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CURRAN. 359 the fallen estate of that multitude who had lived on the pay of political intrigue, the reckless poverty of that over- whelming population to which civil rights could not give bread, all formed a mass of discordant but desperate strength, which only required a sign.-The cross was at length lifted before them, and it was the lifting of a banner to which the whole darkened höst looked up, as to an omen of assured victory. The rebellion was met with manly promptitude, and the country was set at peace. Curran was the leading counsel in the trials of the conspi- rators, and he defended those guilty and misguided men with a vigour and courage of talent, less like the emulation of an advocate, than the zeal of a friend. He had known many of them in the intercourse of private life; some of them had been his early professional associates. A good man and a good subject might have felt for them all. The English leveller is a traitor; the Irish rebel might have been a patriot. Among us, the revolutionist sets fire to a city, a great work of the wise industry, and old established conveniency of man, a place of the temple and the palace, the treasuresi of living grandeur, and the monoments of departed 'virtue. He burns, that he may plunder among the ruins. The Irish rebel threw his firebrand into a wilderness, and if thie conflagration rose too high, and consuned some of its statelier and more solid ornaments, it was sure to turn into ashes the invetérate and tangled undergrowth that had defied his rade industry. This was the effervescence of heated and untaught minds. The world was to be older before it learned the curse and unhappy end of the reform that begins by blood. The French revolution had not then given its moral. It was still to the eyes of the multitude like the primal vision in the Apocalypse, a glorious shape coming forth in unstained robes, conquering and to conquer for the world's happiness; it had not yet, like that mighty emblem, darkened down through all its shapes of terror, till it moved against the world, Death on the pale horse, followed by the unchained