He adds, in the same spirit, "perhaps the time may come, when fortune 'patre valentior,' may smile on me, and enable my old age to resign my breath where I first received it.—Farewell."
At this time he wrote verses, but whatever might be his poetic diligence, he was never destined to exhibit poetic power. It is a remarkable circumstance, that congenial as oratory and poetry seem to be, no one name on record has been eminent in both, from the days of Cicero to our own; both requiring the same ardour of imagination, copiousness of language, and knowledge of man and nature. A great gulf has lain between, which, like the valleys of the Andes, whose edges seem to touch, yet whose depths are beyond the light of the sun, seems to have been within reach of the easiest transit, yet is all but impassable. But Grattan was evidently aware that if fame was to be achieved by him, it was not through the favour of the nine. He writes to his friend, who had asked him for some poetry, "the compositions you demand of me, are incorrect and illegible. My muse is at best but a slattern, and stumbles frequently in her passage. She visits me but seldom, and her productions are rather the efforts of her mind, than the nature of it. When her works are polished and rendered legible, they shall be sent to you."
The political history of Ireland, if written without either perversion or partiality, would be a document next in value to a true history of the Revolution of France. If the latter showed the violences of the mob, the former demonstrated the basenesses of party. If the Revolution found its emblem in the tiger, that, once tasting of human blood, refused all other food, Irish party found its natural similitude in the monkey, at once burlesque and mischievous, gluttonous of all that it could get, and destroying all that it could not devour—ridiculous to look at, yet hazardous to play with; at once teasing and treacherous, dangerous and disgusting.
From the commencement of that century, Ireland, relieved from the intrigues of Popery, had been the most pacific portion of the empire. Peace was beginning to produce wealth; its natural consequence. The southern provinces were beginning to exchange their wild pastures for corn fields; and the northern, Protestant and industrious, already enjoyed an active and extensive system of commerce and manufacture. But this is a condition of things, on which, whatever spirit of evil especially urges the disturbance of nations, always seems to look with peculiar hostility. There was also an unhappy opening left for his incursion. The political conflicts of Ireland had obstructed the Reformation. In those conflicts the people had become barbarous, and the Government insecure. The factions of the country, Popish in their prejudices, their ignorance, and their hostility to England, had successively followed the desperate policy of allying themselves with the Popish continent. Thus Ireland, without the power to shake off either the yoke of Popery, or the influence of foreigners, was the slave of both, and received from both nothing but the wages of the slave—stripes and chains. From the period when the triumphs of Elizabeth's reign made England an empire, and thus awoke the jealousy of the great continental kingdoms, Ireland was adopted by France and Spain as the means which offered the most direct access to the very heart of her strength; important to alienate as an essential portion of British power; and to disable, if it could not be turned into the instrument of actual invasion. In all the attacks of France and Spain on England, the first object of their policy was to raise insurrection in Ireland; in some instances actual invasion was tried, and in all a spirit of disaffection was sedulously sustained. The influence of the Popish priesthood, superstitiously powerful over their followers, was sedulously employed to do the work of those sovereigns of whom the Pope was the vassal, while he himself was the vassal of the Pope. Thus was continued a perpetual treason by a perpetual imposture; thus the minister of the enemy ruled from the altar of the priest; and thus the policy of sovereigns, and the oath of the hierarchy, combined to make this unhappy land the scene of tumults, which, excited by foreign hostility, and unsubdued by foreign pacification, made it the channel that it has been for five centuries. England has been charged with this melancholy result—this conspiracy of man to defraud a great
