4. Antonia Armandine Agiae de Grammont, born October 5, 1826, married, November 26, 1850, Theodore, Duke de Prat.

5. Antonia Gabrielle Leontine de Grammont, born March 2, 1829.* The Duke de Grammont had two sisters:

1. Armandine Sophie Leonice Corisande de Grammont, married, in 1806, Viscount Ossuldon, present Earl of Tankerville.

2. Aglae Angelique Gabrielle de Grammont, married, firstly, at St. Petersburgh, General Demidoff, a Corsican by birth, and a connection of Napoleon Bonaparte; and, secondly, the Marshal Count Sebastiani, a native of Corsica, and connected likewise with the Bonaparte family.

The family De Grammont is now divided into two branches.†

No. XII.

MARSHAL COUNT SEBASTIANI.

The marshal was a native of Corsica, of an ancient family, connected with the Bonapartes. He entered the French army at an early age, and took a distinguished part in the Italian campaigns and Peninsular war. He married a sister of the present Duc de Grammont-the widow of an eminent Corsican in the service of Russia-General Demidoff. In the Peninsular war, Marshal Sebastiani distinguished himself particularly in the reformation of ecclesiastical abuses connected with the possession of property.

"In Spain he was notorious for ransacking convents with merciless avarice, and for mutilating or destroying the airy tracery in the time-honored halls of the Alhambra. The glorious building was converted by Sebastiani into stables for his horses and barracks for his debauched dragoons."

He was the unfortunate father of the ill-fated Duchess de Praslin. "Infelicis patris-infelix proles."

The marshal died at Paris in July, 1851, in his eightieth year. The Comtesse de Sebastiani had died in 1842. The funeral rites of the marshal were performed with extraordinary pomp at the Church of the Invalids, and were attended by the president of the republic, the marshals of France, all the principal generals, the corps diplomatique, and a great number of the principal inhabitants of Paris.

"When the solemn service was proceeding in the church, one of the wax

* Almanach de Gotha, Paris, 1854, p. 114.

↑ La branche cadette est représentée par :

Antoine Eugène Amable Stanislaus Agénor de Grammont, Comte de Grammont D'Aster, ou Comte Agénor de Grammont, pair de France, fils d'Antoine Louis Raymond Geneviève de Grammont, Comte de Grammont D'Aster et d'Amable de Catelan décédés.

Les sœurs sont :

Antoinette Claire Amélie Gabrielle Corisande de Grammont D'Aster, mariée à Roger Gabéléon, Comte de Salmour en Piémont.

Thérèse de Grammont D'Aster, mariée au Marquis D'Aversand de Toulouse.

Antoinette Marie Madeleine Amable Amédée de Grammont, mariée au Comte Gravier de Vergennes.-Ann. Biog. Gentleman's Magazine, November, 1851, p. 537.

tapers placed round the catafalque fell against the black cloth drapery, and in a moment the whole of the decorations were in a blaze. Great fears were entertained for the building, and more immediately for the military trophies suspended in it; but eventually only a few of the latter were destroyed.*

No. XIII.

LORD MOUNTJOY AND LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD.

An imaginary conversation by Walter Savage Landor, between Lord Mountjoy and Lord Edward Fitzgerald, addressed to the Rev. Julius Hare, Trinity College, Cambridge, by the author. Post-mark of letter inclosing a copy of it to Lady Blessington, Firenza, February 12th, 1829.

There are two notes of Mr. Landor appended to this conversation, in which the character of the son and heir of Lord Mountjoy (the late Earl of Blessington) are spoken of in very complimentary terms. In the second note the recent death of the earl is referred to, and the fact mentioned that the "Imaginary Conversation" of Lord Mountjoy with Lord E. Fitzgerald had been only completed when the news had arrived of the sudden death of Lord Blessington.

[Lord Mountjoy, the stanch and early friend of the Irish Roman Catholics, was slain by the people in rebellion in 1798. Lord E. Fitzgerald perished at the hands of authority in the same rebellion, he the head and front of its offending.]

LORD EDWARD. "My dear Mountjoy, I wish I could entertain the flattering hope that you have granted me admittance to you as much from your old friendship as from your invariable politeness."

