to which my memory enables me to plead guilty. The period when I first showed an aptitude for the craft of verse-making, lies so far back in childhood, that I am really unable to say at what age I first began to act, sing and rhyme." In tracing the motives which first stirred his ambition in the field he had selected, he says, "At home, a most amiable father, and a mother, such as in heart and head has rarely been equaled, furnished me with that purest stimulous to exertion-the desire to please those whom we at once most love and most respect." To his respect for the authority of his parents, and especially to the influence of his mother, whose every serious wish was to him a sacred law, he attributed his salvation from the fate which overtook the noble but unfortunate Emmet, who was a fellow-student of his. He entirely sympathized with Emmet's political views, but the anxious opposition of his parents deterred him from the commission of any overt acts. He says that Emmet was his senior by one class at the university, for when in the first year of his course, he became a member of the debating society, which was a sort of nursery to the authorized Historical Society, he found Emmet also a member and in full reputation, not only for his learning and eloquence, but also for the blamelessness of his life and the grave suavity of his manners. In another place he says, Emmet was as modest as he was high-minded and brave. "I remember," says Moore, "his starting up one day as from a revery, when I had just finished playing that

spirited tune, called the Red Fox,' and exclaiming, 'Oh, that I were at the head of twenty thousand men, marching to that air!" The words afterward set to that air by Moore, are the following:

"Let Erin remember the days of old,

Ere her faithless sons betrayed her; When Malachi wore the collar of gold

Which he won from her proud invader, When her kings with standard of green unfurl'd, Led the Red Branch Knights to danger, Ere the emerald gem of the western world Was set in the crown of a stranger."

In reference to the above patriotic impulse, Moore further says, "How little did I then think, that in one of the most tender, if not the most touching of the sweet airs I used to play to him, his own dying words would find an interpretation so worthy of their sad but proud sentiment; or that another of those mournful airs would long be associated in the hearts of his countrymen with the memory of her who shared, with Ireland, his last blessing and prayer."

The dying words of Emmet here referred to are, Let no man write my epitaph till my country shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth; let my tomb remain uninscribed, till other times and other men shall learn to do justice to my memory." The lines in which Moore enforces these noble words, spoken by a youth of twenty-three, standing in the presence of the tribunal whence he was

to receive the doom of death, are the follow

ing:

"Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,

Where cold and unhonor'd his relics are laid: Sad, silent and dark be the tears that we shed, As the night-dew that fall on the grass o'er his head.

But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,

Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he

sleeps;

And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,

Shall long keep his memory green in our souls."

The lady referred to above as having shared with Ireland Emmet's last blessing and prayer, was Miss Curran, the daughter of John Philpot Curran. He was one of the most noble, brilliant and beautiful souls that ever rose like an unsetting sun to shed perpetual lustre on the human race. John Foster, one of the most distinguished Englishmen of the last age, said that Curran and Grattan were a kind of intellectual Inca-children of the sun-that their genius was infinite, meaning that there was no conception so original or brilliant, that one would say they were incapable of it. Miss Curran inherited much of her father's sensibility and genius. She was the betrothed of Emmet. It was no mere mercenary, formal, or worldly contract. She was a part of him; her heart, her breath, her being were his. The reader, especially the fair reader, may easily

conceive what a shock the tragic fate of poor Emmet would be to a frame and spirit like hers. Her friends nursed her most tenderly; all the flowers that affection could gather were scattered in her path. She traveled, she changed her scenery and associations, but to no avail; the stem was dead, the leaf withered; she died of a broken heart. Moore commemorates these mournful events in the following exquisite verses:

"She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,

And lovers are round her sighing;

But coldly she turns from their gaze and weeps, For her heart in his grave is lying.

She sings the wild songs of her dear native plains,

Every note which he loved awaking;Ah! little they think who delight in her strains, How the heart of the minstrel is breaking.

He had lived for his love, for his country he died;

They were all that to life had entwined him; Nor soon shall the tears of the country be dried, Nor long will his love stay behind him. Oh! make her a grave where the sunbeams rest, When they promise a glorious morrow; They'll shine o'er her sleep like a smile from the West;

From her own loved island of sorrow."

Moore, in his narrative of himself, says: "Born of Catholic parents (he does not say that

he was himself a Catholic), I had come into the world with the slave's yoke around my neck. Against the young Catholic all avenues to distinction were closed; and even the University, the professed source of public education, was to him a fountain sealed.' Can any one wonder that a people thus wronged and trampled upon, should have hailed the first dazzling outbreak of the French Revolution as a signal to the slave, wherever suffering, that the day of his deliverance was near at hand. I remember being taken by my father (1792) to one of the dinners given in honor of that great event, and sitting on the knee of the chairman while the following toast was enthusiastically sent round: May the breezes from France fan our Irish Oak into verdure.'" In a few months after was passed the memorable act of 1793, sweeping away some of the most monstrous of the remaining sanctions of the penal code; "and I was myself," says Moore,

66

among the first of the young Helots of the land who hastened to avail themselves of the new privilege of being educated in their country's university,-though still excluded from all share in those college honors and emoluments by which the ambition of the youth of the ascendant class was stimulated and rewarded."

Here was a source of bitterness in our poet's heart which tinged his genius, and shot up a sorrowful indignation everywhere in his works.

*None but Episcopalians were admitted to the University at that period.