enemy; and, in either character, have found him ‘an honest man.’”
I lost the election: but I polled to the end of the fifteen days, and the last tally; and had the gratification of thinking that I broke the knot of a virulent ascendancy, was the means of Mr. Latouche’s success, and likewise of Mr. Grattan’s subsequent return.
In the course of that election many curious incidents occurred; and as every thing which relates to Mr. Grattan, and tends to elucidate the character and peculiarities of that most pure and eminent of my countrymen, must necessarily be interesting (anecdotes, which, as cotemporaries are dropping fast around me, would, if not now recorded, be lost for ever,)—I feel myself justified in detailing a few, though in themselves of no particular importance.
In the days of unsophisticated patriotism, when the very name of Grattan operated as a spell to rouse the energies and spirit of his country;—when the schisms of party bigotry had yielded to the common weal, and public men were sure to obtain that public gratitude they merited;—the corporation of Dublin (in some lucid interval of the sottish malady which has ever distinguished that inconsiderate and intemperate body) obtained a full-length portrait of Henry Grattan, then termed their great deliverer. His name graced their corporate rolls as an hereditary freeman,[[53]] when the jealous malice of that rancorous and persevering enemy of every man opposed to him, the Earl of Clare, in a secret committee of the House of Lords, introduced into their report some lines of a deposition by one Hughes (a rebel who had been made a witness, and was induced to coin evidence to save his own life), detailing a conversation which he alleged himself to have had with Mr. Grattan, wherein the latter had owned that he was a United Irishman. Every body knew the total falsity of this. Indeed, Mr. Grattan was, on the other hand, a man whose principles had been on certain occasions considered too aristocratic; and yet he was now denounced, in the slang of the lord chancellor, “an infernal democrat!” The corporation of Dublin caught the sound, and, without one atom of inquiry, tore down from their walls the portrait which had done them so much honour, and unceremoniously expelled Mr. Grattan from the corporation without trial or even notice; thus proclaiming one of the most loyal and constitutional subjects of the British empire to be a rebel and incendiary. He despised and took no notice of their extravagance, but nevertheless sorely felt their ingratitude.
[53]. Mr. Grattan’s father had been recorder of Dublin and representative in parliament for that city.
On the election in question, I was proposed by Mr. George Ponsonby; and upon Mr. Grattan rising next to vote upon my tally, he was immediately objected to as having been expelled on the report of Lord Clare’s committee. A burst of indignation on the one side, and of boisterous declamation on the other, forthwith succeeded. It was of an alarming nature: Grattan meanwhile standing silent, and regarding, with a smile of the most ineffable contempt ever expressed, his shameless accusers. The objection was made by Mr. John Giffard—of whom hereafter. On the first intermission of the tumult, with a calm and dignified air, but in that energetic style and tone so peculiar to himself, Mr. Grattan delivered the following memorable words—memorable, because conveying in a few short sentences the most overwhelming, although certainly hyperbolical philippic—the most irresistible assemblage of terms imputing public depravity, that the English, or, I believe, any other language, is capable of affording:—