In such a school of experience Curran's passions were developed. He understood the Irish character as few have ever understood it, and swayed it by his power of melting pathos and burning invective. The conditions under which he struggled were eloquently portrayed by him in his defense of Rowan:"

"You are living," he said to the jury, "in a country where the constitution is rightly stated to be only ten years old; where the people have not the ordinary rudiments of education. It is a melancholy story that the lower orders of people here have less means of being enlightened than the same class of people in any other country. If there be no means left by which public measures can be canvassed, what will be the consequence? Where the press is free, and discussion unrestrained, the mind, by the collision of intercourse, gets rid of its own asperities; a sort of insensible perspiration takes place in the body politic, by which those acrimonies, which would otherwise fester and inflame, are quietly dissolved and dissipated. But now, if any aggregate assembly shall meet, they are censured; if a printer publishes their resolutions, he is punished,-rightly, to be sure, in both cases, for it has been lately done. If the people say, 'Let us not create tumult, but meet in delegation,' they cannot do it. If they are anxious to promote parliamentary reform in that way, they cannot do it. The law of the last session has for the first time declared such meetings to be a crime. What, then, remains? The liberty of the press only,-that sacred palladium which no influence, no power, no minister, no government, which nothing but the depravity or folly or corruption of a jury, can ever destroy. And what calamities are the people saved from by having public communication left open to them? I will tell you, gentlemen, what they are saved from, and what the government is saved from. I will tell you also to what both are exposed by shutting up that communication. In one case, sedition speaks aloud, and walks abroad. The demagogue goes forth; the public eye is upon him; he frets his busy hour upon the stage; but soon either weariness, or bribe, or punishment, or disappointment bears him down, or drives him off, and he appears no more. In the other case, how does the work of sedition go forward? Night after night the muffled rebel steals forth in the dark, and casts another and another brand upon the pile to which, when the hour of fatal maturity shall arrive, he will apply the torch. If you doubt of the horrid consequences of suppressing the effusion, even of individual discontent, look to those enslaved countries where the protection of despotism is supposed to be secured by such restraints. Even the person of the despot there is never in safety. Neither the fears of the despot nor the machinations of the slave have any slumber,-the one anticipating the moment of peril, the other watching the opportunity of aggression. The fatal crisis is equally a surprise to both. The decisive instant is precipitated without warning,-by folly on the one side, or by frenzy on the other, and there is no notice of the treason till the traitor acts. In those unfortunate countries-one cannot read it without horror there are officers whose province it is to have the water which is to be drunk by their rulers sealed up in bottles, lest some wretched miscreant should throw poison into the draught. But, gentlemen, if you wish for a nearer and more interesting example, you have it in the history of your own revolution. You have it at that memorable period when the monarch found a servile acquiescence in the ministers of his

folly; when the liberty of the press was trodden under foot; when venal sheriffs returned packed juries to carry into effect those fatal conspiracies of the few against the many; when the devoted benches of public justice were filled by some of those foundlings of fortune who, overwhelmed in the torrent of corruption at an early period, lay at the bottom, like drowned bodies, while soundness or sanity remained in them, but at length, becoming buoyant by putrefaction, they rose as they rotted, and floated to the surface of the polluted stream, where they drifted along, the objects of terror and contagion and abomination. In that awful moment of the nation's travail, of the last gasp of tyranny, and the first breath of freedom, how pregnant is the example,— the press extinguished, the people enslaved, and the prince undone.”

[What a contrast is this with the spirit of British law] "which makes liberty commensurate with and inseparable from British soil; which proclaims, even to the stranger and sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy and consecrated by the genius of universal emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion incompatible with freedom an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery,-the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation."

He poured out his invectives like lava on political informers, "the forsaken prostitute of every vice, who calls upon you, with one breath, to blast the memory of the dead, and to blight the character of the living"; who "measures his value by the coffins of his victims, and, in the field of evidence, appreciates his fame as the Indian warrior does in fight,-by the number of scalps with which he can swell his triumphs. He calls upon you, by the solemn league of eternal justice, to accredit the purity of a conscience washed in his own atrocities. He has promised and betrayed; he has sworn and foresworn; and whether his soul shall go to heaven or to hell he seems altogether indifferent, for he has established an interest in both." On the trial of Finnerty he said:

"I speak of what your own eyes have seen, day after day, during the course of this commission, from the box where you are now sitting,the number of horrid miscreants who acknowledged upon their oaths that they had come from the seat of government,-from the very chambers of the castle,-where they had been worked upon, by the fear of death and the hope of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows; that the mild and wholesome and merciful counsels of this government are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up as a witness. Is this a picture created by a hag-ridden fancy, or is it a fact? Have you not seen him, after his resurrection from that region of death and corruption, make his ap

pearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and the supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked, when he entered, how the stormy wave of the multitude retired at his approach? Have you not seen how the human heart bowed to the supremacy of his power, in the undissembled homage of deferential horror? How his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused, and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and death,— -a death which no innocence can escape, no art elude, no force resist, no antidote prevent. There was an antidote,—a juror's oath! But even that adamantine chain that bound the integrity of man to the throne of eternal justice is solved and molten in the breath that issues from the informer's mouth. Conscience swings from her moorings, and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety in the surrender of his victim:

'Et quae sibi quisque timebat,

Unius in miseri exitium conversa tulere.'

