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ral on that occasion was to attack the enemy's rear with the whoe fleet. But the French perceiving this design, wore their ships and formed on the opposite tack; a movement which rendered it impossible to obey the first order, and the next that Rodney made was for every ship to attack her opposite. Mr. Clerk's question in return to these manœuvres was, why did Sir George change his resolution of attacking the rear, and order an attack on the whole line? Sir George answers to this, that he did not change his intention, but that his fleet disobeyed his signal, and forced him to abandon his plan.

"An anecdote which sets a seal on the great and decisive testimony of the noble Admiral, is worthy of being remembered; and I am glad to be able to record it on the authority of a noble earl. The present Lord Haddington met Lord Rodney at Spa, in the decline of life, when both his bodily and his mental powers were sinking under the weight of years. The great commander who had been the bulwark of his country and the terror of her enemies, lay stretched on his couch, while the memory of his own exploits seemed the only thing that interested his feelings, or afforded a subject for conversation. In this situation he would often break out in praise of the Naval Tactics; exclaiming with great earnestness, John Clerk of Eldin for ever! Generosity and candour seemed to have been such constituent elements in the mind of this gallant Admiral, that they were among the parts which longest resisted the influence of decay."

Mr. Playfair concludes his sketch with an expression of regret that no token of public gratitude has yet been conferred on the memory of Mr. Clerk. He is disposed to ascribe this omission to the fear of giving offence to the navy, and to consider it rather as resulting from an excess of caution than from direct or intentional neglect. It might seem to derogate from the glory of our naval officers to recognise a landsman as the author of one of the most valuable discoveries that had been made in their own art-as the person who had not only pointed out the new principle, but had completely unfolded its advantages and predicted its effects. But, continues he, to whatever cause the neglect of which I now complain is to be attributed, it is certain that the government and the navy have both lost a great opportunity of doing honour to themselves. A national monument that would have marked the era of this great improvement, and testified the gratitude of the nation to the author, would have been very creditable to the minister under whose patronage it was erected; and an acknowledgment from the navy that this discovery was the work of a landsman would have been highly becoming in a profession, of which intrepidity and valour are not more characteristic than frankness and generosity.

FROM THE MONTHLY REVIEW.

The Speeches of the Right Honourable Henry Grattan, in the Irish, and in the Imperial Parliament. Edited by his Son. 4 vols. 8vo. 21. 8s. Boards. Longman & Co. 1822.

Who that cherishes or venerates the "sanctus amor patriæ," who that feels or does homage to great powers of eloquence exerted in the worthiest of causes, or who that has ever commiserated the sufferings of our sister-island, and has appreciated the efforts of her advocates and the glories of her ornaments, can fail to be interested in the name of GRATTAN, and thankful for the memorials of his career? They must

all applaud the diligence and the pious affection of his son, who has here collected and presented to them the speeches of his illustrious parent, accompanied by a short biographical memoir. Long, indeed, has this gentleman occupied a considerable space in the public attention; and his vast talents and unintermitted labours entitle him to a high rank among those whose lives have been honourable and beneficial to mankind. The recorded services of such men are the most unperishable monuments that can be raised to their honour by the gratitude of their survivors.

Henry Grattan was born in 1746 at Dublin, for which city his father was a representative. He was educated at that University, but in 1767 entered as a student of the Middle Temple; and, while prosecuting his studies there, he frequently attended the debates in the British parliament. He is said to have been peculiarly struck with the masculine vigour of Lord Chatham's eloquence; and those who amuse themselves with fanciful analogies have imagined a sort of affinity between the style and character of these great speakers. He certainly was, however, peculiarly studious of that shining orator; he frequently took down in writing entire speeches as they were pronounced; and there is now extant, in the hand writing of Mr. Grattan, a speech of this celebrated statesman which is not to be found in any printed collection. Among the contemporaries with whom Mr. G. set out in life, were Mr. Macaulay Boyd, (one of the supposed authors of Junius,) and Mr., afterward Judge Day; for the latter of whom he entertained an affection which grew with his years, and was extinguished only with his death.

