Grattan

“ Grattan in masquerade—Death of that illustrious patriot, and strictures on his interment in Westminster Abbey—Letter from the author to his son, Henry Grattan, Esq.
Many anecdotes occur to me of my late respected friend, Mr. Grattan. There are but few, however, which can throw fresh light upon a character so long and so generally known, and which exhibited unvarying excellence.
I never met any man who possessed the genuine elements of courage in a higher degree than Mr. Grattan,—in whom dwelt a spirit of mild, yet impetuous bravery, which totally banished all apprehensions of danger. ”

“ Reader! if you be an Irish Protestant, and entertain harsh prejudices against your Catholic countrymen, study the works and life of Grattan—learn from him—for none can teach you better how to purify your nature from bigotry. Learn from him to look upon all your countrymen with a loving heart—to be tolerant of infirmities caused by their unhappy history—and, like Grattan, earnestly sympathise with all that is brave and generous in their character. ”

“ Grattan is a tinhorn who is in a class all by himself. He seems to have all kinds of nerve, and to be willing to take all sorts of chances. That moving-picture deal gives us a pretty good line on him. ”

“ Stephen Grattan had been a drunkard, and was now a reformed man. John Morely had been a drunkard, and was trying to reform. His father, though not a total abstainer, had lived and died a temperate man. But John Morely was not like his father. He had in him, the neighbours said, “the makings” of a better or a worse man than ever his father had been; and when, after his mother’s death, the young builder brought home the pretty and good Alice Lambton as his wife, a “better man” they all declared he was to be; for they believed that now he would not be in danger from his one temptation. ”

“ There were bags and bundles manifold, and a great round basket of Dolly Grattan’s, well known to the little Morelys as capable of holding a great many good things, for it had been in their house before.
“I don’t know as you would speak to me, if you knew all, mother,” said Stephen at last, approaching Mrs Morely, who was sitting by the fire with her baby in her arms. “You are all alive, I see,—at least the boys are. How is baby, and my little Sophy? Why, what ails the child?”
He might well ask; for Sophy was lying limp and white across the baby’s cot. Poor little Sophy! ”

“ In the ‘Life and Times of Grattan’ (v. 104–6) , it is said: ‘He was unquestionably a man of talents ... In early life he began with the people, though he ended against them, and like most renegades ... he ran violently into the other extreme. ... He was bribed by the court and his wants compelled him to sell the country. ... In early life he was a close acquaintance of Mr. Grattan, and a frequent visitor to Tinnehinch ... As a person of no property, he was over-placed and over-salaried. ... ”

“ Nature, like truth, is powerful, and the instinct of the lawyer must prevail.
One man alone "refused to be comforted." Grattan, the Demosthenes of Ireland, for years kept, without swearing it, the Carthaginian oath, which had slipped out of the mind of Plunket. He talked of the past with the rapt anguish of a visionary, and eschewed human occupation with the rigid inutility of a member of La Trappe. Grattan long continued to linger in Ireland, until he was hissed out of his patriotic romance, and laughed into England. ”

“ If we look for its epitaph we shall find it, strangely enough, in the words spoken in 1798 by the man who pursued Grattan's Parliament with his venomous hate, and finally compassed its doom—the famous Irish Chancellor, Lord Clare:—
"There is not a nation on the face of the habitable globe which has advanced in cultivation, in agriculture, in manufactures, with the same rapidity, in the same period, as Ireland." [65]
But, great and splendid as was Grattan's victory, there were two points of weakness in the settlement of 1782, soon to be revealed by experience. ”

“ If (as some do) you entertain dispiriting views of Ireland, recollect that any country containing such elements as those which roused the genius of Grattan never need despair. Sursum corda. Be not disheartened.
"Go—go—my countrymen—and, within your social sphere, carry into practice those moral principles which Grattan so eloquently taught, and which he so remarkably enforced by his well-spent life. He will teach you to avoid hating men on account of their religious professions or hereditary descent. ”

“ Grattan is as much a creature of Fox and his party, as the meanest libeller in the "Morning Herald;" he lives entirely with them. I hear Pelham is to take his father on his back to the Government of Ireland. Grattan will stand, in my opinion, on most unpopular ground, if he either attempts to assert the hereditary right of the Prince, or to give him larger powers in Ireland, than the Parliament of this country entrust to him for the administration of the British Government. ”

“ The most searching scrutiny of his private life only increases the respect due to the memory of Grattan as a statesman and the greatest of Irish orators. His patriotism was untainted by self-seeking; he was courageous in risking his popularity for what his sound judgment showed him to be the right course. As Sydney Smith said with truth of Grattan soon after his death: “No government ever dismayed him. The world could not bribe him. He thought only of Ireland; lived for no other object ”

“ They never said to each other that the times were hard.
There were no more suppers or breakfasts of thin gruel at the little log-house on the hill. In a few days after his first memorable visit, Stephen Grattan was there again, and again Farmer Jackson’s oxen called forth the wonder and admiration of the little Morelys. For Stephen, as he took great pains to explain to Mrs Morely, had taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by the return of the farmer’s empty sled, to bring up the barrel of flour and the bag of meal that ought to have been sent up the very night her husband went away. ”

“ Curran declared that ‘Flood was unmeasurably the greatest man of his time in Ireland.’ In Grattan's opinion Flood ‘had faults; but he had great powers, great public effect. He persuaded the old, he inspired the young; the Castle vanished before him. On a small subject he was miserable. Put into his hand a distaff, and like Hercules he made sad work of it; but give him the thunderbolt, and he had the arm of Jupiter’ (Grattan, Miscellaneous Works, 1822, p. 118) . Flood was identified with all the great measures of Irish reform in his time ”

