of All Hearts to show a collective universe who was engaged in the most virtuous actions, or swayed by the purest motive-my country's oppressors, or

[Here he was interrupted, and told to listen to the sentence of the law.]

My lords, will a dying man be denied the legal privilege of exculpating himself in the eyes of the community from an undeserved reproach, thrown upon him during his trial, by charging him with ambition, and attempting to cast away for a paltry consideration the liberties of his country? Why did your lordships insult me? Or rather, why insult justice, in demanding of me why sentence of death should not be pronounced against me? I know, my lords, that form prescribes that you should ask the question. The form also presents the right of answering. This, no doubt, may be dispensed with, and so might the whole ceremony of the trial, since sentence was already pronounced at the Castle before the jury were empaneled. Your lordships are but the priests of the oracle, and I insist on the whole of the forms. I am charged with being an emissary of France. An emissary of France! and for what end? It is alleged that I wish to sell the independence of my country; and for what end? Was this the object of my ambition? And is this the mode by which a tribunal of justice reconciles contradiction? No; I am no emissary; and my ambition was to hold a place among the deliverers of my country, not in power nor in profit, but in the glory of the achievement. Sell my country's independence to France! and for what? Was it a change of masters? No, but for ambition. Oh, my country! was it personal ambition that could influence me? Had it been the soul of my actions, could I not, by my education and fortune, by the rank and consideration of my family, have placed myself amongst the proudest of your oppressors? My country was my idol! To it I sacrificed every selfish, every endearing sentiment; and for it I now offer up myself, O God! No, my lords; I acted as an Irishman, determined on delivering my country from the yoke of a foreign and unrelenting tyranny, and the more galling yoke of a domestic faction, which is its joint partner and perpetrator in the patricide, from the ignominy existing with an exterior of splendor and a conscious depravity. It was the wish of my heart to extricate my country from this doubly riveted despotism-I wished to place her independence beyond the reach of any power on earth. I wished to

exalt her to that proud station in the world.

Connection with France was, indeed, intended, but only as far as mutual interest would sanction or require. Were the French to assume any authority inconsistent with the purest independence, it would be the signal for their destruction. We sought their aid—and we sought it as we had assurance we should obtain it—as auxiliaries in war, and allies in peace. Were the French to come as invaders or enemies, uninvited by the wishes of the people, I should oppose them to the utmost of my strength. Yes! my countrymen, I should advise you to meet them upon the beach with a sword in one hand, and a torch in the other. I would meet them with all the destructive fury of war. I would animate my countrymen to immolate them in their boats, before they had contaminated the soil of my country. If they succeeded in landing, and if forced to retire before superior discipline, I would dispute every inch of ground, burn every blade of grass, and the last entrenchment of liberty should be my grave. What I could not do myself, if I should fall, I should leave as a last charge to my countrymen to accomplish; because I should feel conscious that life, any more than death, is unprofitable when a foreign nation holds my country in subjection. But it was not as an enemy that the succors of France were to land. I looked, indeed, for the assistance of France; but I wished to prove to France and to the world that Irishmen deserved to be assisted; that they were indignant at slavery, and ready to assert the independence and liberty of their country. I wished to procure for my country the guarantee which Washington procured for America; to procure an aid which, by its example, would be as important as its valor; disciplined, gallant, pregnant with science and experience; that of a people who would perceive the good, and polish the rough points of our character. They would come to us as strangers, and leave us as friends, after sharing in our perils. and elevating our destiny. These were my objects: not to receive new taskmasters, but to expel old tyrants. It was for these ends I sought aid from France; because France, even as an enemy, could not be more implacable than the enemy already in the bosom of my country.

[Here he was interrupted by the court.]

I have been charged with that importance in the emancipation of my country as to be considered the keystone of the com

bination of Irishmen; or as your lordship expressed it, "the life and blood of the conspiracy." You do me honor overmuch: you have given to the subaltern all the credit of a superior. There are men engaged in this conspiracy who are not only superior to me, but even to your own conceptions of yourself, my lordmen before the splendor of whose genius and virtues I should bow with respectful deference, and who would think themselves disgraced by shaking your blood-stained hand.

