at the commencement of the tumults in 1640, a royalist, as was every honest man in the kingdom, and about that period mayor of Newcastle. Being summoned to surrender by the Earl of Leven, at the head of the Scottish army (1644), he replied, like the honourable man that he was, "that he would not betray his trust or forfeit his allegiance." The town was stormed, and his assailants were so infuriated by the spirit of his defence, that the general was obliged to place a guard of soldiers over his house. He had another result of the turn of popular freedom to undergo, for he was returned in the list of the principal persons sent to London to be tried, and was termed "that atheistical mayor and governor of the town, a most pestilent and desperate malignant, and enemy to all goodness." "Such," says the biographer, "was the fanaticism of the times." A fanaticism, however, which is copied every day of his life by his faction, and which would realize its menaces with even more desperate fidelity. Marlay, who had been so opulent as to be called the rich knight, "was robbed of all his fortune by the republicans, and sustained the still heavier loss of three sons in battle: his life was spared, and it seems to have been the only thing that was left to him. It is painful, even at this distance of time, to record, that this brave and sincere man was neglected by that contemptible and selfish profligate, Charles II. But the family evidently held a certain consideration among the loyalists; for his son was afterwards a captain in the Duke of Ormond's regiment, and his grandson, a barrister, rose rapidly through the ranks of his profession, till he arrived at the Chief Justiceship of the King's Bench in Ireland. The daughter of this distinguished public officer was the mother of Grattan. His sons, beginning life with the advantages of their father's rank, made a respectable figure. One was a member of Parliament, another rose to be a colonel in the army, and a third became bishop of Waterford.
When a boy, Grattan gave a proof of his early spirit, by refusing to remain at a school where he had been insulted by the master. The pedant, not content with disapproving of his translation of a passage in Ovid, ordered him to kneel in presence of the boys, and desired the footman to call him "an idle boy." The footman had decency enough to decline the office, and little Harry Grattan, insisting on being subjected to the chance of such indignities no longer, left the school.
In 1763 he entered Dublin College, where he became acquainted with Foster, afterwards Speaker of the House of Commons, and Fitz-Gibbon, afterwards Lord Chancellor. Politics raged in Ireland at this period, and perverted all the inconsiderate, all the ambitious, and all the poor, thus leaving the common sense and common principle of the country in a hopeless minority. Grattan, in the giddiness and ignorance of youth, a Whig, quarrelled with his father, whose better knowledge, and more mature experience, had made him a Tory, and the quarrel went so far that the family mansion was willed to another. This act seems to have weighed heavily on the son, and to have produced a good deal of the melancholy tone which characterises his early letters. In one of those letters to an intimate friend, he writes in this strain "If you want my company, I am sure I want yours. A fluctuation of sentiment, a listless indolence, and the gloomy reflections that arise from it, make the chaos of my mind. But of this no more. A man who is not happy finds his principal comfort in painting his own disquietude." Those were the feelings of a philosopher of one-and-twenty; but we soon find them still more strongly excited by the still more painful reality. His father died; and, as it appears, without sufficient reconciliation. On this occasion he thus writes to his friend Broome:—
