From 1790, however, his town house was a mere place of business. In that year he took a place called Holly Park, in the county of Dublin, and soon after changed its name to the Priory. The Priory contains about thirty-five acres, and lies on the road to White Church, about a mile beyond Rathfarnham, on the side of a moderately large hill, facing Dublin. From it, there is a beauteous view of the city, with the plains of Fingal on one side, and its bay and varied shores on the other. The house is a comfortable plain building, with a warm shrubbery, a garden, and a few fields about it. At the opposite side of the road is Marlay, the residence of the Latouches, and the country all round consists of wooded demesnes.

The place suited him perfectly. His habits there were very simple and uniform. He went to bed about one, and rose at seven o'clock, and spent a couple of hours dressing and lounging about. Immediately after breakfast he used generally to ride or drive in his gig to Dublin. During term time, when he was a practising lawyer or a judge, this was of course necessary, as a matter of business; and, after he left the bench, he continued to go in to hear news, and see his old friends-hanging, as it would seem, on men's hearts, and hoping, like a lover, for some good tidings still.

Punctually at five o'clock he came up the avenue, often with his watch in hand; for though irregular in other things, he was childishly exact in his dinner-hour, and would not have waited for Washington.

When he did not go into town, he was fond of walking with a friend among the shaded roads about Rathfarnham and Dundrum: or oftner still he spent his hours in sauntering or strolling all alone through the garden and shrubbery of his little place. In one of these fields he had buried his little daughter Gertrude, and upon her dear grave he used often lie down and weep, and wish to be with her. She had died in 1792, when his hopes were high, and his home untainted.

Of late years he grew close. He had been a man more irregular than lavish in money matters. Strange to say, he, the first lawyer at the bar, did not continue to keep a regular fee book, and excused himself by saying, the money came in so fast, he could not enter it. His irregularity continued, for, at the time when, it is said, he was miserly, he left his pecuniary concerns to be managed by a friend. He felt the weakness growing on him, and hated himself for it. His closeness must, however, have been over-rated by his friends and himself, or he would have died a richer man than he did.

He seldom dined without having some to share with him a meal that was occasionally too frugal. We have heard of his bringing Grattan and several others out to dine when he had nothing useable but cold corned beef, and that one of the guests took to the kitchen and manufactured a dish of "bubble and squeak,” which the party, assisted by plenty of good wine, declared to be capital.

On a diamond-shaped flag is the inscription-"Here lies the body of Gertrude Curran, fourth daughter of John Philpot Curran, who departed this life October the 6th, 1792, age twelve years." She lies under a little group of limes, ash, and laburnhams, in a very safe untroubled looking spot.

Curran, when roused, used to run over jokes of every kind, good, bad, and indifferent. No epigram too delicate, no mimicry too broad, no pun too little, and no metaphor too bold for him. In fact he wanted to be happy, and to make others so, and he rattled away, not for a Boswell to note, but for mere enjoyment. These after-dinner sittings were seldom prolonged very late, but they made up in vehemence what they wanted in duration. Curran played the violin and violoncello, and when the fit toook him, played with great feeling and nature; but if asked to show off, he was timid and stiff in his performance. The same difference was observable in talking over any of his own speeches or writings.

Often, after his company had left him, he used to walk about the room, soliloquizing aloud, until he got into very high or very low spirits.

This habit of soliloquy he had fallen into when a young speaker. He never wrote his speeches, and hardly ever wrote even passages of them. There is no orator, living or dead, of whom this can be said to the same extent.*

Curran's avoidance of written speeches was deliberate. He thought that no foresight could enable you to calculate beforehand how to shape your discourse exactly, and he felt in himself the rare power of doing, on the spur of the occasion, whatever his genius, if allowed repose, could have planned. But though he wrote none of his speeches, he generally prepared them with the most intense and passionate care. Walking about his grounds, in his driving into and out from Dublin, and in those stray hours which intervened between the departure of his guests and the coming of the welcomer guest, sleep, he most frequently bethought himself how to shape his coming speech most persuasively; and then, and in walking in the hall, or when rambling over his violoncello, his happiest and most glorious thoughts used to come. He had a fine and wellpractised memory, and it carried for him to court the frame and topics, and leading illustrations of his speech, but no more. The speech was an original effort upon these previous materials, and what the events in court added to them. His notes were mere catch words, as we mentioned in Rowan's case; nor were they needed, as the speeches for Finnerty and the Sheareses prove.

