ace. A greater man had in the meanwhile risen to the
front, and in Henry Grattan Irish aspiration had found its clearest and
strongest voice.

This was a source of profound mortification to Flood, and led eventually
to a bitter quarrel between these two men--patriots in the best sense
both of them. Flood tried to outbid Grattan by pushing the concessions
won from England in the moment of her difficulty yet further, and by
making use of the volunteers as a lever to enforce his demands. This
Grattan honourably, whether wisely or not, resisted, and the Parliament
supported his resistance. After an unsuccessful attempt to carry a
Reform Bill, Flood retired, to a great degree, from Irish public life,
and not long afterwards succeeded in getting a seat in the English
Parliament. His oratory there proved a failure. He was "an oak of the
forest too great and old," as Grattan said, "to be transplanted at
fifty." This failure was a fresh and a yet more mortifying
disappointment, and his end was a gloomy and somewhat obscure one, but
he will always be remembered with gratitude as one of the first who in
the Irish Parliament lifted his voice against those restrictions under
which the prosperity of the country lay shackled and all but dead.

XLIX.

HENRY GRATTAN.

"Great men," wrote Sydney Smith, sixty years ago in an article in _The
Edinburgh Review_, "hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in
their time. What Irishman does not feel proud that he lived in the days
of Grattan? Who has not turned to him for comfort from the false friends
and open enemies of Ireland? Who did not remember him in the days of its
burnings, wastings, and murders?"

Grattan is, indeed, pre-eminently the Irish politician to whom other
Irish politicians--however diverse their views or convictions--turn
unanimously with the common sense of admiration and homage. Two
characteristics--usually supposed in Ireland to be inherently
antagonistic--met harmoniously in him. He was consistently loyal and he
was consistently patriotic. From the beginning to the end of his career
his patriotism never hindered him either from risking his popularity
whenever he considered duty or the necessities of the case required him
to do so; a resolution which more than once brought him into sharp
collision with his countrymen, on one occasion even at some little risk
to himself.

[Illustration: RIGHT HON. HENRY GRATTAN, M.P. _(From an engraving by
Godby after Pop