MOUNTJOY. "Such a wish is itself a proof to me that I was in the wrong, if I did not."

LORD EDWARD. "Neither my knowledge of your easy temper, nor of your warm and generous heart, gave me all that assurance which I now receive from the pressure of your hand; a diversity in politics, I need not tell you, has made several of my earliest friends and nearest relations turn their backs upon me."

MOUNTJOY. "I hope I shall never turn mine on a good soldier, friend or enemy."

LORD EDWARD. "I will be sworn for you; if the last spark of honor and chivalry is to be extinguished on the earth, it will be in the breast of Mountjoy."

MOUNTJOY. "Lord Edward, let us leave off compliments, which, while they were in use, were used principally to display some grace in the person, or to conceal obliquity in the mind.”

LORD EDWARD. "Faith! if that is the good of them, you have the best right of any man to vote them out of fashion: now to the business of my visit. The people, you have long been aware, my lord, are highly exasperated against * Gentleman's Magazine, November, 1851, p. 538.

the government. I will not ask you whether you think they are so with reason or without; certainly there is danger of an open insurrection."

MOUNTJOY." Lord Edward, when a dog is mad, I do not ask what drove him mad; I defend my own dogs and myself from his fury as well as I can." LORD EDWARD. "Sometimes it is wiser to get out of his way."

MOUNTJOY. "I neither can nor would get out of the way, gladly as I should see every root of grievance torn up from a country but too fertile in them.”

LORD EDWARD. "We were together in the association of Dublin volunteers, which, supported by others throughout the kingdom, was then strong enough to have set at defiance the battered and broken arms of our oppressor, and could have accomplished all that was wanting for the permanent good of Ireland. The English government no longer had money or credit; the English people, exhausted by the expenditure of the war, alienated by the misconduct of it, began at last to perceive and to acknowledge the justice of the American cause. Ours was the same under much longer and much worse irritations; we had a larger and a better army to assert it; more within our reach to confiscate justly for the support of it; and we should have had the same allies. When we could have done every thing for our country, what did we? We sat down again, contented with paltry concessions and empty promises. England thought herself generous for granting them; Ireland for her easy acceptance of the grant. In England, every generosity is called a folly; in Ireland, every folly is called a generosity. We are now told that too much has been done for us, and truly I believe it, since every thing is too much for us which we do not for ourselves."

MOUNTJOY. "Lord Edward, our country endures no injury to which I am not as sensitive as you are; we differ only in the expediency of resistance; we have lost the only opportunity we ever had of being the confederates rather than the subjects of England, or, what is yet better than confederacy, a part. Britons, Saxons, Danes, Normans, have united; what hinders the Irish?”

LORD EDWARD. " English policy."

MOUNTJOY. "I see no reason why salt water rather than fresh should separate those whom affections and interests draw together."

LORD EDWARD. "Nor do I; but the wholesale butchers, who have turned Ireland into their slaughter-house, have so ensanguined the knot that it will hold no longer."

MOUNTJOY. "Nothing, in the whole of our misfortunes, is so deplorable as that it should continue to be the policy of our rulers to bind us rather by restrictions than by generosity—a bad policy with any nation, but worse with the Irish than with any other, for among the Irish the very vilest and the most inconsiderate are brought over and attached to you by one kind action, and alienated by one effort of control. Who would imagine that the English aristocracy and the Irish democracy should be equally strenuous in producing the same result? Yet so it is; if you can not lead the blind man, do not mock him, my dear Lord Edward. The trick may bring about the calamity.

476

It now appears to be the intention of certain men that we should throw ourselves into the arms of France, and thus render our country the arena for all the battles of the English with all their enemies."

LORD EDWARD. "How much better would it have been, as you remarked, to identify the two countries, and to render every man in each the neighbor of his neighbor. It seems an absurdity, a contradiction, an impossibility, that it should not be so; yet, where all men, with equal wishes and knowledge, may not aspire to equal rank and estimation-where a thought on God is a crime in the eyes of him who has another thought on the same God—where a son, if he follow his father, is stripped of his civic rights for it, and interdicted his natural, what hope, then, can we have of justice, or what desire of reconciliation?"

MOUNTJOY. "I will not discourse with you on open war."

