The Church, the usual province of high families in England, was poor, feeble, and unpopular in Ireland. With a few positions of great wealth, all below was barren: livings of vast extent, with a meagre population, and still more meagre income; Romanism was hourly spreading with a population, itself spreading until it had nothing to eat, and embittered against Protestantism until conversion became more than a hopeless toil—an actual terror. Law was the only instrument of collecting the clerical income, and the collector and the clergyman were involved in one common obloquy, and often in one common danger—a condition of things which must have largely repelled all those who had the power of choice.
The mitres were chiefly bestowed on the Fellows of English colleges, and tutors of English noblemen. Every new Viceroy imported a succession of chaplains, and quartered them all upon the Irish Church. The majority of those men looked upon their position with the nervous alarm of settlers in the wilderness, thought only of the common-room of the colleges from which they had been torn, or of the noble houses in which they had been installed; and reproached the ill luck which had given them dignities which only excited popular disgust; and wealth, from which they could derive no pleasure, but in its accumulation. We can scarcely wonder that, through almost the whole of the eighteenth century, the Irish Church lay in a state of humiliation, repulsive to the public feelings. This, too, has changed; and the Church now possesses many able men.
Commerce, which plays so vigorous a part in the world, was then a swathed infant in Ireland, and swathed so tightly by provincial regulations, that there was scarcely a prospect of its ever stepping beyond the cradle. Manufactures—that gold-mine worth all the treasures of the Western World—were limited to the looms of the north; and the only manufacture of three-fourths of this fine country consisted in the fatal fabrication of forty-shilling voters.
The Squiredom of Ireland was the favourite profession of busy idleness, worthless activity, and festive folly. But this profession must have an estate to dilapidate, or a country to ride over, and English mortgagees to pamper its prodigality and accelerate its ruin. Gout, the pistol, broken necks, and hereditary disease, rapidly thinned this class. Perpetual litigation stood before their rent-rolls, in the shape of a devouring dragon; and, with a peasantry starving but cheerful, and with a proprietary pauperised, but laughing to the last, they were determined, though hourly sinking into bankruptcy, to be ruined like a gentleman.
All those circumstances coming together, made the Bar almost the sole assemblage of the ability of Ireland. But they also made it the most daring, dashing, and belligerent body of gentlemen that Europe has seen. It was Lord Norbury's remark, in his old age, when he reposed on the cushions of the peerage, had realised immense wealth, and obtained two peerages for his two sons—that all this came out of fifty pounds, and a case of pistols, his father's sole present as he launched him in life. The list of duels fought by the leading members of the Bar might figure in the returns of a Continental campaign; and no man was regarded as above answering for a sarcasm dropped in court, by his appearance in the field.
But we must not, from this unfortunate and guilty habit, conceive that the spirit of the higher orders of Ireland was deficient in the courtesies of life. There was a melancholy cause in the convulsions of the country. The war of William III., which had broken down the throne of James II., had left many a bitter feeling among the Popish families of Ireland. Many of the soldiers of James had retired into village obscurity, or were suffered to retain the fragments of their estates, and live in that most embittering of all conditions—a sense of birth, with all the struggles of diminished means. These men indulged their irritable feelings, or avenged their ruin, by the continual appeal to the pistol. Always nurturing the idea that the victory had been lost to them solely by the cowardice of James, they were ready to quarrel with any man who doubted their opinion; and as their Protestant conquerors were brave bold men, equally disposed to maintain their right, and unhesitating in their claim to possess what they had won by their swords, their quarrels became feuds. Law, which reprobated the principle, by its laxity established the practice; and when lawyers led the way, the community followed. Still, there can be no doubt that duelling is a custom alike contrary to the order of society, and the command of heaven; and, the first judge who hangs a duellist as a murderer, and sends all the parties engaged in the transaction to the penal colonies for life, will have rendered a signal service to his country.
While every part of this volume is valuable, for the display of vigorous writing and manly conception, the more interesting fragments, to us, are the characters of the parliamentary leaders; because such men are the creators of national character, the standards of national intellect, and the memorials to which their nation justly points as the trophies of national honour.
The Parliament of Ireland is in the grave; but, while the statues of her public orators stand round the tomb, it must be felt to be more than a sepulchre. Whatever homage for genius may be left in the distractions of an unhappy country, must come to kneel beside that tomb; and if the time shall ever arrive for the national enfranchisement from faction, the first accents of national wisdom must be dictated from that sacred depository of departed virtue.
Grattan, the first man in the brightest day of the Irish Parliament, was descended of an honourable lineage. His father was a barrister, member of parliament for Dublin, and also its Recorder. He himself was a graduate of the Irish University, where he was distinguished. Entering the Middle Temple, he was called to the Irish Bar in 1772.
But his mind was parliamentary; his study in England had been parliament; and his spirit was kindled by the great orators of the time. He who had beard Burke and Chatham, had heard the full power of imaginative oratory—of all oratory the noblest. Grattan had the materials of a great speaker in him by nature—keen sensibility, strong passion, daring sincerity, and an imagination furnished with all the essential knowledge for debate—not overwhelmed by it, but refreshing the original force of his mind, like the eagle's wing refreshed by dipping into the fountain, but dipping only to soar. Yet, though almost rapturously admiring those distinguished men, he was no imitator. He struck out for himself a line between both, and, in some of its happier moments, superior to either; combining the rich exuberance of Burke's imagination with Chatham's condensed dignity of thought. Possessed of an extraordinary power of reasoning, Grattan had the not less extraordinary power of working it into an intensity which made it glow; and some of the most elaborate arguments ever uttered in Parliament have all the brilliancy of eloquence. He continually reasoned, though the most metaphorical of speakers; and this combination of logic and lustre, though so unusual in others, in him was characteristic. He poured out arguments like a shower of arrows, but they were all arrows tipped with fire.