What, my lord, shall you tell me, on the passage to the scaffold, which that tyranny (of which you are only the intermediary executioner) has erected for my murder, that I am accountable for all the blood that has been and will be shed in this struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor-shall you tell me this, and must I be so very a slave as not to repel it? I do not fear to approach the Omnipotent Judge to answer for the conduct of my whole life; and am I to be appalled and falsified by a mere remnant of mortality here? By you, too, although, if it were possible to collect all the innocent blood that you have shed in your unhallowed ministry in one great reservoir, your lordship might swim in it.

[Here the judge interrupted.]

Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory, by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country's liberty and independence; or that I could have become the pliant minion of power, in the oppression and misery of my country. The proclamation of the provisional government speaks for our views; no inference can be tortured from it to countenance barbarity or debasement at home, or subjection, humiliation, or treachery from abroad. I would not have submitted to a foreign oppressor, for the same reason that I would resist the foreign and domestic oppressor. In the dignity of freedom, I would have fought upon the threshold of my country, and its enemy should enter only by passing over my lifeless corpse. And am I, who lived but for my country, and who have subjected myself to the dangers of the jealous and watchful oppressor, and the bondage of the grave, only to give my countrymen their rights, and my country her independence,-am I to be loaded with calumny, and not suffered to resent it? No; God forbid!

[Here Lord Norbury told Mr. Emmet that his sentiments and language disgraced his family and his education, but more particularly his father,

Doctor Emmet, who was a man, if alive, that would not countenance such opinions. To which Emmet replied:]

If the spirits of the illustrious dead participate in the concerns and cares of those who were dear to them in this transitory life, Oh, ever dear and venerated shade of my departed father! look down with scrutiny upon the conduct of your suffering son, and see if I have, even for a moment, deviated from those principles of morality and patriotism which it was your care to instill into my youthful mind, and for which I am now about to offer up my life. My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifice. The blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim-it circulates warmly and unruffled through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are now bent to destroy for purposes so grievous that they cry to heaven. Be yet patient! I have but a few more words to say-I am going to my cold and silent grave my lamp of life is nearly extinguished - my race is run — the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom. but one request to ask at my departure from this world: it is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for, as no man who knows my motives dares now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion, until other times and other men. can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.

I have

THOMAS, LORD ERSKINE

(1750-1823)

scan

HEN Erskine appeared in his first case (that of King versus Baillie), he himself was probably the only man in England who thought his talents as a lawyer worth considering. When he left the court room, however, where he had spoken as the junior of five counsel, he was already near the head of the English bar, and it is said he received thirty retainers before he was out of the building. Compared to his more mature efforts, this speech would hardly be worth notice, did it not illustrate both the spirit and the method which made him the greatest forensic orator of his day. At a time when it was a highly dangerous offense to " dalize the great," it was the rule to find humble scapegoats to bear the odium of the sins of power. Neither the King nor his ministers were to be mentioned except with the usual "Far be it from me»But Erskine, reviewing the question presented by the pamphlet in which Captain Baillie had charged Lord Sandwich, first lord of the admiralty, with responsibility for abuses at Greenwich hospital, made an attack on Sandwich so bold that he at once compelled attention to himself as the central figure of the trial. From this beginning, Erskine was concerned in one after another of those great causes, through which the right of the people to sit in judgment on the acts of all who exercise their delegated power was asserted and at last vindicated. Under the Georges, prosecution for "seditious libel" took the place of what might have been arrests for treason under the Stuarts. In such cases as in that of Hardy and others for treason itself, Erskine was moved by the liberrima indignatio of the man who feels as his own every wrong with which power threatens weakness. This intensity gave him his power and his celebrity. In such cases as that of Lord George Gordon, where he is forcible to the last degree, he does not compel any other interest than that which attaches to the subject itself. This is true of some others of his orations in what were great political trials, but his peroration in the case of Stockdale is made sublime by the strength of his protest against the injustice of holding Warren Hastings as worse than the policy he was sent to India to enforce. His speech prosecuting the publisher of Thomas Paine's 'The Age of Reason,' which he himself considered his masterpiece, is, undoubtedly, very eloquent, and, from his stand