In 1772, Mr. Grattan was called to the Irish bar; and he was then living in familiar intercourse with the many distinguished individuals who formed the gay, the polished, and the intellectual circle of his native metropolis. Among these were Mr. Parker Bushe, Mr. Flood, Sir Hercules Langrishe, and Dr. Marlay, afterward Bishop of Waterford; and, in concert with Mr. Flood, he wrote several jeux d'esprit in ridicule of Lord Townsend's bon vivant administration, which were inserted in a collection called Baratariana. The friendship, however, which was nearest to his heart, the purest satisfaction of his life, and afterward the subject of its most tender and pleasing recollections, was that of the accomplished Lord Charlemont. It was at the house of this nobleman that the patriotic band who delivered Ireland were wont to assemble; and it was through his influence that, in 1775, Mr. Grattan was returned to parliament for the town of Charlemont. In 1790, he was elected for the city of Dublin: in 1800, he was chosen for Wicklow, to oppose the Union: in 1805, he came into the Imperial parliament for Malton; and in 1806 he was re-elected for his native city, and sat for that place in the several parliaments summoned in 1807, 1813, 1818, and 1820. On the accession of his present majesty, he came over to take his seat, contrary to the advice of his physicians and the remonstrances of his friends, his health being then in an alarming state. The project which filled his soul and animated its expiring efforts was the Catholic question: but he had tasked his strength beyond his powers of physical endurance. As he could not bear a journey by land, he went by water from Liverpool to London in a canal-barge, emptied of its lumber, and hung round with garden-mats. In this manner, for six days, he sat up in a chair without moving, sustained

by his anxiety to bear with his last breath his testimony to the holy cause of religious tolerance, and to perform his last duty to his country. After much suffering, however, he expired a few days subsequently to his arrival in London, on the 4th of June, 1820; thus finishing, by a species of political martyrdom, a patriotic and honourable course of public service.

His private life well corresponded with the purity of his public conduct; and an interesting simplicity was manifested in his character, not unlike that which was the charm and ornament of the domestic retirement of Mr. Fox. He loved to "forget the statesman in the friend." On the subjects that accidentally arise in social converse, philosophy, poetry, and politics, he was equally pleasing and instructive; every topic being illumined with the bright though softened rays of that powerful intellect, which was alike capable of elucidating the most perplexed and adorning the simplest matters on which it touched. When playful, he delighted the young; and when grave, even age itself was improved by his experience. His private conversations were replete with the purest morality, for he was never the momentary apologist of vice or profligacy, An instinctive innate horror of every thing low or corrupt, a religious devotion to public and private principle, from a rooted conviction that both were inseparably entwined together in their ethical relations, and a contempt for money, (the surest indication of a lively sensibility to the wants and sufferings of others,) were the chief outlines of his domestic character and habits. His life," says his son, "was one continued, gentle, moral lesson. It was impossible in his society not to become enamoured of virtue." Thus lived and thus died a man whom every age does not witness. Never was an individual exposed to the stormy elements of political strife, who experienced more of the proverbial levity of the people;of that people whose political and moral depression he deplored, and devoted his whole life to ameliorate. He was the object of their fondest idolatry on one day-in the next, rejected and despised. In 1798, he was denounced as the enemy to his country;-afterward, he was deified as the strenuous assertor of the constitution;-again he was traduced as the betrayer of the civil liberties of Ireland;-in 1812, he was elected by the unanimous voice of the people;-and in 1818 he was almost stoned to death in the midst of his native city.

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For the honour of England, never insensible to native or to foreign worth, his death was universally mourned, and the sighs of the great and the good were mingled over his grave. Every individual, from the highest to the lowest, seemed to feel as if he had been deprived of a friend and a father; the interest of the sad solemnities was deepened by the unostentatious attendance at his funeral of all who were elevated in rank or ennobled by talent; and the warmest of his political opponents joined in the procession as if solicitous to bury in his tomb the passing animosities and contentions of the hour. The spot of earth dedicated to his mortal remains adjoined that which encloses the ashes of Pitt and of Fox. Atqui hæc sunt indicia solida et expressa; hæc signa probitatis, non ficata forensi specie, sed domesticis inusta notis veritatis." CIC.C Orat. pro Plancio.

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Concerning the character of Mr. Grattan's eloquence, a greater variety of opinion may be fairly indulged, than the uniform and consenting feelings of mankind will suffer us to entertain of the manly

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and undeviating rectitude of his public career. Though not liable to all the exceptions, which sound criticism and correct taste may justly make against that which is called the Irish school, his mode of speaking was far from being untinctured by its faults. His best and most popular harangues may be said to be a string of antitheses; and he appeared more solicitous to produce effect by strong and pointed sentences, than by continuous and systematic reasoning. We certainly perceive, and to a great degree we feel, in this extraordinary orator, a style glowing, animated, and enthusiastic:—but at the same time we find it incongruous, and not formed according to the best taste; nearly all the members of the composition being equally laboured and expanded, without any due selection or subordination of parts. He is generally too epigrammatic, and his manner wants variety. There is an eloquence far beyond this sort;—the eloquence of reason, and of Fox :-which, conscious (as it were) of its native might, threw off when it started on its gigantic race all the trappings and ornament of a vulgar rhetoric, as incumbrances to its career. This was not the oratory of Grattan. He did not trust himself

, like the Athenian, to the athletic and invincible strength of unadorned argument; but, infected with the prevailing taste of his countrymen, he could not resist the temptations which a figurative and metaphorical diction holds out to ardent and impassioned minds. We must add, also, the unconquerable love of point and antitheses, to which we have already made a passing allusion. It was this fault, which is hardly redeemed by a world of beauties, that imparted what may be called a mannerism to his mode of speaking that, on many occasions, counteracted the strength and impetuosity of his reasoning, and left the ear tired and sated with a ceaseless jingle of epigram and sentences. In early life, however, he was uninfected with this species of bad rhetoric ; which grew on him towards the close of his career.

