ROBERT EMMET.

New Zealand Tablet, 2 March 1877, Page 15

ROBERT EMMET.

Robebt Emmet, the great Irish patriot, was an early advocate of Irish freedom. In the year 1798 he was expelled from Trinity College on account of his principles. The events of those times had m powerful effect on his feelings. He actively participated in the work going on with the object of effecting the independence of Ireland. In October, 1802, we find him among the refugees in Paris, when they were devising new means to overthrow the British. Government in Ireland; and it may appear strange that so readily* after the fatal suppression of one insurrection, they were engaged in organising another. It would not at all appear strange to those who would have calculated the circumstances of Ireland and England at that time. Although the insurrection of 1798 was totally suppressed, yet, in the year 1800, the atrocious means which tho Government adopted for carrying the measure of the so-called Union, had excited the bitterest resentment in the heart of every man in Ireland who had not been bought over by the Ministry, or whose pecuniary or personal interests were not in some way identified with English supremacy. Emtaet relied on the force of this national resentment, but he did not rely on that exclusively. With reference to the fair being whose history was entwined with that of Eobert Emmet, his fate destroyed her hopes of earthly happiness and transformed her into a hopless maniac. When, in obedience to the demands of society, she ventured to mix in the great assemblies, she was observed to mope about like one abstracted, for her heart lay beneath the cold tombstone on her lover's grave. Washington Irving has traced with his own diamond pan the history of her sorrows ; and he tells us that she sought, under the influence of a southern sky, to dispel the gloom that had settled upon her soul ; but it was in vain. She wasted away in a Blow but hopeless decline, and at length she sunk into the grave, the victim of a broken heart. And you know that it took the enchanted lyre of Moore to give expression to her feelings and to preserve in appropriate numbers the memory of Sarah Curran's fidelity.—* Exchange.'