the fame of a party leader or of a great legislator. Even as an orator-though his place is in the foremost rank--his popularity was somewhat limited by the extreme severity of a taste which rarely stooped to ornament, or indulged in anything that was merely rhetorical or declamatory. But in the power of rapid, lucid, and most cogent extemporaneous argument; in the grave, dignified, reasoned, and persuasive eloquence, which is most fitted to charm and subjugate an educated audience, he has very seldom had an equal, scarcely ever a superior.

As a politician, he belonged essentially to the school of Grattan, with whom he was linked in the closest friendship, whom he succeeded in the conduct of the Catholic question in the Imperial Parliament, and of whom he was accustomed to speak to the end of his long life as the greatest and best man he had ever known. He agreed with Grattan in his hostility to the Union and in his views on the Catholic question, and he equally agreed with him in his detestation of the United Irish conspiracy; in his dislike and distrust of the democratic character which O'Connell afterwards gave to Irish politics; in his freedom from all French sympathies; in his genuine hatred of anarchy and disorder. In the Imperial Parliament he was at once recognised as one of the very greatest of orators and debaters,1 but he confined himself to a few questions, and was never a keen party politician. The affinity of

'I may here mention, that Lord Russell once told me that, looking back on his long life, he considered that there were two men in his early days, who excelled as orators any in the generation that succeeded them. They were Canning and Plunket; and of these two, he considered Plun

ket the greater. There is an admirable description of Plunket's speaking in Bulwer's St. Stephen's, part 3. See, too, much on the subject which is collected in Plunket's Life, by his distinguished grandson, the member for Dublin University.

his intellect and character drew him naturally to the moderate Whigs who followed Lord Grenville, and like most of Lord Grenville's followers he joined the Government of Lord Liverpool in 1821, and supported the liberalised Toryism of Canning. On two memorable occasions, he separated himself from the bulk of those with whom he usually acted. In 1815, when the great body of the Whig party were prepared to sacrifice the fruits of twenty years' war by acquiescing in the restoration of Napoleon, Plunket, with Grattan and with Lord Grenville, strenuously advocated the renewal of the war, and in 1819 he surprised many of his friends by maintaining the necessity of the six Acts of Castlereagh. In the session of 1798, his main object seems to have been to restrain illegal violence, and he was the proposer of the clause for granting compensation to the innocent victims of military violence.

The discontent produced by the refusal of the Irish Parliament to grant any measure of redress or of reform, was seriously increased by the renewed rejection of the absentee tax. The arguments, both of principle and policy, which Burke had urged against this tax, were very powerful, and in ordinary times they might have been accepted as conclusive, but Ireland was now struggling with no ordinary difficulties. It was scarcely possible that any small and poor country could bear, for many successive years, the financial strain of such a war as that which was now raging. England herself staggered under the burden, and seemed to many good judges on the verge of bankruptcy; and in Ireland the situation was aggravated by the necessity of immense military preparations to maintain the Government at home, and by the collapse of credit and paralysis of industry that always follow extreme anarchy and imminent danger of invasion and rebellion. I have described the excellent financial condition of Ireland when the VOL. IV.

war began, and the very moderate and equitable taxation imposed by the Irish Parliament. But in 1797, the fifth year of the war, the condition of affairs had become very serious.

The Government deemed it necessary to raise nearly four millions by loan, and they found the operation exceedingly difficult. They were obliged to issue five per cent. 1007. debentures at 63, and they obtained with some difficulty a loan of a million and a half from England. It was no longer possible to exempt the poor from taxation, and the salt tax and the leather tax fell upon them with great severity. Some of the principal articles of Irish manufacture, it is true, still showed a surprising vitality, and high prices gave prosperity to agriculture, but those prices greatly aggravated the distress of large classes, and it was stated that in 1797 there were no less than 37,000 persons in Dublin alone, in a state of extreme destitution.2

