elected member for Dublin. His
speeches in the House of Commons seem never to have produced an effect
at all comparable with that of his writings, but he gave a constant and
important support to the patriotic party, which had now formed itself
into a small but influential opposition under the leadership of
Henry Flood.

[15] English Statutes, 6 Geo. c. 5.

Flood and Grattan are by far the two greatest of those orators and
statesmen whose eloquence lit up the debates of the Irish House of
Commons during its brief period of brilliancy, and as such will require,
even in so hasty a sketch as this, to be dwelt upon at some length.
Since a good deal of the same ground will have to be gone over in
succeeding chapters, it seems best to explain here those points which
affected them personally, and to show as far as possible in what
relationship they stood one to the other.

Henry Flood was born near Kilkenny in 1732, and was the son of the Chief
Justice of the King's Bench. At sixteen he went to Trinity College,
Dublin, and afterwards to Oxford. In 1759 he entered the Irish
Parliament as member for Kilkenny, and at once threw himself vehemently
upon the popular side, his first speech being an attack upon the Primate
Stone. As an orator his style appears to have been laboured, and his
speeches brim over in all directions with forced illustrations and
metaphors, but his powers of argument and debate were remarkably strong.
For about ten years he waged a continual struggle against the
Government, urging especially a limitation to the duration of Parliament
and losing no opportunity of asserting its claims to independence, or of
attacking the pension list, which under the system then prevailing grew
steadily from year to year. Upon reform he also early fixed his
attention, although, unlike Grattan, he was from the beginning to the
end of his life steadily hostile to all proposals for giving the
franchise to the Catholics.

[Illustration: RIGHT HON. HENRY FLOOD. (_After a drawing by
Comerford_.)]

During the viceroyalty of Lord Townshend, who became Lord-Lieutenant in
1767, an Octennial Bill was passed limiting the duration of Parliament
to eight years, but this momentary gleam of better things was not
sustained; on the contrary, corruption was, under his rule, carried even
further than it had been before. Under the plea of breaking the power of
the borough-owners, he set himself deliberately to make the whole
Parliament subs