of England. And the struggles of an independent
people, endeavoring, by their own efforts, to reform their own
institutions, led to the rising of that brilliant galaxy of statesmen,
orators, wits, and lawyers, to which Irishmen of the present day, almost
without exception, refer with grief and despondency, not unmixed with
indignation, when wishing to make the world appreciate the evils their
country has suffered in consequence of its union with England. But,
unhappily, the great spirit of freedom was awakened in evil times.
Great, vigorous, and almost glorious was this wonderful manifestation of
its power; but eventually the horrible corruption and vice of the period
bore all before it, and extinguished every chance of benefit from the
acquisition of independence. Great men appeared, but they were
powerless. Of the remarkable period in which they lived, however, every
memorial is of interest. With the society of which they formed a part,
so different from our own--with the character and manners of the men
themselves, their history, their good sayings and wild deeds, every
student of history wishes to become acquainted, and seizes with avidity
upon every piece of evidence from which authentic information respecting
them may be gathered--and, as a portion of this evidence, the work of
Mr. Phillips deserves consideration.

Among the most remarkable of the many distinguished characters of this
stirring period was John Philpot Curran,--among Irish advocates, as was
Erskine among those of England, _facile princeps_. With him, when on
the bench as Master of the Rolls in Ireland, Mr. Phillips, himself then
a junior at the Irish bar, became acquainted. Acquaintance became
intimacy, and intimacy led to friendship, which lasted without
interruption to the day of Curran's death. Admiration and affection
induced Mr. Phillips to gather together memorials of his deceased
friend, round whose portrait he has grouped sketches of many of his
celebrated cotemporaries. He says in his preface--

"My object has been, touching as lightly as possible on the politics of
the time, to give merely personal sketches of the characters as they
appeared upon the scene to me. Many of them were my acquaintances--some
of them my intimates; and the aim throughout has been a verisimilitude
in the portraiture;--in short, to make the reader as familiar with the
originals as I was myself."

And a more curious collection of likenesses was never crowded into