Page images
PDF
EPUB

comes a joyless peril; and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge-a buoyant pestilence! But, Gentlemen, let me not degrade into the selfishness of individual safety, or individual exposure, this universal principle: it testifies a higher, a more ennobling origin. It is this which, consecrating the humble circle of the hearth, will at times extend itself to the circumference of the horizon; which nerves the arm of the patriot to save his country; which lights the lamp of the philosopher to amend man: which, if it does not inspire, will yet invigorate the martyr to merit immortality; which, when one world's agony is passed and the glory of another is dawning, will prompt the prophet, even in his chariot of fire, and in his vision of heaven, to beqneath to mankind the mantle of his memory! Oh divine, oh delightful legacy of a spotless reputation! Rich is the inheritance it leaves; pious the example it testifies; pure, precious, and imperishable, the hope which it inspires! Can you conceive a more atrocious injury than to filch from its possessor this inestimable benefit -to rob society of its charm, and solitude of its solace; not only to outlaw life, but to attaint death, converting the very grave, the refuge of the sufferer, into the gate of infamy and of shame! I can conceive few crimes beyond it. He who plunders my property takes from me that which can be repaired by time: but what pe riod can repair a ruined reputation? He who maims my person affects that which medicine may remedy: but what herb has sovereignty over the wounds of slander? He who ridicules my poverty, or reproaches my profession, upbraids me with that which industry may re

trieve, and integrity may purify; but what riches shall redeem the Bankrupt fame? what power shall blanch the sullied snow of character? Can there be an injury more deadly? Can there be a crime more cruel? It is without remedy-it is without antidote-it is without evasion! The reptile calumny is ever on the watch. From the fascination of its eye no activity can escape; from the venom of its fang no sanity can recover. It has no enjoyment but crime; it has no prey but virtue; it has no interval from the restlessness of its malice, save when, bloated with its victims, it grovels to disgorge them at the withered shrine, where envy idolizes her own infirmities. Under such a visitation how dreadful wonld be the destiny of the virtuous and the good if the providence of our constitution had not given you the power, as, I trust, you will have the principle, to bruise the head of the serpent, and crush and crumble the altar of its idolatry!

And now, Gentlemen, having toiled through this narrative of unprovoked and pitiless persecution, I should with pleasure consign my client to your hands, if a more imperative duty did not still remain to me, and that is, to acquit him of every personal motive in the prosecution of this action. No; in the midst of slander, and suffering, and severities unexampled, he has had no thought, but, that as his enemies evinced how malice could persecute, he should exemplify how religion could endure; that if his piety failed to affect the oppressor, his patience might at least avail to for tify the afficted. He was as the rock of Scripture before the face of infidelity. The rain of the deluge had fallen -it only smoothed his asperities: the wind of the tem

pest beat-it only blanched his brow: the rod, not of prophecy, but of persecution, smote him; and the desert, glittering with the Gospel dew, became a miracle of the faith it would have tempted! No, Gentlemen; not selfishly has he appealed to this tribunal; but the venerable religion wounded in his character, but the august priesthood vilified in his person, but the doubts of the sceptical, hardened by his acquiescence,-but the fidelity of the feeble, hazarded by his forbearance, goaded him from the profaned privacy of the cloister into this repulsive scene of public accusation. In him this reluctance springs from a most natural and characteristic delicacy: in us it would become a most overstrained injustice. No, Gentlemen: though with him ́ we must remember morals outraged, religion assailed, law violated, the priesthood scandalized, the press betrayed, and all the disgusting calender of abstract evil; yet with him we must not reject the injuries of the individual sufferér. We must picture to ourselves a young man, partly by the self-denial of parental love, partly by the energies of personal exertion, struggling into a profession, where, by the pious exercise of his talents, he may make the fame, the wealth, the flatteries of this world, so many angel heralds to the happiness of the next. His precept is a treasure to the poor; his practice, a model to the rich. When he reproves, sorrow seeks his presence as a sanctuary; and in his path of peace, should he pause by the death-bed of despairing sin, the soul becomes imparadised in the light of his benediction! Imagine, Gentlemen, you see him thus; and then, if you can, imagine vice so desperate as to defraud the world of so fair a vision. Anticipate for a moment the melancholy evidence we must too

soon adduce to you. Behold him, by foul, deliberate, and infamous calumny, robbed of the profession he had so struggled to obtain, swindled from the flock he had so laboured to ameliorate, torn from the school where infant virtue vainly mourns an artificial orphanage, hunted from the home of his youth, from the friends of his heart, a hopeless, fortuneless, companionless exile, hanging in some stranger scene, on the precarious pity of the few, whose charity might induce their compassion to bestow, what this remorseless slanderer would compel their justice to withhold! I will not pursue this picture; I will not detain you from the pleasure of your possible compensation; for oh! divine is the pleasure you are destined to experience;-dearer to your hearts shall be the sensation, than to your pride shall be the dignity it will give you. What! though the people will hail the saviours of their pastor: what! though the priesthood will hallow the guardians of their brother; though many a peasant heart will leap at your name, and many an infant eye will embalm their fame who restored to life, to station, to dignity, to character, the venerable friend who taught their trembling tongues to lisp the rudiments of virtue and religion, still dearer than all will be the consciousness of the deed. Nor, believe me, countrymen, will it rest here. Oh no! if there be light in instinct, or truth in Revelation, believe me, at that awful hour, when you shall await the last inevitable verdict, the eye of your hope will not be the less bright, nor the agony of your ordeal the more acute, because you shall have, by this day's deed, redeemed the Almighty's persecuted Apostle, from the grasp of an insatiate malice-from the fang of a worse than Philistine persecution.

SPEECH

IN THE CASE OF CONNAGHTON v. DILLON:

DELIVERED IN

THE COUNTY COURT-HOUSE OF ROSOMMON,

My Lord and Gentlemen,

In this case I am one of the counsel for the Plaintiff, who has directed me to explain to you the wrongs for which, at your hands, he solicits reparation. It appears to me a case which undoubtedly merits much consideration, as well from the novelty of its appearance amongst us, as for the circumstances by which it is attended. Nor am I ashamed to say, that in my mind, not the least interesting of those circumstances is the poverty of the man who has made this appeal to me. Few are the consolations which soothe-hard must be the heart which does not feel for him. He is, Gentle. men, a man of lowly birth and humble station; with little wealth but from the labour of his hands, with no rank but the integrity of his character, with no recrea tion but in the circle of his home, and with no ambition, but, when his days are full, to leave that little circle the inheritance of an honest name, and the treasure of a good man's memory. Far inferior, indeed, is he in

M

« PreviousContinue »