584 CURRAN IN FRANCE AND SCOTLAND. grinning philosopher; they well might agree that human affairs were a sad joke. I see it every where, and in every thing. The wheel has run a complete round; only changed some spokes and a few 'fellows,' very little for the better, but the axle certainly has not rusted; nor do I see any likelihood of its rusting. At present all is quiet, except the tongue, thanks to those invaluable protectors of peace, the army!!"- Vol. ii. pp. 206, 207. - The public life of Mr. C. was now drawing to a close. He distinguished himself in 1804 in the Marquis of Headfort's case, and in that of Judge Johnson in 1805: But, on the accession of the Whigs to office in 1806, he was appointed to the situation of Master of the Rolls, and never afterwards made any public appearance. He was not satisfied with this appointment; and took no pains to conceal his dissatisfaction. His temper, perhaps, was by this time somewhat soured by ill health; and his notion of his own importance exaggerated by the flattery of which he had long been the daily object. Perhaps, too, the sudden withdrawing of those tasks and excitements, to which he had been so long accustomed, co-operating with the languor of declining age, may have affected his views of his own situation: But it certainly appears that he was never very gay or goodhumoured after his promotion—and passed but a dull and peevish time of it during the remainder of his life. In 1810, he went, for the first time, to Scotland; and we cannot deny our nationality the pleasure of his honest testimony. He writes thus to a friend soon after his "I am greatly delighted with this country. You see no trace here of the devil working against the wisdom and beneficence of God, and torturing and degrading his creatures. It may seem the romancing of travelling; but I am satisfied of the fact, that the poorest man here has his children taught to read and write, and that in every house is found a Bible, and in almost every house a clock: And the fruits of this are manifest in the intelligence and manners of all ranks. In Scotland, what a work have the four and twenty letters to show for themselves! — the natural enemies of vice, and folly, and slavery; the great sowers, but the still greater weeders, of the human soil. Nowhere can you see here the cringing hypocrisy of dissembled detestation, so inseparable from oppression: and as little do you meet the hard, and dull, and right-lined angles of the southern visage; you find the notion exact and the phrase direct, with the natural tone of the Scottish muse. SCOTLAND, ENGLAND, AND FRANCE. 585 "The first night, at Ballintray, the landlord attended us at supper: he would do so, though we begged him not. We talked to him of the cultivation of potatoes. I said, I wondered at his taking them in place of his native food, oatmeal, so much more substantial. His answer struck me as very characteristic of the genius of Scotland-frugal, tender, and picturesque. 'Sir,' said he, we are not so much i' the wrong as you think; the tilth is easy, they are swift i' the cooking, they take little fuel; and then it is pleasant to see the gude wife wi' a' her bairns aboot the pot, and each wi' a potatoe in its hand.””— Vol. ii. pp. 254–256. There are various other interesting letters in these volumes, and in particular a long one to the Duke of Sussex, in favour of Catholic Emancipation; but we can no longer afford room for extracts, and must indeed hurry through our abstract of what remains to be noticed of his life. He canvassed the burgh of Newry unsuccessfully in 1812. His health failed very much in 1813; and the year after, he resigned his situation, and came over to London in his way to France. He seems at no time to have had much relish for English society. In one of his early letters, he complains of" the proud awkward sulk" of London company, and now he characterises it with still greater severity: "I question if it is much better in Paris. Here the parade is gross, and cold, and vulgar; there it is, no doubt, more flippant, and the attitude more graceful; but in either place is not Society equally a tyrant and a slave? The judgment despises it, and the heart re nounces it. We seek it because we are idle; we are idle because we are silly; and the natural remedy is some social intercourse, of which a few drops would restore; but we swallow the whole phial and are sicker of the remedy than we were of the disease."- Vol. ii. pp. 337, 338. And again, a little after, 66 - England is not a place for society. It is too cold, too vain, without pride enough to be humble, drowned in dull fantastical formality, vulgarized by rank without talent, and talent foolishly recommending itself by weight rather than by fashion- -a perpetual war between the disappointed pretension of talent and the stupid overweening of affected patronage; means without enjoyment, pursuits without an object, and society without conversation or intercourse: Perhaps they manage this better in France-a few days, I think, will enable me to decide."