Informers are worshipped in the temple of justice, even as the devil has been worshipped by pagans and savages; even so, in this wicked country, is the informer an object of judicial idolatry; even so is he soothed by the music of human groans; even so is he placated and incensed by the fumes and by the blood of human sacrifices."

Deeply sensible of his duty, and proud of his privilege as an advocate in such stirring times, he modestly and gracefully referred, on the trial of Judge Johnson, to his own services:

"No man dares to mutter, no newspaper dares to whisper, that such a question is afloat. It seems an inquiry among the tombs, or, rather, in the shades beyond them. 'Ibant sola sub nocte per umbram.' I am glad that it is so; I am glad of this factitious dumbness; for if murmurs dare to become audible, my voice would be too feeble to drown them. But when all is hushed, when nature sleeps,-'Cum quies mortalibus aegris,'-the weakest voice is heard; the shepherd's whistle shoots across the listening darkness of the interminable heath, and gives notice that the wolf is upon his walk, and the same gloom and stillness that tempt the monster to come abroad facilitate the communication of the warping to beware."

So often defeated in his best efforts, oppressed by responsibility, and exhausted by his labors, it is not to be wondered at that he looked beyond legal tribunals for final judgment. As he said to the judges in moving to set aside the verdict against Rowan:

"You are standing on the scanty isthmus that divides the great ocean of duration,-a ground that, while you yet hear me, is washed from beneath your feet. Let me remind you, my lord, while your determination is yet in your power, 'Dum versatur adhuc intra penetralia vestae,' that on that ocean of future you must set your judgment afloat, and future ages will assume the same authority which you have assumed; posterity feel the same emotions which you have felt when your little hearts have beaten, and your infant eyes have overflowed, at read ing the sad history of the sufferings of a Russell or a Sidney."

Curran's acceptance of judicial office was a mistake. His temperament was forensic, rather than judicial, and his technical learning was inadequate for judicial station. He lost interest in his work, and, like Erskine, enjoyed himself most in rehearsing the scenes of his early activity. His parliamentary career, though important, was not particularly distinguished; but there can be no doubt of his devotion to his country. As O'Connell said, "There never was so honest an Irishman.”

1 His opinion in the case of Merry v. Power is his ablest judicial effort.

ARGUMENT IN THE CASE OF THE REV. CHARLES MASSY AGAINST THE MARQUIS OF HEADFORT, AT THE ENNIS ASSIZES, COUNTY CLARE, IRELAND, BEFORE BARON SMITH AND

A SPECIAL JURY, 1804.

STATEMENT.

This was an action for criminal conversation. The Rev. Charles Massy, the plaintiff, was a clergyman, who, in 1796, had married, contrary to his father's wishes, and at a sacrifice of £16,000 a year, Miss Rosslewin, a girl of eighteen, of remarkable personal attractions. In 1803, while they were living at Summer Hill, about five miles from Limerick, the Marquis of Headfort, an officer in the British army, was quartered with his regiment in Limerick. As the marquis' mother had been a former parishioner of Mr. Massy's, the two became acquainted, and the marquis, who was then over fifty years of age, was shown every hospitality. Shortly afterwards, while Mr. Massy was engaged in the service of his church, Mrs. Massy eloped with the marquis. The case was argued by Bartholomew Hoar and John Philpot Curran for the plaintiff, and by Thomas Quin and George Ponsonby for the defendant. Bartholomew Hoar opened the case in a speech of great power. His striking simile is often quoted: "The Cornish plunderer, intent on the spoil, callous to every touch of humanity, shrouded in darkness, holds out false lights to the tempest-tossed vessel, and lures her and her pilot to that shore upon which she must be lost forever, the rock unseen, the ruffian invisible, and nothing apparent but the treacherous signal of security and repose. So, this prop of the throne, this pillar of the state, this stay of religion, the ornament of the peerage, this common protector of the people's privileges and of the crown's prerogatives, descends from these high grounds of character to muffle himself in the gloom of his own base and dark designs; to play before the eyes of the deluded wife and the deceived husband the falsest lights of love to the one, and of friendly and hospitable regards to the other, until she is at length dashed upon that hard bosom where her honor and happiness are wrecked and lost forever."

The defense did not deny the fact charged, but defended upon the theory that, in view of Mrs. Massy's frivolous character, the plaintiff was guilty of constructive connivance in permitting her to associate with the marquis. After Curran's closing speech for the plaintiff, the jury promptly returned a verdict for the plaintiff, and fixed his damages at £10,000. This cause enlisted Curran's feelings, as well as his intellect, for he himself had suffered a similar wrong. It is unquestionably the best specimen of his eloquence.

ARGUMENT.

Never so clearly as in the present instance have I observed that safeguard of justice which Providence has placed in the nature of man. Such is the imperious dominion with which truth and reason wave their scepter over the human intellect, that no solicita