when he once treads on the field. The first impulse of a struggle worthy of himself, brings out all his native proportions—the muscles are shown, and the coxcomb is lost in the champion. Grattan's chief fault was a style disfigured by antithesis; but this fault almost wholly disappeared when he became once fully warmed with his subject. They were but the clouds which gathered over his eloquence in the hour of listlessness and tranquillity; but when the storm was up, they were drifted away before its breath. In his argument he is often difficult and obscure; but in his passion never. There all is plain; he speaks with a force equal to his feeling, and the fruit of his feeling. He is never more successful than when he thus abandons his mind and his cause to the ardour of his impressions; to this his chief triumphs were due in Parliament; he never showed greater genius, more of that unequivocal sense of mastery within, which constitutes the orator, than when, letting his ship drive under bare poles, he steered her before the wind, and when all guidance seemed helpless, still exerted that fine science which brought her into harbour. The extraordinary questions which he carried in the Irish Legislature, are an evidence of the not less extraordinary ardour with which his passion furnished him, and which still, even in the wrecks and remnants of Irish legislative history, remain specimens of the intense fire with which he less forged, than fused, the popular mind into the wildest shapes of his own will. However rugged, discordant, and intractable he found the materials of party and the people, be subdued them, he urged them into one mass, he vitrified them. We now regard those measures with astonishment, alike at their rashness and the frenzied unanimity with which they were adopted; for Grattan's policy was as precipitate as his eloquence was powerful. It is to the errors of this singular man that a large share of the Irish disabilities for all rational government, and all pure religion are owing, even to this hour, when they seem thickening more inveterately than ever. But let justice be done to the memory of genius. If he was a mistaken prophet, he was not a willing deceiver.
His imperfect science betrayed him into false calculations of those signs of earth and heaven which regulate the changes of empires. He was the political astrologer, fantastic in his mystery, but a believer in his own reading of the stars. The oracle was fallacious, but it was not fraudulent; it was wholly the reverse of that system of determined deception and imposture for pay, which characterises the oracles of Ireland in later times. The charlatans who now mount the tripod, are alike gross and evil, disgusting in their aspect, and dangerous in their announcements. We turn from them with disdain to the sincere dreams and lofty credulity of the enthusiast who once held the seat of the fancied inspiration, and whose language, erroneous though it be, still gives us images of unborrowed beauty, and the majestic rapture of a brilliant, though a wayward mind.
But we must wholly remonstrate against the views which these volumes give of every individual whose public opinions happen to fail of exact coincidence with those of the author. Outrageous in demanding his right to be heard, he insists on the silence of every other claim. Clamouring for the best construction of his own dubious motives, he denies that any man in possession of his senses can be other than a knave, unless he should happen to be a Whig; and plunged in faction to a depth which has palpably buried him from the light of common reason, and the benefit of common knowledge, he deals with history as if it were a Papist witness, put in the jury-box to prove against the fact. His character of George the Third, for example, is a continued extravagance: determined to be malignant, without the skill to be severe, he pours out upon the name of this best of men and monarchs, an expectoration of vulgar wrath, which naturally falls back upon his own visage. The simple character of the king is stamped with a succession of brands, each effacing the other. With a more than womanish spirit of defamation, he alternately rails at the deceased monarch as a monster, and a mime; as something too fearful to approach, and too trifling to be worth punishment; as a Machiavel on the throne, and a simpleton every where: as a sullen hypocrite and a senseless devotee; as the cause of all the national evils from the commencement of his reign, and as having no influence what-
