ever beyond the range of his family and his sycophants; a cipher in the national sum,—a toy to be played with by the shuttlecocks of ministers—a nonentity among mankind. To quote one sentence on this topic is, we are persuaded, as much as any reader of these pages will endure—"The empire was lost when the King was in possession of his senses, it was recovered only when he was deprived of them." This is the summary way of ac- counting for the Peninsular glories, and the conquest of the universal enemy.
Henry Grattan was born in Dublin, on the 3d of July 1746. His father was a barrister, for many years Recorder of Dublin, and member of Parliament for the city from 1761 until 1766, when he died. It was his ill luck to have for his colleague in Parliament Dr Lucas, an individual who, having failed in his profession of medicine, adopted the more thriving one of demagogue, acted as the disturber of the public peace for some years, was a prodigious discoverer of grievances, and after wasting his life, and impoverishing his family, died, bequeathing to the nation a demand for the payment of his debts, and the pensioning of his descendants. As the Doctor was wholly ignorant of law, and his colleague, the Recorder, was a sound lawyer, they quarrelled of course upon every possible subject. Lucas appealed to the mob, and of course had them on his side, the Recorder appealed to common law and common sense, which in those times had no one on their side. The lawyer was of course universally worsted, and, as the narrative says, suffered this paltry contest to embitter, if not to shorten his days. If this be true, the lawyer was as great a fool as the demagogue. An ancestor of Grattan had been a senior fellow of the Dublin College. His son, Grattan's grandfather, a country gentleman, resided near Quilca, Dr Sheridan's house, which has been made so familiar to us from the life of Swift. It was by this neighbourhood that Swift became acquainted with the five brothers, who seem to have been considerable favourites even with the tetchiness of the celebrated Dean Swift, who, in a letter to Lady Betty Germain, thus writes:—
"I went and told my Lord Duke (Dorset, then viceroy) that there was a certain family here called the Grattans, and that they could command ten thousand men; two of them are parsons, as you Whigs call them, another is lord mayor of this city, and was knighted by his Grace a month or two ago; but there is a certain cousin of theirs, who is a Grattan, though his name be John Jackson, as worthy a clergyman as any in this kingdom."
A letter of Swift, applying to the Duke on behalf of this clergyman, is so characteristic of his habitual oddity, as to be well worth transcribing, especially as we do not recollect to have seen it before.
"Dublin, Dec. 30th, 1735.
"My Lord,—Your Grace fairly owes me one hundred and ten pounds a-year in the church, which I thus prove: I desired you would bestow a preferment of one hundred and fifty pounds a-year to a certain clergyman. Your answer was, that I asked modestly, that you would not promise, but grant my request. However, for want of good intelligence, and of being (after a cant word used here) an expert kingfisher, that clergyman took up with forty pounds a-year, and I shall never trouble your Grace any more on his behalf. Now, by plain arithmetic, it follows that one hundred and ten pounds remain, and this arrear I have assigned to one Mr John Jackson, a cousin-german of the Grattans, who is vicar of Santry, and has a small estate, with two sons and as many daughters, all grown up. He has lain some years as a weight upon me, which I voluntarily took up on account of his virtue, piety, and good sense, and modesty, almost to a fault. Mr Jackson is condemned to live on his own small estate, part whereof is his parish about four miles from hence, where he has built a family house more expensive than he intended. He is a clergyman of long standing, and of a most unblemished character; but the misfortune is, he has not one enemy to whom I might appeal for the truth of what I say."
The mention of the Marlay family, from whom Grattan was descended in the female line, introduces an anecdote worth relating, for the benefit of those who are fond of civil war. "Radical changes" in countries and constitutions may be happy topics to round the periods of an itinerant orator, or indulge the theories of a philosopher of the Reviews; but to those who have any thing to lose, they are terrible things, and even to those who have nothing to lose, they are not much better in the end. Sir John was a man of large fortune
