en up by the
Government in 1795, but was almost immediately afterwards reconstructed
and re-organized upon an immense scale. Every member was bound to take
an oath of secrecy, and its avowed object had become the erection by
force of a republican form of Government in Ireland. The rebellion was
bound to come now, and only accident could decide how soon.

[Illustration: RIGHT HON. EDMUND BURKE. _(From a sketch from life.)_]

LIII.

'NINETY-EIGHT.

It was not long delayed. The Society of United Irishmen had now grown to
be little more than a mere nest of Jacobinism, filled with all the
turbulent and disaffected elements afloat in the whole country. Of this
society Wolfe Tone was the creator, guide, and moving spirit. Any one
who wishes to understand the movement rather as it originally took shape
than in the form which it assumed when accident had deprived it of all
its leaders, should carefully study his autobiography. As he reads its
transparent pages, brimful of all the foolish, generous enthusiasms of
the day, he will find it not a little hard, I think, to avoid some
amount of sympathy with the man, however much he may, and probably will,
reprobate the cause which he had so at heart.

Amongst the other leaders of the rising were Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a
brother of the Duke of Leinster, Arthur O'Connor, a nephew of Lord
Longueville, Thomas Addis Emmett, elder brother of the better known
Robert Emmett--whose attempted rebellion in 1803, was a sort of
postscript to this earlier one--and the two Sheare brothers. Compared to
Wolfe Tone, however, all these were mere amateurs in insurrection, and
pale and shadowy dabblers in rebellion. Lord Edward was an amiable
warm-hearted visionary, high-minded and gallant, but without much
ballast, and to a great degree under the guidance of others. The
mainspring of the whole movement, as has been seen, was Protestant and
Northern, and now that all hope of constitutional reform was gone, it
was resolved to appeal openly to force and to call in the aid of the
enemies of England to assist in the coming struggle.

Insane as the idea appears, looked back at from this distance, it
evidently was not viewed in the same light by those at hand. England and
France, it must be remembered, were at fierce war, and a descent upon
the Irish coast was then, as afterwards by Napoleon, regarded as a
natural and obvious part of the aggressive policy of the latter. In the
summer of 1796 Lord Ed