“ Classical eloquence was thrown away in such a struggle. The concentrated strength of national enthusiasm, careless of form, animated only by a single giant purpose, was demanded. Grattan, though such a man as Irishmen of every creed might well be proud of, was, unfortunately for his success in the attainment of great national aims, neither a Catholic nor identified with the “Celtic peasant.” He lacked the fundamental force bred of the soil. ”

“ We know Tsan Ti is in New York, and we can't feel absolutely sure that the Chinaman hasn't fallen into some trap laid by Grattan. If that's the case, the mandarin may lose his life."
"There's about as much chance of that, pard, as that you and I will get struck by lightning."
"We'll say the chance that Bunce is telling the truth is about one in a hundred. Well, Joe, that hundredth chance is what we can't take. Besides, Grattan is wanted. If he is really in the hills, and we can capture him, that will clear the road for Tsan Ti." ”

“ At the head of his ragged and ill-disciplined band, he had the temerity to charge a crack French regiment, and, as might be expected, was sent back with a sore head. Whilst on the subject of guerillas, Mr Grattan combats an opinion which he believes many persons in this country entertain, "that the Spaniards and Portuguese did as much, if not more, during the Peninsular contest, than the British." Here he is certainly mistaken. Very few persons, out of the Peninsula, have any such notion. The French know well enough by whom they were beaten. ”

“ Finding that further resistance was useless Grattan gave up the struggle, and retired to Tinnehinch, co. Wicklow, where he amused himself with the study of the classics and the education of his children. In 1801 he refused Lord Fitzwilliam's offer of one of the seats for Peterborough. But, persuaded at length by Fox and Fitzwilliam, he was elected for the borough of Malton in April 1805. Grattan made his maiden speech in the imperial parliament on 13 May in support of Fox's motion for a committee on the Roman catholic petition (ib. iv. 57–79) . ”

“ Grattan's testimony, as that of a famous orator, cannot here be passed, though it refers to a later period. 'He was a man of great genius, great flight of mind. His imagination was astonishing.... He was very great and 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 style was not regular oratory, like Cicero or Demosthenes, but it was very fine and very elevated, and above the ordinary subjects of discourse.... His gesture was always graceful. He was an incomparable actor. ”

“ As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the riverbanks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. ”

“ Grattan felt called upon to undertake, was not revolutionary, in the usually accepted sense of the term. He was a Monarchist and a Whig in general politics; but he was an Irishman, proud and fond of his country, and a sincere lover of the largest religious liberty. With the independence of the judiciary and the legislature, with freedom of commerce and of conscience, he would be well content to stand by the British connection. "The sea," he said, in his lofty figurative language, "protests against union—the ocean against separation." ”

“ The stubborn and advancing energy of Swift and Flood may teach us to bear up against wrong; the principles of Tone may end in liberation; but the splendid nationality of Grattan shall glorify us in every condition.
The speeches of Grattan were collected and his memoirs written by his son. The latter is an accessible and an invaluable account of his life; but the speeches were out of print, not purchasable under five or six guineas, and then were unmanageably numerous for any but a professed politician. Mr. ”

“ In June, Grattan, with Lord Charlemont, Ponsonby, and Forbes, founded the Whig Club in Dublin, the objects of which, as Grattan afterwards explained, were ‘to obtain an internal reform of parliament, in which they partly succeeded,’ and ‘to prevent an union, in which they failed’ (Sir J. Barrington, Memoirs, ii. 146, note) . Hitherto Grattan since the legislative independence of the Irish parliament had given a general but independent support to the government. Disgusted with the system of wholesale corruption pursued by the Castle, he now went into opposition. ”

“ Grattan exerted his utmost influence to dispel. Want of confidence, also, in the sincerity of Lord Shelburne's Ministry yielded an additional ground for national discontent. "Things were never more unsettled than they are at present," Mr. Perry writes to Mr. Grattan, in October, 1782; "some of the Ministry here are at open enmity with each other, and everybody seems to distrust the head." ”

“ So worthily ended the mortal career of Henry Grattan. He was interred by the side of his old friend, Charles James Fox, in Westminster Abbey; the mourners included the highest imperial statesmen, and the Catholic orphan children; his eulogium was pronounced in the House of Commons by William Conyngham Plunkett, and in the Irish capital by Daniel O'Connell. ”

“ Nothin' more, on my soul, than to strangle Tsan Ti with a yellow cord an' take the ruby away from him. My eye, mates, but Grattan's a clever hand at overhauling his locker for a game like that. The boss of the Chinee Empire sends these yellow cords to the chinks he don't like an' don't want around. When the cords come to hand, then the chinks receivin' thereof uses them to choke out their lives. Tsan Ti is found, dead as a mackerel, with the yellow cord twisted into his fat neck. ”

“ At the general election in November 1806 he was elected one of the members for the city of Dublin, for which constituency he continued to sit until his death. The contest was a severe and expensive one, but though the Roman catholics subscribed 4,000l. to defray the expenses of his election, Grattan declined to accept it. In 1807 Grattan gave his support to the Irish Arms and Insurrection Bills, and in the debate on Sheridan's motion on the state of Ireland defended the course which he had taken with regard to these bills in a speech of great ability (Speeches, iv. 126–33) . ”

“ It is possible even in such noble natures as these men had—so strangely are we constituted—that there was a latent sense of personal rivalry, which prompted them to grasp, each, at the larger share of patriotic honour. It is possible that there were other, and inferior men, who exasperated this latent personal rivalry. Flood had once reigned supreme, until Grattan eclipsed him in the sudden splendour of his career. In scholarship and in genius the elder Patriot was, taken all in all, the full peer of his successor ”