— Vol. ii. pp. 345, 346. In France, however, he was not much better off — and returned, complaining of a constitutional dejection, 586 CURRAN PROGRESS OF HIS ORATORY. wine." He rejoices in the downfall of Bonaparte; and is of opinion that the Revolution had thrown that country a century back. In spring 1817, he began to sink rapidly; and had a slight paralytic attack in one of his hands. He proposed to try another visit to France; and still complained of the depression of his spirits: "he had a mountain of lead (he said) on his heart." Early in October, he had a severe shock of apoplexy; and lingered till the 14th, when he expired in his 68th year. There is a very able and eloquent chapter on the character of Mr. Curran's eloquence-encomiastic of course, but written with great temper, talent, and discrimination. Its charm and its defects, the learned author refers to the state of genuine passion and vehement emotion in which all his best performances were delivered; and speaks of its effects on his auditors of all descriptions, in terms which can leave no doubt of its substantial excellence. We cannot now enter into these rhetorical disquisitions — though they are full of interest and instruction to the lovers of oratory. It is more within our province to notice, that he is here said to have spoken extempore at his first coming to the Bar; but when his rising reputation made him more chary of his fame, he tried for some time to write down, and commit to memory, the more important parts of his pleadings. The result, however, was not at all encouraging: and he soon laid aside his pen so entirely, as scarcely even to make any notes in preparation. He meditated his subjects, however, when strolling in his garden, or more frequently while idling over his violin; and often prepared, in this way, those splendid passages and groups of images with which he was afterwards to dazzle and enchant his admirers. The only notes he made were often of the metaphors he proposed to employ — and these of the utmost brevity. For the grand peroration, for example, in H. Rowan's case, his notes were as follows: "Character of Mr. R. Furnace Rebellion -smothered-Stalks - Redeeming Spirit." From such slight hints he spoke fearlessly. and without cause for COURAGE AS A SPEAKER, AND SUCCESS. 587 fear. With the help of such a scanty chart, he plunged boldly into the unbuoyed channel of his cause; and trusted himself to the torrent of his own eloquence, with no better guidance than such landmarks as these. It almost invariably happened, however, that the experiment succeeded; "that his own expectations were far exceeded; and that, when his mind came to be more intensely heated by his subject, and by that inspiring confidence which a public audience seldom fails to infuse into all who are sufficiently gifted to receive it, a multitude of new ideas, adding vigour or ornament, were given off; and it also happened, that, in the same prolific moments, and as their almost inevitable consequence, some crude and fantastic notions escaped; which, if they impeach their author's taste, at least leave him the merit of a splendid fault, which none but men of genius can commit." (pp. 403, 404.) The best explanation of his success, and the best apology for his defects as a speaker, is to be found, we believe, in the following candid passage: "The Juries among whom he was thrown, and for whom he originally formed his style, were not fastidious critics; they were more usually men abounding in rude unpolished sympathies, and who were ready to surrender the treasure, of which they scarcely knew the value, to him that offered them the most alluring toys. Whatever might have been his own better taste, as an advocate he soon discovered, that the surest way to persuade was to conciliate by amusing them. With them he found that his imagination might revel unrestrained; that, when once the work of intoxication was begun, every wayward fancy and wild expression was as acceptable and effectual as the most refined wit; and that the favour which they would have refused to the unattractive reasoner, or to the too distant and formal orator, they had not the firmness to withhold, when solicited with the gay persuasive familiarity of a companion. These careless or licentious habits, encouraged by early applause and victory, were never thrown aside; and we can observe, in almost all his productions, no matter how august the audience, or how solemn the occasion, that his mind is perpetually relapsing into its primitive indulgences." pp. 412, 413. The learned author closes this very able and eloquent dissertation with some remarks upon what he says is now denominated the Irish school of eloquence; and seems 588 CURRAN- -IRISH ELOQUENCE. any deficiency, or even neglect of argument. As we had some share, we believe, in imposing this denomination, we may be pardoned for feeling some little anxiety that it should be rightly understood; and beg leave therefore to say, that we are as far as possible from holding, that the greatest richness of imagery necessarily excludes close or accurate reasoning; holding, on the contrary, that it is frequently its most appropriate vehicle and natural exponent -as in Lord Bacon, Lord Chatham, and Jeremy Taylor. But the eloquence we wished to characterise, is that where the figures and ornaments of speech do interfere with its substantial object-where fancy is not ministrant but predominant-where the imagination is not merely awakened, but intoxicated—and either overlays and obscures the sense, or frolics and gambols around it, to the disturbance of its march, and the weakening of its array for the contest:- And of this kind, we still humbly think, was the eloquence of Mr. Curran. His biographer says, indeed, that it is a mistake to call it Irish, because Swift and Goldsmith had none of it-and Milton and Bacon and Chatham had much; and moreover, that Burke and Grattan and Curran had each a distinctive style of eloquence, and ought not to be classed together. How old the style may be in Ireland, we cannot undertake to say say-though we think there are traces of it in Ossian. We would observe too, that, though born in Ireland, neither Swift nor Goldsmith were trained in the Irish school, or worked for the Irish market; and we have already said, that it is totally to mistake our conception of the style in question, to ascribe any tincture of it to such writers as Milton, Bacon, or Taylor. There is fancy and figure enough certainly in their compositions: But there is no intoxication of the fancy, and no rioting and revelling among figures-no ungoverned and ungovernable impulse no fond dalliance with metaphors no mad and headlong pursuit of brilliant. images and passionate expressions--no lingering among tropes and melodies-no giddy bandying of antitheses |