But I was fortunately disappointed. By some means, which I could never subsequently ascertain, a rumour of my seizure had reached the House; and the strongest alarm was excited by the dread of my assassination. The commencement of the debate was suspended. Opposition, with the dignified courtesy which distinguished their leaders, even proposed the adjournment of their motion; the messengers of the House were dispatched in all directions to bring some tidings of me; and I had afterwards the satisfaction to find that none imputed my absence to any motive unbecoming my personal and official honour. Thus, when I entered the House, nervous with apprehension, I was received with a general cheer; my colleagues crowded round me with enquiries and congratulations; members crossed from the opposite benches to express their welcome. The galaxy of the living and the lovely in the gallery, which the expectation of the great debate had filled with all the fashionable portion of the capital, chiefly, too, in full dress, as was the custom of the time, glanced down approvingly on me; and, when at last I took my seat, I felt myself flattered by being the centre of one of the most splendid and interesting assemblies in the world.
The House was at length hushed, and Grattan rose. I cannot revert to the memory of that extraordinary man, without a mixture of admiration and melancholy—admiration for his talents, and melancholy for the feeling that such talents should expire with the time, and be buried in the common dust of the sepulchre. As a senatorial orator, he was incontestably the greatest whom I have ever heard. With but little pathos, and with no pleasantry, I never heard any man so universally, perpetually, and powerfully, command the attention of the House. Thee was the remarkable peculiarity in his language, that while the happiest study of others is to conceal their art, his simplicity had the manner of art. It was keen, concentrated, and polished, by nature. His element was grandeur; the plainest conception in his hands, assumed a loftiness and power which elevated the mind of his hearers, as much as it convinced their reason. As it was said of Michael Angelo, that every touch of his chisel was life, and that he struck out features and forms from the marble with the power of a creator, Grattan's mastery of high conceptions was so innate, that he invested every topic with a sudden magnitude, which gave the most casual things a commanding existence to the popular eye. It was thus, that the grievance of a casual impost, the delinquencies of a police, the artifices of an election, or the informalities of a measure of finance, became under his hand historic subjects, immortal themes, splendid features, and recollections of intellectual triumph. If the Pyramids were built to contain the dust of nameless kings and sacrificed cattle, his eloquence erected over materials equally transitory, memorials equally imperishable.
His style has been criticised, and has been called affected and epigrammatic. But, what is style to the true orator? His triumph is effect—what is to him its compound? What is it to the man who has the thunderbolt in his hands, of what various, nay, what earthly—nay, what vaporous, material it may be formed? Its blaze, its rapidity, and its penetration, are its essential value; and smiting, piercing, and consuming, it is the instrument of irresistible power.
But Grattan was an orator by profession, and the only one of his day. The great English speakers adopted oratory simply as the means of their public superiority. Pitt's was the oratory of a ruler of empire; with Fox, oratory was the strong, massive, and yet flexible instrument of a leader of party. But with Grattan it was a faculty, making a portion of the man, scarcely connected with external things, and neither curbed nor guided by the necessities of his political existence. If Grattan had been born among the backwoodsmen, he would have been an orator, and have been persuasive among the men of the hatchet and the rifle. Wherever the tongue of man could have given superiority, or the flow and vigour of conception could have given pleasure, he would have attained eminence and dispensed delight. If he had not found an audience, he would have addressed the torrents and the trees; he would have sent forth his voice to the inaccessible mountains, and have appealed to the inscrutable stars. It is admitted, that in the suffering condition of Ireland, he had a prodigious opportunity; but, among thousands of bold, ardent, and intellectual men, what is his praise who alone rushes to their front, and seizes the opportunity? The English rule over the sister country has been charged sometimes as tyranny, which was a libel; and sometimes as injustice, which was an error; but it had an unhappy quality which embraced the evils of both—it was invidious. The only map of Ireland which lay before the English cabinet of the eighteenth century, was the map of the sixteenth—a chart spotted with the gore of many battles, not the less bloody that they were obscure; and disfigured with huge, discoloured spaces of barbarism. They forgot the lapse of time, and that time had since covered the graves of the past with a living race, and was filling up the swamps of the wilderness with the vigour and the passions of a new and glowing people. They still governed on the guidance of the obsolete map, and continued to administer a civilized nation with the only sceptre fit for barbarism—the sword. By a similar misconception, while they declared the islands one indivisible empire, they governed them on the principle of eternal separation. No Irishman was ever called across the narrow strait between the two countries, to take a share in the offices, or enjoy the honors of England. Irish ambition, thwarted in its own country, might wander for ever, like Virgil's unburied ghosts, on the banks of the Irish Channel, without a hope of passing that political Styx. The sole connexion of the islands was between Whitehall and the Castle—between power and placemen—between cabinets and viceroys. It never descended to the level of the nation. It was a slight and scarcely visible communication, a galvanic wire, significant only at the extremities, instead of a public language and human association—instead of a bond of heart with heart—an amalgamation of people with people. Posterity will scarcely believe that the neglect of unity should have so nearly approached to the study of separation. Even the coin of the two countries was different in impress and in value—the privileges of trade were different—the tenure of property was different—the regulations of the customs (things which penetrate through all ranks) were different—and a whole army of revenue officers were embodied to carry on those commercial hostilities. The shores of the "Sister Islands" presented to each other the view of rival frontiers, and the passage of a fragment of Irish produce was as impracticable as if it had been contraband of war.
