ford, the chancellor, bade him speak louder, his papers fell from his hand, and a friend had to finish the motion. Although he had from the first some practice and made as much as eighty-two guineas in his first year and between one and two hundred in his second, he was for some time little more than a witty idler in the Four Courts, and lived in poverty in a lodging on Redmond's Hill, then the legal quarter of Dublin. He attended the Cork sessions, and after a time his friend Arthur Wolfe (afterwards Lord Kilwarden) obtained for him a brief in the Sligo election case of Ormsby v. Wynne from the well-known attorney Lyons, afterwards his great friend and constant client. He was also engaged in the Tullagh election petition, and his fiery temper brought him in another case into very sharp conflict with Mr. Justice Robinson. These circumstances and his wit were already making him well known. Fitzgibbon, afterwards his enemy, gave him his ‘red bag.’ Barry Yelverton (afterwards Lord Avonmore) stood his friend, and when in 1779 he founded a convivial and political society, called the Order of St. Patrick, or Monks of the Screw, which lasted until 1795 and met at the house in Kevin Street afterwards used as the seneschal's court, he made Curran the prior. The first case which made Curran truly popular was at the Cork summer assizes in 1780. Lord Doneraile was sued for a brutal assault upon a priest, Mr. Neale, and so high did religious feeling run that the plaintiff could find no counsel to undertake his case, until Curran, though a protestant, volunteered to represent him, and by dint of great zeal and extraordinary fierceness of language obtained a verdict for thirty guineas. Having stigmatised a relative and accomplice of Lord Doneraile, Captain St. Leger, as a ‘renegade officer,’ Curran was challenged by him. St. Leger missed, and Curran did not return his fire. This trial and duel made Curran popular, both for religious and political reasons, and his practice grew apace. He was a very fine cross-examiner, a perfect actor, and intimately acquainted with every winding of an Irish witness's mind. In 1782, after seven years at the bar, he became, by the influence of Yelverton, a king's counsel, and in 1783, during Lord Northington's administration, was returned to the Irish House of Commons by Mr. Longfield (afterwards Lord Longueville) as the colleague of Flood for one of his two seats at Kilbeggan, Westmeath. Curran had given no pledges, but was no doubt expected to adopt Longfield's party. Being, however, a personal friend of Grattan and one of his warmest admirers, he joined the opposition along with Sir Laurence Parsons and Mr. A. Browne. Finding that Longfield considered himself aggrieved, he laid out his only 500l. and 1,000l. more, which he borrowed, in purchasing another seat for Longfield. During the administration of the Duke of Rutland he continued in opposition, and in the next parliament was elected at his own expense for Rathcormac, county Cork. He spoke frequently in parliament, but with little success in comparison with that he won at the bar. His genius was forensic rather than political; he spoke often late at night or in the small hours of the morning, after an exhausting day in court, and his speeches are ill-reported, most of the reporters being employed by the government. His first speech was on 12 Nov. 1783, on a motion for a new writ for Enniscorthy, and he spoke again on the 18th on the manufacturing distress; but his first considerable appearance was on 29 Nov., on Flood's motion for parliamentary reform, when he cautioned the house not to make a public declaration against the convention of volunteers, which was at that time sitting for the purpose of intimidating the house into passing the motion. The house, however, rejected Flood's motion, and carried a counter-motion against interference by the volunteers. On 14 Feb. 1785 he supported a motion of Flood's for retrenchment, and on the same day pronounced a panegyric on the volunteers, which, in consequence of an attack which he made in it on Mr. Gardiner, brought him for the first time into open collision with Fitzgibbon. They were by this time no longer intimate; they differed in all their associations and tastes. On 24 Feb. a debate took place on the abuse of attachments in the king's bench, in connection with the attachment of O'Reilly, sheriff of Dublin, for complying with a requisition to summon a meeting to elect members for a conventional congress on parliamentary reform. Fitzgibbon and Curran girded openly at one another. Fitzgibbon spoke of him as a ‘puny babbler.’ Curran replied in savage terms, and a duel resulted in which neither was hit, though Fitzgibbon at any rate was observed to take very deliberate aim after Curran had fired and missed. The quarrel was renewed on 12 Aug., in the course of a very able speech of Curran's, begun at six o'clock in the morning, on Mr. Secretary Orde's commercial proposals.
When, in 1789, Lord Lifford resigned the chancellorship, and Fitzgibbon, as Lord Clare, succeeded him, Curran lost his considerable chancery practice owing to the chancellor's visible personal hostility to him in court, and was compelled to confine himself to the less
