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CURRAN 857 be more than equivalent to the reluctant patronage of the throne. To bis habits, legal distiuctions would have been only a bounty upon his silence. His limbs would have been fettered by the ermine. But he had the compensation of boundless popular honour, much respect from the higher ranks of party, much admiration and much fear from the lower partisans. In parliament he was the assailant most dreaded; in the law courts he was the advo- cate whose assistance was deemed the most essential: in both he was an object of all the more powerful passions of man, but rivalry. He stood alone, and shone alone. " The connections of his early life, and still more the original tarn of his feelings, threw him into the ranks of opposition; in England, a doubtful canse, and long sepa- rable from patriotism; in Ireland, at that day, the natural direction of every man of vigorous feeling and heedless genius. Ireland had been, from causes many and deep, an unhappy country. For centuries utterly torpid, or only giving signs of life from the fresh gush of blood from her old wounds, the influence of England's well-intentioned policy was more than lost upon her; it was too limited t work a thorough reformation, but too strong not to irritate; it was the application of the actual cautery to a limb, while the whole body was a gangrene. But a man who loved the influence of this noblest of countries, might hate the government of Ireland. It was a rude oligarchy. The whole influence of the state was in the hands of a few great families. Those were the true farmers-general of Ireland; and the English ininister, pressed by the diffi- culties of an empire then beginning to expand over half the world, was forced to take their contract on their own terms. The viceroy was their viceroy; only the first figure in that deplorable triumph which led all the hopes and virtues of the country in chains behind the chariot wheels of a haughty faction. It was against this usurpa- tion that the Irish minority rose up in naked but resolute patriotism. The struggle was not long; they hewed their way through the hereditary armour of their adversaries,