It was Grattan who first broke down this barrier, and he thus rendered the mighty service of doubling the strength of the empire; perhaps rendered the still mightier service of averting its separation and its ruin. As the nation had grown strong, it had grown sullen; its disgust was ripening into wrath; and its sense of injury might speedily have sought its relief in national revenge. And yet it is only justice to acknowledge that this evil arose simply from negligence on the part of England; that there was no design of tyranny, none of the capriciousness of superiority, none of the sultan spirit in the treatment of the rayah. But no minister had yet started up in English councils capable of the boldness of throwing open the barrier; none of intellectual stature sufficient to look beyond the old partition wall of the countries; no example of that statesmanlike sagacity which discovers in the present the shape of the future, and pierces the mists, which, to inferior minds, magnify the near into giant size, while they extinguish the distant altogether. But no man can ever write the annals of England, without a growing consciousness that magnanimity has been the instinct of her dominion; that she has been liberal on principle, and honest by nature; that even in the chillest and darkest hour of her sovereignity, this influence has existed unimpaired, and like gravitation on the globe, that it has accompanied and impelled her, day and night alike, through the whole circuit of her proud and powerful career.
This was the glorious period of Grattan's public life. His task, by universal confession, was the noblest that could be enjoined on man, and he sustained it with powers fitted to its nobleness. On the later portion of his history I have no desire to touch. The most hazardous temptation of early eminence is the fondness which it generates for perpetual publicity. The almost preternatural trial of human fortitude is, to see faction with its vulgar and easy triumph seizing the fame, which was once to be won only by the purest and rarest achievements of patriotism. When the banner which had flamed at the head of the nation on their march to Right, and which was consigned to the hand of Grattan as its legitimate bearer, was raised again, in a day threatening the subversion of every throne of Europe; he exhibited a jealousy of his obscure competitors, unworthy of his renown. But he did not join in their procession. He was unstained. If he felt the avarice of ambition, he exhibited no decay of that original dignity of nature, which, in his political nonage, had made him the leader of bearded men, and a model to the maturity of his country's virtue.
On this night he spoke with remarkable power, but in a style wholly distinct from his former appeals to the passions of the House. His accents, usually sharp and high, were now lingering and low; his fiery phraseology was solemn and touching, and even his gesture, habitually wild, distorted, and pantomimical, was subdued and simple. He seemed to labour under an unavowed impression of the share which the declamatory zeal of his party had to lay to its charge in the national peril. But I never saw more expressive evidence of his genius, than on this night of universal consternation. His language, ominous and sorrowful, had the force of an oracle, and was listened to like an oracle. No eye or ear strayed from him for a moment, while he wandered dejectedly among the leading events of the time, throwing a brief and gloomy light over each in passing, as if he carried a funeral lamp in his hand, and was straying among tombs. This was to me a wholly new aspect of his extraordinary faculties. I had regarded rapidity, brilliancy, and boldness of thought, as his inseparable attributes; but his speech was now a magnificent elegy. I had seen him, when he furnished my mind almost with the image of some of those men of might and mystery, sent to denounce the guilt, and heap coals of fire on the heads of nations. He now gave me the image of the prophet, lamenting over the desolation which he had once proclaimed, and deprecating less the crimes than the calamities of the land of his nativity. I never was more struck with the richness and variety of his conceptions, but their sadness was sublime. Again, I desire to guard against the supposition, that I implicitly did homage to either his talents or his political views. From the latter, I often and deeply dissented; in the former I could often perceive the infirmity that belongs even to the highest natural powers He was no "faultless monster." I am content to recollect him as a first-rate human being. He had enemies and may have them still. But all private feelings are hourly more and more extinguished in the burst of praise, still ascending round the spot where his dust is laid. Time does ultimate justice to all, and while it crumbles down the fabricated fame, only clears and separates the solid renown from the common level of things. The foibles of human character pass away. The fluctuations of the human features are forgotten in the fixed majesty of the statue; and the foes of the living man unite in carrying the memorial of the mighty dead to its place in that temple, where posterity comes to refresh its spirit, and elevate its nature, with the worship of genius and virtue.
BETHAM'S ETRURIA CELTICA.
Herodotus has this amusing story of a philological experiment made by the Egyptian king Psammetichus, who may, not inappropriately, be termed the James the First of his dynasty:—