among the wild impulses of man. I
repeatedly warned the Irish cabinet against an outbreak, which, if it
succeeded, must convulse the empire; and which, even if it failed, must
cost the heaviest sacrifices to the country. My advice was answered by
professions of perfect security, and magnanimous declarations of the
wisdom of extinguishing peril by exhibiting the absence of fear! My part
was now done, and I was thenceforth to be only a spectator. But the
course of things was not to be controlled by the confidence of cabinets.
The sun went down, notwithstanding the government conviction that it
would shine through the whole twenty-four hours; the political night
came, as regularly as the night of nature, and with it came the march of
tens of thousands of political lunatics, as brave as lions, though as
incapable of discipline. My prediction was formidably fulfilled: the
firebrand and the pike ravaged the land; blood flowed in torrents; and
when the country returned to its senses, and the light of common sense
once more dawned, ministers and people alike had only the melancholy
office of burying the common offences in that great resting-place where
the faults of the past generation are marked by tombs, and where the
wisdom of the future is to be learned only from inscriptions recording
the frailty of all that lived before.

The conspiracy which it had fallen to my lot to extinguish had been
brief and local. The half-Scottish population among whom it broke out,
were among the most sharp-witted and well-informed subjects of the
empire; and they had no sooner made the discovery, that government was
awake, than they felt the folly of attempting to encounter the gigantic
strength of the monarchy, and postponed their republican dreams to a
"fitter season." The time now approached when the leader of the Northern
insurrection was to be brought to trial; and hostile as I was to the
effects of his enthusiasm, I took no trivial interest in the individual.
Still, to set him at liberty was palpably impossible; and my only
resource was, to give him such aid in this extremity of his career as
could be given by lightening the severities of his prison, and providing
him with the means of securing able counsel. I had now an opportunity of
seeing, for the first time, the genius of this singular people displayed
under a new and brilliant form--the eloquence of the bar.

In England the Bar holds a high rank; from its essential value to the
mai