House. Burke said that by this speech Flood had retrieved his reputation. Fox declared that the scheme was the best that had been proposed, and Pitt based his opposition to it almost exclusively upon the disturbed state of public affairs. It is to be hoped that these praises in some degree allayed the mortification produced by his previous disappointment. In his reply upon this question he alluded in touching terms to the isolation of his position. I appeal to you,' he said, 'whether my conduct has been that of an advocate or an agitator; whether I have often trespassed upon your attention; whether ever except on a question of importance, and whether I then wearied you with ostentation or prolixity. I am as independent in fortune as the honourable member himself. I have no fear but that of doing wrong, nor have I a hope on the subject but that of doing some service before I die. The accident of my situation has not made me a partisan; and I never lamented that situation till now that I find myself as unprotected as I fear the people of England will be on this occasion.' In the dissolution of 1790 he lost his seats in both Parliaments, and he then withdrew to Farmley, his country house in the county of Kilkenny. He is said in his last years to have retired much from society, and his temper became gloomy and morose. He died in December 1791, in his fifty-ninth year.

When he felt death approaching he requested his attendant to leave the room, and he drew his last breath alone. Faithful to the interests of his country, he left an estate of about 5,000l. a year to descend, after the death of his wife, to Dublin University, to be employed in the foundation of an Irish professorship and the acquisition of Irish manuscripts. The will, however, was challenged in the law courts and finally overthrown.

The impression Flood made upon those who had known him in the earlier part of his Irish career was far deeper

than that which he has left in history. No one can read the confidential Government letters without perceiving what a great part he played in Irish parliamentary life, how much the Government dreaded his opposition, how anxious they were even at the time when they distrusted him the most to secure his support. Charlemont, who differed strongly from his policy in some periods of his career, never lost his respect and admiration for him, and in the Memoirs which he wrote, and which were not intended for publication, he pronounced Flood to be a man of consummate ability,' 'who for the fourteen first years of his parliamentary life had uniformly acted the most patriotic part, actively and incessantly exerting those wonderful talents with which he was endowed to the honour and benefit of his country.' Peter Burrowes, who was an excellent judge of eloquence, and who through his whole life was the warm friend and admirer of Grattan, nevertheless pronounced Flood to be perhaps the ablest man Ireland ever produced, indisputably the ablest man of his own times.' Langrishe, Curran, and Barrington formed a very similar estimate of his powers, and Sir Lawrence Parsons, who was himself one of the most sagacious members of the Irish Parliament, has written about him in still warmer terms. The impartial judgment of subsequent ages,' he wrote, will consider him as unrivalled in his own country; and had it been his fortune to have moved upon a theatre as capacious as his own mind, his celebrity would not have been exceeded by any man in any other.'

6

Posterity has not ratified this judgment, and there is something very melancholy in the life of Flood. From his earliest youth his ambition seems to have been to identify himself with the independence of the Irish Parliament. But though he attained to a position which, before him, had been unknown in Ireland, though the unanimous

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verdict of his contemporaries pronounced him to be one of the greatest intellects that ever adorned the Irish Parliament, and though there is perhaps no act of his life which may not be at least plausibly defended, yet his career, presents one long series of disappointments and reverses. At an age when most statesmen are in the zenith of their influence he sank into political impotence. The party he had formed discarded him as its leader. The reputation he so dearly prized was clouded and assailed; the principles he had sown germinated and fructified indeed, but others reaped their fruit, and he is now scarcely remembered except as the object of a powerful invective in Ireland, and as an example of a deplorable failure in England. A few pages of oratory, which probably at best only represent the substance of his speeches, a few youthful poems, a few laboured letters, and a biography so meagre and so unsatisfactory that it scarcely gives us any insight into his character, are all that remain of Henry Flood. The period in which he lived, a jealous, exacting, and uncertain temper, and two or three lamentable mistakes of judgment, were fatal to his reputation; and he laboured for a people who have usually been peculiarly indifferent to the reputation of their great men. We may say of him as Grattan said of Kirwan: The curse of Swift was upon him, to have been born an Irishman and a man of genius, and to have used his talents for his country's good.'

HENRY GRATTAN

A PAPER was found in Swift's desk after his death, containing a list of his friends, classified as grateful, ungrateful, and indifferent. In this list the name of Grattan occurs three times, and each time it is marked as grateful. The family was one of some weight in the country, and the father of the subject of the present sketch was Recorder and member for Dublin. As I have already had occasion to observe, Dr. Lucas was his colleague and his opponent, and a bitter animosity, both personal and political, subsisted between them. The Recorder seems to have been a man of a violent and overbearing temper, firmly wedded to his own opinions, and exceedingly intolerant of contradiction. He was greatly exasperated with his son for adopting what would be now called Liberal politics, and he carried his resentment so far as to mark his displeasure in his will. Henry Grattan was born in the year 1746. From his earliest youth he manifested the activity of his intellect, and the force and energy of his character. Some foolish nursery tales having produced in his mind those superstitious fears that are so common among children, he determined when a mere boy to emancipate himself from their control, and was accustomed to go at midnight into a churchyard near his father's house, where he remained till every qualm of terror had subsided. He had a distinguished career at Dublin University, and acquired a passion for the classics, and especially for the great orators of antiquity, that never deserted him through life. Long

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before he obtained a seat in Parliament he had begun to cultivate eloquence. His especial models were Bolingbroke and Junius, and his method was constant recitation. He learnt by heart certain passages of his speeches, and continually revolved them in his mind till he had eliminated all those almost imperceptible prolixities that exist in nearly every written composition. By this method he brought his sentences to a degree of nervousness and of condensation that is scarcely paralleled in oratory. Several anecdotes are told of the difficulties into which his passion for recitation brought him. On one occasion his landlady in England requested his friends to remove that mad young gentleman who was always talking to himself, or addressing an imaginary person called Mr. Speaker. On another, when apostrophising a gibbet in Windsor Forest, he was interrupted by a tap on the shoulder, and a curious inquiry as to how he had got down. His letters written at this time show that he was subject to violent fits of despondency, and they betray also a morbidness that is singularly unlike his character in after years.

Shortly after leaving the University he was called to the Bar, and resided for some time in the Temple, where he probably occupied himself much more in the study of oratory than of law. He had obtained access to the House of Lords, and had come completely under the spell of Lord Chatham's eloquence. He wrote an elaborate character of Chatham which was inserted in 'Baratariana'; and in a letter written some years later he gives a long and very minute description of his style of speaking. The following extract will be read with pleasure, as forming a vivid description of perhaps the greatest of British orators: He was very great, but very odd; he spoke in a style of conversation; not, however, what I expected. It was not a speech, for he never came with a prepared harangue. His