Under these circumstances, and at a time when the poor were suffering so severely, the exemption of the great absentee proprietors from all taxation for Irish purposes seemed peculiarly unjust. Another year of war was now opening; there was no prospect of returning peace, and it was certain that new sacrifices would be required. The tax was proposed by La Touche, the principal banker, and one of the most respected characters in Dublin, but he desisted, when he found the Government inflexibly opposed to it. It was then taken up again by Vandeleur, and it was defeated by 104 to 40. In this case, the real opposition came not from Ireland, but from England, and Portland gave the Lord Lieutenant peremptory orders that the tax must be rejected. 'It is impossible,' writes Camden, 'to

1 See the financial debates in Irish Parl. Deb. xvii. part 2. Adolphus's History of England,

vi. 547, 548.

2 Plowden, ii. 644.

describe the ill humour which pervades ail descriptions of persons, from finding Government determined to oppose this measure. It will, however, I trust, be defeated by a larger majority than your grace might have supposed; but I must repeat the great disgust with which most of the friends of Government support it upon the present occasion.'1

This session of Parliament did nothing to quiet the country, and nothing to regain the affections of the people, and the shadow of great coming calamity fell darkly on the land. In Ulster, it is true, there was a sudden, mysterious, perplexing calm. Cooke wrote to England in March, that, although the leading agitators were still busy there, the lower classes were at work, and peaceable and industrious, and he added, ‘I believe no part of the King's dominions more apparently quiet, or more evidently flourishing, than the North of Ireland.'2 Clare, as we have seen, boasted of it in the House of Lords, as a clear proof of the success of martial law. Lake wrote from Belfast: 'The natives continue quiet, waiting with anxious expectation for the arrival of the French, which, they are taught to believe, will happen very shortly; their dispositions remain precisely the same. The flame is smothered, but not extinguished.' Others believed that the very calm of Ulster was an evil sign, for it only showed how perfectly the people were organised, how fully they obeyed the order to remain passive till the French invasion, which was confidently expected in the early spring. But over a great part of Leinster and Munster, horrible murders were of almost daily occurrence, and an ex

3

Portland to Camden, Jan. 29; Camden to Portland, Feb. 5, 15, 23, 1798. 2 Auckland

iii. 392.

Correspondence,

3 Lake to Pelham, Jan. 27, 1798.

+ Beresford's Correspondence, ii. 154; Musgrave's Rebellions in Ireland, pp. 196, 197, 203.

treme terror prevailed. Lord Longueville, writing from the county Cork, to report the murder of Sir Henry Merrick, said that Abercromby's order forbidding the military to act without the presence of a magistrate, would be fatal, as the magistrates would not dare to expose themselves to the lasting vengeance that would pursue them, and he mentioned that, in a single week, three men had been shot in clear daylight, within eight miles of his own house.1 Even the sentinels on guard in Dublin were frequently fired at.2 Dr. Lanigan, the Catholic Bishop of Ossory, wrote in March to Archbishop Troy, describing the condition of the Queen's County, and some charges that had been brought against the priests, and his letter contains this very significant sentence: The priests told me, and I believe them, that the fear of assassination prevents them from speaking as much as they wished against United Irishmen.'3

In the towns, the United Irish ranks were rapidly recruiting. McNally writes that men in respectable and independent positions, and even of considerable property,' were 'daily Uniting;' that the conspiracy was making rapid progress in the public offices, and among the yeomen; that nearly all the clerks in banks and great merchant and trading houses were involved in it; that there was hardly a house with three men servants which had not a domiciliary committee; that the United Irishmen had already their agents and their spies in the most confidential departments of the Castle and the law courts, and that they were actively introducing them into the post offices. In Trinity College, seditious

4

1 Lord Longueville, March 8, 1798.

2 Musgrave, p. 203.

3 Castlereagh Correspondence, i. 160-162.

4 See the letters of J. W. for Feb. and March 1798. An Athlone magistrate, named Parker, wrote that he had been sending a confidential agent to attend a