Thomas Emmet

“ On November the 11th, 1804, Jane Emmet first set foot on American soil on which forty-two years of her life were yet to be spent, and in which she was to find a grave. Her health, which had suffered much during her sojourn in Fort George, and through the agitations and anxieties which attended her life in Brussels and Paris, improved. Her husband whose reputation and talents had secured for him the most distinguished reception at the hands of the noblest men in America, made his way rapidly at the American Bar. ”

“ Emmet was appointed State Physician, and owing to his character and capacity, was soon in possession also, of a large private practice. He was a charming, genial man, and a great favourite with his patients. His wife’s nephew, St. John Mason, described him to Dr. Madden as “a man of easy and gentlemanly manners, remarkable for vivacity and pleasantry, but free from coarseness or that exaggeration of expression in moments of hilarity called grimace. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Alas! how short the moment to which we may cry with Faust, “tarry awhile, thou art so fair.” Very speedily, Elizabeth Emmet’s “fair moment” passed. In February, 1789, her son, Christopher Temple, went “circuit” in Munster—and one day to those who waited his return in the pleasant home in Stephen’s Green there came the tragic news of his death from smallpox. The blow was too severe for Christopher’s young wife. She died a few months after her husband, leaving their little 20daughter, Kitty, to the care of her grandparents. Elizabeth Emmet had to live on—to face the sorrows that yet awaited her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Extract from Gentleman’s Magazine for 1808: “May 5th, 1808, at Hythe, in Kent, of a rapid decline, aged 26, Sarah, wife of Captain Henry Sturgeon, youngest daughter of the Right Hon. J. P. Curran, Master of the Rolls in Ireland.”
Anne Devlin In 1842 when Dr. Madden was engaged in his researches for his memoir of Robert Emmet, he was directed to a certain old washerwoman, called Campbell, then living in great poverty and obscurity in a stable-yard off John’s Lane. ”

“ In another place Madden speaks of her “noble disposition and vigorous understanding,” and in conversation with Dr. Thos. Addis Emmet in 1880 he stated that he considered that she, her husband, her three sons, Christopher Temple, Thomas Addis, Robert, and her daughter, Mary Anne (wife of Robert Holmes) “were the most talented family in every respect he had ever known of.” It was felt, indeed, and not alone by those who hold that “all distinguished men inherit their characteristics rather from the mother than from the father,” that the extraordinary brilliancy of the three sons of Dr. ”

“ Like practically all other modern mechanical wonders, the motion picture was not the invention of any one man. Rather, the picture as we know it to-day is the cumulative result of the toil and experiments of a score of workers, whose efforts cover over half a century. As far back as 1795 scientists were striving to produce the phenomena of pictures that moved. Succeeding generations all saw experimenters working toward the same object, each contributing his mite of improvement, until, with Thomas A. Edison’s invention of the kinetoscope, in 1893, the day of modern motion pictures dawned. ”

“ For Emmet, finely gifted though he was, was just a young man with the same limitations, the same self-questionings, the same falterings, the same kindly human emotions surging up sometimes in such strength as almost to drown a heroic purpose, as many a young man we have known. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Emmet lives in it, and outlives. It is the compensation of a lot cast in a planet where even our own honourable action has a trick of turning hostile and smearing us, that there is something in the best of us which cannot be smeared. Robert Emmet’s large soul has, like a magician, pieced together his broken body, the symbol of his broken, mistimed, and because mistimed, unhallowed effort. But only his own soul [89] has done it, and by a power within, shaking herself clear of censure. Mr. Henry Curran devotes to him a reticent paragraph obliquely affectionate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This Englishman, whatever his eminence of courage and skill might be, had been the husband of Emmet’s sweetheart; and Emmet was an Irish rebel and felon. The young soldier had probably weighed well what he was inheriting, before his marriage, and found all that endurable enough, until he died. In a world where earthly accidents wither away at a breath, and men of like temper see each other as they are, Henry Sturgeon must have smiled from the blood-wet Spanish grass straight into Robert Emmet’s eyes. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ How could a man that wore a heavy watch-chain possess the genuine quality? In the judgment of the First Church, that chain was heavy enough to bind him hand and foot and to sink him in the depths of the sea.
But criticisms from this source Emmet accepted as a matter of course, much as a Republican candidate for the Presidency would count on a solid Democratic South. A more serious menace to his future lay in the attitude of some of his own supporters, who supposed that the mayor's office could now be their lounging-place and headquarters. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Emmett, it is said, might possibly have quitted the country in a fishing boat, but his wild and ardent attachment to a daughter of the celebrated Curran induced him to return to the metropolis and seek a parting interview with his mistress. None but a madman would have risked the dangerous experiment; but Emmett appears to have been influenced in all his actions by the wildest impulse, and, accordingly, he regained the city safely, and again took up his quarters in his old concealment, Harold’s Cross. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Emmeline thought of the Schmidt baby. He was heavy, and could not be dragged, cart and all, through crowds; he would be an annoying encumbrance to a girl who liked to be in the forefront of everything. It was certainly not true that the rebels were coming; but something was coming, and Emmeline wished to be at hand to see. If she hurried up this alley and down that back street, she could reach her own yard and then the front street. She could leave the Schmidt baby, fast asleep by now, on the side porch of her house, or could thrust him, cart and all, into the kitchen. ”