Robert Emmet

“ Now to be magnanimous is not to possess a definite [90] grace or virtue: magnanimity, like a sense of humour, is a spirit, a solvent merely; to exercise it in any one emergency is to show greatness equal to all. Robert Emmet said that he had received, immediately on his return from France, official invitations from conspirators in high quarters at home: the “first men in the land” were those who “invited him over.” Of his truthfulness there was but one opinion. Said Curran, who loved him little: “I would have believed the word of Emmet as soon as the oath of any other man I ever knew.” ”

“ He who had staked so much on the purity of his public motive, he who cared only, and cared fiercely, for the clearing of his name from the misconceptions of posterity, he who was one of the elect souls loving his love so much because he loved honour more—he, Robert Emmet, was willing to forfeit every chance of his own vindication for the sake of the sad girl brought into abhorrent publicity by his rashness. ”

“ Anne Devlin’s Lament for Emmet. SHALL we not join together the two women, whom love for Robert Emmet has dowered with a common immortality, and whom a common agony of loss has bound, one to the other, in the eternal sisterhood of sorrow? ”

“ No credit need be given to the tale that as Emmet [57] went forth to his death through the Dublin streets, a young lady, believed to be Miss Curran, was seen in a carriage despairingly taking leave of him, and fluttering a handkerchief until he was out of sight, when she sank in a swoon. It is not the fashion of persons of deep feeling, save on the stage, to have recourse at solemn moments to fluttering handkerchiefs. If any young lady interested in Robert Emmet were abroad in a carriage on that autumn morning, it would be his only sister, Mrs. ”

“ On the day set for his execution Robert Emmet wrote to his old friend Richard Curran:—
“My dearest Richard: I find I have but a few hours to live; but if it was the last moment, and the power of utterance was leaving me, I would thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generous expressions of affection and forgiveness to me. If there was any one in the world in whose breast my death might be supposed not to stifle every spark of resentment, it might be you. I have deeply injured you ”

“ Still less did others suspect the now plighted attachment, the innocent love hungry for joy, and yet hurried on to dark ends through devious and hidden ways. Mr. Curran’s strenuous opposition, on all grounds, was necessarily taken for granted, until some prodigious success should befall Emmet, and as if by a spell free the daughter who so feared her father. Sarah knew detail by detail of the conspiracy as it arose, and was fain with all her soul to encourage its progress. ”

“ What gave a faun-like idiosyncrasy to the whole countenance was the slight upward curve of the perfect eyebrows at the inner edge. If we are to accept Brocas as our best authority (though his hand at work has somehow captured a momentary scorn not seen by Comerford) , this idiosyncrasy had in it no touch of frowning severity such as was foreign, according to all report, to Emmet, but added rather a final whimsical attraction to a sad young face which a child or a dog would readily love. As Anne Devlin said once of “Miss Sarah’s,” it was “not handsome, but more than handsome.” ”

“ Sarah herself was entirely open with him: one would expect no less of her nobly sweet nature. “She pleaded his own cause for him by proving how little he deserved a divided affection;” but “the constancy and tenderness of her attachment to Emmet seem only to have rendered her the more interesting.” Two difficult years and more went by for Henry Sturgeon. He never wavered in his purpose: much as society sought after him, there was but one woman in the world to that patient and dedicated lover. ”

“ When enclosed in his cell, Emmet became the object of apparent concern and affection on the part of two acquaintances: the accomplished advocate and litterateur, Mr. Leonard M’Nally, and Dr. Trevor, Superintendent of Prisons. If these persons had stepped out of an ancient epic or some fancied tragedy to show what human genius could do by way of creating hypocrites, no plaudit ever yet given could be worthy of the play. ”

“ The first journey, fully a half-year after the marriage, must have taken him and his wife through the capital, the Dublin of all racking memories, for we hear of Mrs. Sturgeon visiting Mr. James Petrie’s studio there. From the sketches he had made of Robert Emmet in the court-room, and from the mask in his possession, he had painted a [78] portrait unhappily not wholly successful. But we know what peculiar interest belongs to a portrait, when there is, and can be, but one; and no person, surely, in all the world, can have longed to scan this one with the longing of Sarah Sturgeon. Dr. ”

“ Emmet has been misreported in one important particular. He had a fine understanding of the uses of irony; but it is his praise that he was also scrupulously, persistently, and invincibly courteous. To know him is to know that sentences such as those figuring in some reports of his speech, about “that viper,” meaning (Mr. Plunkett) , or “persons who would not disgrace themselves by shaking your (that is, Lord Norbury’s) [52] blood-stained hand,” are, as attributed to him, all but impossible. ”

“ He was called to the bar in Ireland in 1781, and in that year he married Anne Western Temple, daughter of Robert Temple, an American loyalist who had settled in Ireland. Emmet attained eminence as an advocate; he possessed a highly poetical imagination, remarkably retentive memory, and a vast amount of acquired knowledge of law, divinity, and literature. Under the chancellorship of Lord Lifford, Emmet was advanced to the rank of king's counsel in 1787. His death occurred in February 1788, while he was on circuit in the south of Ireland, and his widow died in the following November. ”

“ May they be more fortunate than their uncle, but may they preserve as pure and ardent an attachment to their country as he has done. Give the watch to little Robert; he [62] will not prize it the less for having been in the possession of two Roberts before him. I have one dying request to make to you. I was attached to Sarah Curran, the youngest daughter of your friend. I did hope to have had her my companion for life; I did hope that she would not only have constituted my happiness, but that her heart and understanding would have made her one of Jane’s dearest friends. ”