His library was small, but very good, especially in classics. He says in one of his letters that he was fond of metaphysical and theological studies, but he appears not to have had settled opinions on these subjects. From his letters one would say, that Sterne was a greater favourite than Berkley or Virgil, and the Bible supplies his speeches with more illustrations than any book, save nature's.

Alas, for poor Curran! his country's dishonour was not his only cause of woe. Just at the time sorrow for Ireland most pressed him down, his wife, the companion of twenty-five years, deserted him for a man whom he had long welcomed as a friend-the Rev. Mr. Sandys.

When we say orators, we do not mean public talkers, but men whose speeches are great combinations of reasoning or plausibility, fancy or passion, and owe their success to the literary excellence and oratorical address, and not to other circumstances. This makes the orator occasionally rank below the speechless man of business and character.

It has been said that Curran was dissipated, that he was apt "to hang up his merriment with his hat when he came home," and that he ought not to have so trusted a man of Mr. Sandys' character. We have neither leisure nor inclination to inquire whether he was too confiding, too careless, or too selfindulgent; suffice it, the separation took place under circumstances of peculiar pain, not only to him, but to his children. Curran recovered but trifling damages in an action against Mr. Sandys, and this certainly shows that he was to some extent faulty. The occurrences of this trial estranged him from many of his old friends.

This event is said to have given a most cruel interest to his speech in the case of Massy and Headfort. His speech against Lord Headfort is beyond comparison the most persuasive pleading ever uttered in a case not involving national interests or public passions. By his ability and his personal sympathy for the case, he made it a great contest between virtue and vice. The safety of the juror's family, the character of the country, the fate of society itself, seem to depend on their making an example of this "hoary criminal." How he leads them over the whole chronicle of dishonour, yet never compromises their dignity or his own for one instant. His reply to the palliations offered by Lord Headfort's counsel sends them back in coals of fire. He represents the judge as interposing to prevent the victim's flight with her seducer, and puts in his mouth every argument that reason, passion, mercy, and Scripture could give to prevent this crime. He warns him that he cannot marry this fugitive; for, between him and the marriage altar, there are two sepulchres to pass. He tears away the miserable pretext of love from an indulgence which would as surely cause the ruin, as it proved the dishonour, of its object; and under his burning eloquence he makes the lordly sinner blacken into a selfish, cowardly violator of hospitality, and a traitor to public morals.

This was Curran's last great achievement at the bar.

In 1806, on Pitt's death, Fox and the Whigs came in. It had been settled for seventeen years before, that when they should come in, Ponsonby was to have the first, and Curran the second, legal appointment. Ponsonby was made Chancellor; Curran was entitled to the Chief Justiceship if it could be vacated, and if not, to the Attorney-Generalship. He got neither, but was put off with the Mastership of the Rolls, encumbered by the officers of Sir Michael Smith; for Mr. Ponsonby had agreed to leave these officers in, or pension them before Sir Michael would retire. Curran was not consulted on this, and very naturally refused to be bound by it, and dismissed the officers. This led to a quarrel between him and Ponsonby, which was never healed. Both parties seem to have acted with just intentions. Curran explained the facts in a letter to Grattan, and to that published letter no reply was given, nor could any. Ponsonby very honourably provided for these people out of his own estate.

Curran was unsuited to the technicalities and minute business of the Rolls, He had neither knowledge nor taste for it. He felt this, and the moment when he could rise was one he anxiously looked for. It may be guessed, that his orders on details were not very sound nor convenient. The only memorable decision he made was that in Merry v. Power. The expulsion of his party from

office in 1807, forced him into communication with men whose policy he condemned as much as their principles.

In the vacations, he often went to England. Some of his letters during these trips are precious tokens of the swell and depth of his ebbing mind. One dated from Godwin's house, 41, Skinner-street, London, in 1810, tells us something of his habits and feelings.

"I am glad to hear you are letting yourself out at Old Orchard; you are certainly unwise in giving up such an inducement to exercise, and the absolute good of being so often in good air. I have been talking about your habit without naming yourself. I am more persuaded that you and Egan are not sufficiently afraid of weak liquors. I can say, from trial, how little pain it costs to correct a bad habit. On the contrary, poor nature, like an ill-used mistress, is delighted with the return of our kindness, and is anxious to show her gratitude for that return, by letting us see how well she becomes it.

"I am the more solicitious upon this point from having made this change, which I see will make me waited for in heaven longer than perhaps they looked for. If you do not make some pretext for lingering, you can have no chance of conveying me to the wherry; and the truth is, I do not like surviving old friends. I am somewhat inclined to wish for posthumous reputation; and if you go before me, I shall lose one of the most irreclaimable of my trumpeters; therefore, dear Mac, no more water, and keep the other element, your wind, for the benefit of your friends. I will show my gratitude as well as I can, by saying handsome things of you to the saints and angels before you come. Best regards to all with you. 'Yours, &c. "J. P. C."

