He visited Hampton Court, and though he seems to have passed through its solemn halls and stately galleries without peculiar remark, he seized on his game of living character.
"The servant who showed us the splendid apartments seemed to be a good deal pleased with his manner of explaining a suite of tapestry representing the Persian war of Alexander. Though a simple fellow, he had his lesson well by rote, and ran over the battles of Issus, Arbela, &c., with surprising fluency. 'But, where is Alexander?' cries Apjohn, (a young fellow-student, who had accompanied him.) 'There, sir, at the door of Darius's tent, with the ladies at his feet.' 'Surely,' said I, 'that must be Hephæstion, for he was mistaken by the Queen for Alexander.' 'Pardon me, sir, I hope I know Alexander better than that.' 'But, which of the two do you think the greater man?' 'Greater!—bless your soul, sir, they are both dead these hundred years.'"
Curran's observation on this official, or, as he would probably have called it, ministerial blunder, exhibits, even in these early days of his mind, something of the reflective spirit which afterwards gave such an interest to his eloquence.
"Oh, what a comment on human vanity! There was the marrow of a thousand folios in the answer. I could not help thinking at the instant, what a puzzle that mighty man would be in, should he appear before a committee from the Temple of Fame, to claim those laurels which he thought so much of, and to be opposed in his demands, though his competitor were Thersites, or the fellow who rubbed Bucephalus's heels!"
All this is showy if not new; yet, in defiance even of Curran's authority, its argument is practically denied by all human nature. What man ever acts for the praise of posterity alone? Present impulses, excited by present rewards, are the law of the living; and Alexander charging through the Granicus, and sweeping the royal Persian cavalry before him, had probably a heart as full of the most powerful impulses, as if he could have assured himself of the inheritance for ten thousand years of the plaudits of the globe. We are also to remember, that he has inherited the great legacy of fame, to this hour—that, to the minds of all the intelligent, he is still the hero of heroes; that clowns are not the clients of memory, or the distributors of renown; and that the man whose history has already survived his throne two thousand years, has exhibited in himself all the distinction between the perishableness of power and the immortality of fame.
In 1775 Curran returned to Ireland, and after anxiously pondering on the chances of abandoning Europe, and seeking fortune in America, as other eminent men—Edmund Burke among the number—had done before him, he fixed his fates at home.
This portion of the subject begins with a high panegyric on the difficult but attractive profession into which Curran now threw himself, without income, connection, or friend:—
"It is not to be questioned, that to the Bar of that day the people of Ireland looked up in every emergency, with the most perfect reliance on their talent and their integrity. It was then the nursery of the parliament and the peerage; there was scarcely a noble family in the land that did not enrol its elect in that body, by the study of law and the exercise of eloquence to prepare them for the field of legislative exertion. And there not unfrequently arose a genius from the very lowest of the people, who won his way to the distinctions of the Senate, and wrested from pedigree the highest honours and offices of the Constitution."
That the Bar was the first body in the country was incontestible, and that it often exhibited remarkable instances of ability is equally known. But those facts must not be understood as giving the author's opinion, that perfection lies in the populace. All the remarkable persons of their time in Ireland were men of education, many of birth, and many of hereditary fortune. Grattan was the son of a judge; Flood a man of old family and estate; Clare, the Chancellor, was the son of the leader of the Bar, and began the world with £4000 a-year—a sum probably now equal to twice the amount. The Ponsonbys, the leading family of Whiggism in Ireland, were among the first blood and fortune of the land. Hussey Burgh was a man of old family and fortune. The Beresfords were closely allied to nobility. Plunket and Curran were, perhaps, those among the leaders the least indebted to the Heralds' College; but Plunket was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and both had received the best education which Ireland could give—both were graduates of the University.
Of course, nature is impartial in the distribution of talents, but the true distinction is in their training. The Radicalism which fills public life with vulgarity and faction is wholly the work of that absence of all early training, which must be the fate of men suddenly gathered from the manual labours of life. We know the necessity of those labours, but intellectual superiority must be the work of another school. The men of eminence in Ireland were also men of accomplished general knowledge, and of classical acquirement, to an amount seldom found even in the English Legislature. There was not an assembly in the world where a happy classical quotation, or dexterous reference to antiquity, would be received with a quicker sense, or a louder plaudit than in the Irish Parliament.