“ Emmet’s [96] assurances was his own extreme, almost fantastic, chivalry; and that those assurances set off deeply by contrast, as he vehemently meant they should do, his abhorrence of the underlying system of which Lord Hardwicke’s conduct was merely the agreeable accident. Lord Hardwicke, at least, had understood.
Even one intelligent modern has fallen foul of Emmet’s unusually scrupulous care in such matters, and of his attitude of regal courtesy, like that of the battling foes on Crécy field: such a care and such an attitude indicate, it is thought, “weakness of character!” ”

“ Emmet joined her husband in 1800, and they remained there, though not in close confinement, until 1802, when with the other prisoners they were sent to Holland. Emmet was at Paris when he heard the news of his brother Robert's rising and death, and he had an interview with Napoleon on the subject in September 1803. He assisted MacSheehy in his scheme for raising a battalion of Irish in the pay of France, but he did not himself join it, and left France in 1804 for the United States. He joined the New York bar, where he soon took a leading position and made a large income. ”

“ Naked logic was Emmet’s element, and the expedient his negligible quantity. Every agitation sincerely founded [47] on a popular need breeds, in time, its extremists. They are the glory and the difficulty of all reform. It might have been said of Emmet, as at the outset of the Oxford Movement it was said of Hurrell Froude, that “the gentleman was not afraid of inferences.” Curran’s thoughts dwelt in no such simplified worlds. Like all the best Irishmen of his blazingly brilliant day, he was for Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation, and against the Union. ”

“ You do me honour overmuch. You have given to the subaltern all the credit of the superior.” He [91] turned half-smiling to the presiding judge. “There are men concerned in this conspiracy who are not only superior to me, but even to your own conception of yourself, my lord.” At the final moment of his life Emmet stood motionless with a handkerchief in his hand, the fall of which was to be the signal for the cart to be drawn away. ”

“ The reign of Sensibility was not over; able-bodied persons in 1803 were only beginning to be carried out of the pit, more dead than alive, when Mrs. Siddons played. But something in Emmet’s uncomplaining presence overcame stern men habituated to political offenders. The honest turnkey at Kilmainham fell fainting at his feet, only [58] to hear the affectionately-proffered good-bye; and it was generally noticed that Lord Norbury, facing him, could with difficulty steady his voice, though he was popularly believed to revel in pronouncing capital sentence. ”

“ Some critics on the spindle side will find it easier to forgive an unsuccessful patriot than an uninventive and unauthoritative lover. Emmet in hiding near the Priory, between the no-rising and the arrest, had his almost certain chances of escape ”

“ Curran, for whom he had an affection as genuine as he was capable of feeling. It was like “Janus” Wainewright’s affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt from the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to divers and sundry. It is possible, therefore, that Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his much-deceived client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a life-in-death which also was surely “better so.” But this is mere conjecture, as Emmet would never have inquired; rather than name his “nut-brown maid,” the truly “banished man” would still have endured all the inner turmoil of lonely love ”

“ I know not whether success would have blotted out the recollection of what I have done; but I [do] know that a man with the coldness of death on him need not to be made to feel any other coldness, and that he may be spared any addition to the misery he feels, not for himself, but for those to whom he has left nothing but sorrow.”
It is apparent from this page that the great Mr. Curran had not withheld from one under misfortune some crumbs of that verbal opulence for which he was famous. Emmet’s disclaimer of any eagerness on Sarah’s part in reciprocating his devotion is a knightly one. ”

“ The years from 1778 to 1789 were, doubtless, the happiest years in Elizabeth Emmet’s life. The elder boys, Christopher Temple and Thomas Addis, were at the University, and a mother even less tender than she, could not but be filled with pride and happiness at the brilliant records they were making for themselves. In one of these years there arrived from America kinsfolk of her husband’s, Sir John and Robert Temple, and the latter’s family, and in the hospitable eighteenth-century manner which its big houses and generous style of living fostered, they became inmates of Dr. ”

“ Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my name remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. ”

“ The moon-beams playing on the still waters, the sunshine streaming through the golden clouds, the perfect poise and artistic shape of the trees growing on the mountain side among the jagged rocks where the hand of man never trained or cultivated them. ”

“ Religious disqualification is but one of the many grievances of which Ireland has to complain. Our intention is to remove not that only, but every other oppression under which we labour. We fight, that all of us may have our country, and that done – each of us shall have his religion. ”

“ The little brook dancing and playing in and out among the deep chasms chiseling its narrow passage among the granite, jumping over big rocks, rolling little pebbles, it steals here and there until it spreads out on the great plains and fertile prairies into a rushing river hurrying on its way to the ocean. ”

“ We have been mutually pledged to each other, to look only to our own strength, and that the first introduction of a system of terror, the first attempt to execute an individual in one county, should be the signal of insurrection in all. ”

“ The beautiful sun-set casting its long stream of golden beauty over the western sky mocks at the skillful artist when he tries to imitate its marvelous shades and tints. The moon breaking through the silvery clouds and showering the heavens with beauty and grandeur rests its glory on the evening dew, and the millions of diamonds glitter and glisten in a splendor and elegance far beyond the hand of man. ”

“ They go on and on; they are commencing to look ragged and worn out; the roses have flown from their cheeks: their eyes are no more full of lustre and keenness; the gray hairs are showing, the step is not so firm, but still they go on. ”

“ Years have passed, but the pain lingers and when the thoughts go back to the silent form in the little white casket the tender heart of this pure woman is so engulfed in sorrow that it seems it is entirely beyond all human endurance and patience. ”