der
his hand historic subjects, immortal themes, splendid features, and
recollections of intellectual triumph. If the Pyramids were built to
contain the dust of nameless kings and sacrificed cattle, his eloquence
erected over materials equally transitory, memorials equally imperishable.

His style has been criticised, and has been called affected and
epigrammatic. But, what is style to the true orator? His triumph is
effect--what is to him its compound? What is it to the man who has the
thunderbolt in his hands, of what various, nay, what earthly--nay, what
vaporous, material it may be formed? Its blaze, its rapidity, and its
penetration, are its essential value; and smiting, piercing, and
consuming, it is the instrument of irresistible power.

But Grattan was an orator by profession, and the only one of his day. The
great English speakers adopted oratory simply as the means of their public
superiority. Pitt's was the oratory of a ruler of empire; with Fox,
oratory was the strong, massive, and yet flexible instrument of a leader
of party. But with Grattan it was a faculty, making a portion of the man,
scarcely connected with external things, and neither curbed nor guided by
the necessities of his political existence. If Grattan had been born among
the backwoodsmen, he would have been an orator, and have been persuasive
among the men of the hatchet and the rifle. Wherever the tongue of man
could have given superiority, or the flow and vigour of conception could
have given pleasure, he would have attained eminence and dispensed
delight. If he had not found an audience, he would have addressed the
torrents and the trees; he would have sent forth his voice to the
inaccessible mountains, and have appealed to the inscrutable stars. It is
admitted, that in the suffering condition of Ireland, he had a prodigious
opportunity; but, among thousands of bold, ardent, and intellectual men,
what is his praise who alone rushes to their front, and seizes the
opportunity? The English rule over the sister country has been charged
sometimes as tyranny, which was a libel; and sometimes as injustice, which
was an error; but it had an unhappy quality which embraced the evils of
both--it was invidious. The only map of Ireland which lay before the
English cabinet of the eighteenth century, was the map of the sixteenth--a
chart spotted with the gore of many battles, not the less bloody that they
were obscure; and disfigured with huge, discoloure