It is much to be lamented that scarcely a memorial exists of Mr. Grattan's first speeches, which are pre-eminently the best: but the true criterion of their excellence is manifest in the benefit which they were instrumental in effecting for Ireland. With respect to that country, it may be said of him as it was said of Augustus with respect to Rome, Latentiam invenit, marmoream reliquit." Ireland, before the time of Mr. Grattan, had scarcely a merchant, a manufacturer, or a name of note in literature:—the desert was planted by his hands. It is not easy, also, to imagine a more critical conjuncture than that in which he first appeared on the stormy theatre of Irish politics; which then exhibited, on one side, violence and power,--on the other, servitude and sedition ;-a series of disgraceful alternations between exorbitant authority, sullen submission, secret repinings, and open rebellion.

Undoubtedly, no small part of these evils arose from the popery. laws;—the professed object of which was to reduce the Catholics to the condition of a miserable and despised race, without property and without education, and bound to the rest of the community by no ties of sympathy, no bond of common interest, no motives of affection. They divided the nation into two distinct bodies, one of which was to possess all the franchises, all the property, and all the education. Violence of conquest and tyranny of regulation, unintermitted for nearly a hundred years, had gradually reduced the people to a degraded mob, without estimation themselves, and holding in no estimation the

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rank and influence of others. To palliate these disorders, Mr. Grattan, and a few who accorded with his views of policy, exerted themselves to raise an interest of property and education among them, and to hold out to them the animating expectation of participating in the benefits of a constitution, "which," as Mr. Burke somewhere observes, "is not made for great, general, and proscriptive exclusions."

Having entered on his career with the most ardent resolutions to restore the independence of Ireland, Mr. G. introduced his celebrated Declaration of Irish Rights, the first step towards the recovery of that legislative power of which the country had been deprived for centuries. His great speech on this occasion was delivered on the 9th of April, 1790, and it is said to have been electrical in its effect. That the subject of it may be better apprehended, we must be permitted to make a few preliminary observations.

The right of Ireland to make laws was first invaded by the 10th Henry VII. in a parliament held before the deputy, Sir Edward Poynings: which enacted that no parliament should set in Ireland without a certificate, under the great seal, of the acts that were to be passed; that they should be affirmed in England by the King in council; and that his license to summon a parliament must be obtained under the great seal of England. Thus the English Privy Council acquired the right of altering or suppressing acts of the Irish legislature, which consequently was deprived of the power to originate, alter, or amend. Ireland lost, moreover, her judicial rights. Against this usurpation, Molyneux protested in his celebrated "Case of Ireland," which was burned by the hands of the common hangman. The English House of Lords, however, persisted in reversing on appeal the decrees of the House of Lords in Ireland; and the disputes on this memorable subject at last gave rise to the declaratory act, 6 Geo. I., stating that Ireland was a subordinate and dependant kingdom; that the King, Lords, and Commons of England had power to make laws to bind Ireland; that the House of Lords of Ireland had no jurisdiction; and that all proceedings before that court were void. Although the Irish nation sullenly and reluctantly yielded, the spirit of the times began to awaken, and the arming of the volunteers gave weight and efficacy to their remonstrances. They had extorted a free trade from Great Britain; and many circumstances conspired to rouse them to a sense of their condition, and to an ardent aspiration after their rights. These circumstances are well introduced by Mr. Grattan:

"If this nation," said he, "after the death-wound given to her freedom, had fallen on her knees in anguish, and besought the Almighty to frame an occasion in which a weak and injured people might recover their rights, prayer could not have asked, nor God have furnished, a moment more opportune for the restoration of liberty, than this, in which I have the honour to address you.

"England now smarts under the lesson of the American war; the doctrine of Imperial legislature she feels to be pernicious; the revenues and monopolies annexed to it she has found to be untenable; she lost the power to enforce it; her enemies are a host, pouring upon her from all quarters of the earth; her armies are dispersed; the sea is not hers; she has no minister, no ally, no admiral, none in whom she long confides, and no general whom she has not disgraced; the balance of her fate is in the hands of Ireland; you are not only her last connexion, you are the only nation in Europe that is not her enemy. Besides, there does, of late, a certain damp and spurious supineness overcast her arms and councils, miraculous as that vigour which has lately inspired yours;-for with you every thing is the reverse; never was there a parliament in Ireland so possessed of the confidence of the people; you are the greatest political assembly now sitting in the world; you

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