66

He visited Scotland this autumn, and praises the knowledge, independence, and hospitality of all classes there. In one of these letters he thus speaks of having visited Burns' cabin :

"Poor Burns!-his cabin could not be passed unvisited or unwept; to its two little thatched rooms-kitchen and sleeping-place-a slated sort of parlour is added, and it is now an ale-house. We found the keeper of it tipsy; he pointed to the corner on one side of the fire, and with a most mal-à-propos laugh, observed, there is the very spot where Robert Burns was born.' The genius and the fate of the man were already heavy on my heart; but the drunken laugh of the landlord gave me such a view of the rock on which he foundered, I could not stand it, but burst into tears."

A more affecting sight could not well be. No man could sympathize better with the genius and failings of Robert Burns, than John Curran. In the whole range of literature, there are no two men more like. They had the same deep, picturesque genius; the same absolute control over language; the same love of country and kind; the same impassionate, womanishly sensitive hearts; now plunging into difficulties from their loving, generous, and social hearts, and springing out of them by strength of intellect, and then, alas! both sinking under the tyranny of imagination, and seeking relief from intense melancholy in undue social excitement. There are several minuter points of resemblance, and any one familiar with the two men, must feel the likeness in their lives and works.

Some other bits of the letters show how playful he could be in all this depression. From Cheltenham he writes in September, 1811

"During my stay here, I have fallen into some pleasant female society; but such society can be enjoyed only by those who are something at a tea-table or a ball. Tea always makes me sleepless; and as to dancing, I tried three or four steps that were quite the cream of the thing in France at one time, and which

cost me something. I thought it might be the gaiters that gave them a piperly air; but even after putting on my black silk stockings, and perusing them again before the glass, which I put on the ground for the purpose of an exact review, I found the edition was too stale for re-publication."

Talking of Irish parties, in the same letter he says

"The smoke is thickest at the corners farthest from the chimney, and, therefore, near the fire we see a little more distinctly; but as things appear to me, I see not a single ticket in the wheel that may not be drawn a blank, poor Paddy's not excepted. To go back to the fire each party has the bellows hard at work; but I strongly suspect that each of them does more to blind their rivals, and themselves too, by blowing the ashes about, than they do in coaxing or cherishing the blaze for the comfort or benefit of their own shins."

From London, 1811, he says

"I have little doubt that Perceval is as warlike a hero as Grenville, and just as capable of simplifying our government to the hangman and the taxgatherer."

In a P.S. from Holland House he writes

"Some more lies from the continent. Another victory-three legs of Bonaparte shot away, the fourth very precarious. I really suspect that you have been here incog., and bit every body; for they will believe nothing, even though authenticated by the most respectable letters from Gottingen."

The next letter is strong on an important point

“As to our miserable questions, they are not half so interesting as the broils in the Caraccas. What a test of the Union! and what a proof of the apathy of this blind and insolent country! They affect to think it glorious to struggle to the last shilling of their money, and the last drop of their blood, rather than submit their property and persons to the capricious will of France; and yet that is precisely the power they are exercising over us the modest authority of sending over to us laws, like boots and shoes ready made for exportation, without once condescending to take our measure, or ask whether or where they pinch us."

In October, 1812, he was asked to stand for Newry, but was beaten, after a six days contest, by General Needham. The Catholic agitation was then at its height, and yet, by the votes and labours of some Roman Catholics, he was beaten. His picture of these miserable men is such as to justify the cruel charity with which he bids the people "forgive them, for they will not forgive themselves."

Every part of this speech deserves close attention. It is the perfect oratory of a matured patriot. But we more especially ask the reader to study the principle announced in pages 596-7,-a most emphatic announcement of the power of agitation to achieve its ends.

His son's memoir contains a long treatise of his, on the then state of Irish politics, in a letter to the Duke of Sussex-we have not space to publish it, nor is it equal to his less formal letters, in thought or style.

Curran resigned the Mastership of the Rolls in 1814, in consequence of his wretched health, which grew worse and worse every day.

But sickly as his body had grown, it was healthier than his mind.

Grief of every kind weighed upon that wild sensitive heart of his. The purest by whose side he had striven for Ireland, were dead or banished; the bitterest with whom he contended, were no longer there to excite anger and exertion.