LORD EDWARD. "But show me, if you can, in all the records of history, a war of nation against nation more manifestly just."*

MOUNTJOY. "The cause of justice is but little forwarded by compromising the cause of humanity; we are hardly the people that can teach the English to be wiser, or that can compel them to be more equitable. I wish we were: we would then begin the first lesson to-morrow. attempt at resistance we should only make the brutal more brutal, and the As matters stand, by any suffering more suffering; and the end of it would be, that every peaceable man would leave the kingdom by choice, and every brave man by proscription. I think it criminal to contend without a chance of success, unless it be where, by the sacrifice of our lives, as well as theirs under us, we can give time for others to come on, who may continue or renew the contest with better hopes. In that case our bodies may well fill up the straits, and the idlest of strangers will never write fool above our epitaphs. I see clearly the expectations of the United Irishmen, and no less clearly the disappointment and delusion of them. The French and Irish can never cordially agree."

LORD EDWARD. "Why do you think so?"

MOUNTJOY. "Because the one will no longer be ruled by priests; the other will be ruled by none else."

LORD EDWARD. "It must, indeed, be a tremendous curse that can render them endurable. We may want them for a time."

MOUNTJOY. "Their time will be longer than ours; hopes, fears, consciences, are tossed about, and distributed by their hands.”

LORD EDWARD. "Too true; throw in likewise a moiety of the wives, present and future; they find spouses both for God and man, with good accommodation; and not only do they bring about marriages, but they can make heavy ones light and light ones heavy, and can put other horns above the devil's in any doorway they have once entered."

MOUNTJOY. "If England had the equity and wisdom to place Ireland by her

* That such is not the case at present is quite certain, on the authority of the Duke of Wellington and of nearly all the principal men in the cabinet.-W. S. L.

side in the same level, and no lower; if she would grant to the Irish all the rights of citizens, as she hath done to the Canadians-"

LORD EDWARD. "Which renders it the more galling, the more iniquitous, the more intolerable."

MOUNTJOY. "Then, indeed, the priesthood could make no further appeals to the passions of the ignorant, and the contest for mastery would shortly lie between the people and it. Popery would lose her hold on the latter's ignorance; for among the Irish, if the acutest sense is that of injustice, the quickest is that of ridicule-the expression of which two feelings can never exist together. Ireland will grow more Catholic every day she continues to be oppressed; less Catholic every day after she is relieved from oppression. Faction will cease within the first century of this real Reformation, which it seems wonderful that the Protestant clergy should be reluctant to bring

about."

LORD EDWARD. "Not at all; the Protestant clergy leap from the goat-fold to the sheep-fold; from the sheep-fold to the ox-stall, and being there, grow too lazy to budge. Who among them would not abandon parishioners for a vicarage for a deanery, a bishopric for an archbishopric, and the house of God for the House of Lords? The government-be the party what it may, Whig or Tory-never wished our pacification; a state of discontent, of discord, and of turbulence, kept up artificially and sedulously by them, is necessary as a plea to keep up likewise a large establishment here, both military and civil, and the people of England are induced to pay taxes for it, on which many hundred dependents of every administration rear their families. Were Ireland flourishing, as she must be under any other system, the rival oligarchies would lose a large portion of their patronage; England wavers perpetually in every branch of her policy, excepting this. The Horatii and Curatii, who contend for supremacy, instead of three, are about nine on a side, and in the families of these we are to look for the secret. Why, by their consent we are never to meliorate our condition: the people of England would gain some millions yearly by our freedom, by our mere equality with the French-Canadians. The means of keeping them in subjection to these ruling families would be lost by leaving us unbound."

MOUNTJOY. 66 The English would benefit in wealth by it quite as much as we should, and greatly more in the reduction of taxes; all that they would lose would be the sentiment of contempt for the generality of us, and of hatred for the remainder."

LORD EDWARD. "If they persist, my life for it, they shall lose one of these sentiments, and very soon."

MOUNTJOY. "I see nothing but a divided people and a corrupt Parliament." Lord Edward. “You shall see neither much longer. Those who separate themselves from the people are no part of it, and what is corrupt will drop off, or must be cut off: who could regret it? Was there ever an association, even an assemblage in any lane of the worst city, or in any forest of the wildest