ART. VI.-The Life, Letters, and Speeches of Lord Plunket. By his Grandson the Hon. DAVID PLUNKET, with an Introductory Preface by Lord BROUGHAM. 2 vols. London: 1867.

THE

HE author of this very interesting book is a junior member of the Irish Bar, who should rise to eminence in his profession, if title by descent be a valid claim, for he is a grandson of Lord Plunket and of Chief Justice Bushe. Mr. Plunket from boyhood, to use the expression of his greatest ancestor, has had before him the images of these illustrious 'dead; and he has judged correctly that a Life of Lord Plunket, and a record of his oratorical genius, compiled with care from authentic sources, would be still welcome to numerous readers. We regret, indeed, that a work of the kind was not. written some years ago, when contemporary experience might have enriched it, and when the brilliant career of Lord Plunket was clear in the sight of living witnesses. The materials for his biography are now less abundant; the memory of his public services, and of his renown as a lawyer and orator, is fading rapidly into mere tradition. Hardly a member of the House of Commons, not one certainly of considerable mark, remembers his triumphs in that Assembly; and only a few of his professional brethren can recall the days when his fame in the Four Courts eclipsed all other lights of the Irish Forum. The great political questions - the Union with Ireland, and Catholic Emancipation-with which he was especially identified, have lost the passionate interest they once excited, and, accordingly, even Plunket's speeches on them must now appear comparatively lifeless. For these reasons this memorial of him comes too late in a certain sense; and yet we are glad that it has been published, for the condition of Ireland, that most serious of political problems, is unintelligible without a study of the period comprised in Lord Plunket's life. Such a career, moreover, as his was-a notable instance how honour in the State can, in spite of many opposing circumstances, be won by talent, industry, and good sense-will always be of interest to Englishmen; and every admirer of modern eloquence will be attracted to a work that contains specimens of Lord Plunket's speeches, in some respects to be classed among the best examples of English oratory. Nor has the present generation lost all personal sympathy with this eminent man; it may be said of him as of the late Sir Robert Peel, that this bright luminary has

not so far sunk into the twilight of past years, but that its 'radiance still cheers and warms the horizon it has left.'

We have read these volumes with interest, but in one particular our expectations have been disappointed. One characteristic of Lord Plunket was his command of a very original style, concise, vigorous, and idiomatic; and he had the faculty of lighting up a subject with most apposite and happy illustrations. We had hoped that these gifts would have been transmitted to his descendant, and that Mr. Plunket might have blended with them the genial humour and rhetorical art of Chief Justice Bushe, his maternal grandfather. But though this book deserves commendation, and is not ill written in any sense, it has no traces of the manner of Lord Plunket, or of Bushe's graceful and felicitous diction. One quality, however, of Lord Plunket's mind, and that one of no little importance, appears to have been inherited by his grandson. With oratorical genius and fervour Lord Plunket possessed an excellent judgment, and much sobriety and coolness of thought; and, though he lived in an age of passionate excitement, when many powerful and noble minds were hurried into extravagant courses, he never deviated from the path of prudence. Mr. Plunket, if we may judge from his book, is equally self-contained and sedate; his opinions are usually reasonable and moderate; and his views on the great political questions in controversy during Lord Plunket's life are with rare exceptions temperate and thoughtful. This is a merit of no ordinary kind, especially in a young Irish author, dealing for the most part with Irish subjects; and we have great pleasure in recommending this work as an intelligent and instructive biography. It describes Lord Plunket's career, and the historical events associated with it, clearly and well; it is always fair and candid in tone; and it is singularly free from the biographer's vice of general and unvarying adulation. Not the least valuable part of the book is the preface from the pen of Lord Brougham, containing a graphic and discriminating sketch of Lord Plunket's characteristics as an orator. This venerable and illustrious man, like Cicero in his Tusculan retreat, delights in recalling to a younger age the figures of the great public speakers among whom he was proudly eminent, and he has delineated with a skilful hand the peculiar excellences of a contemporary sometimes his antagonist, whose reputation rivalled his own, though his eloquence was of a different order.

Lord Plunket sprang from a Presbyterian family, for some generations settled in Ireland. In after years the successful lawyer adopted the ancient coat of the Fingals, and in his

speeches on the Catholic claims he used to dwell with emphasis on the exclusion of this name from the Roll of the Lords; but it is improbable that he was connected by blood with the Norman-Danish House of the Pale for centuries established at Killeen in Meath. His grandfather was a Presbyterian clergyman, and his father pursued the same calling, first at Enniskillen, and then in Dublin, at a meeting-house known in those days as the Strand Street Chapel. Dr. Thomas Plunket, for such was his name, was a man of remarkable parts and acquirements, a preacher of a very high order, a master of sound and nervous English, well known in Dublin society as a critic of great local reputation. In his generation the glory of letters had not departed from the Irish capital; the fame of Swift and of Berkeley was recent; and literary merit was highly prized by the gay and frank though sectarian noblesse that thronged the levees of the Chesterfields and Dorsets. Dr. Plunket had many brilliant acquaintances especially among the Whig patriots, then growing into a formidable party; and through their influence, it is related, he secured a nook in the House of Commons-known long afterwards as Plunket's chair--from which he was wont to hear the debates and to discuss the merits of the different speakers. Lord Plunket was born in 1764, the youngest of a family of sons all of whom, but one who died in youth, became eminent in different professions. These volumes give us but little information of his earliest years and training as a boy, except that he went to a day-school in Dublin, and that his father directed his general education. But it is possible that Dr. Plunket occasionally took his son to witness the patriotic and eloquent contests, of which the Irish House of Commons was the scene from 1772 to 1778; and that Pery, Yelverton, Grattan, and Flood were the first models of the future orator. Lord Plunket, too, was doubtless indebted in some degree to his father's teaching for the mastery of terse and classical English-clear, scholarlike, and in the best taste--for which his speeches are justly remarkable.

Dr. Plunket died in 1778, and left his family in comparative poverty. For some years they lived in seclusion in a small house in a back street of Dublin running down by Ormond Quay to the Liffey. Plunket, however, found means to go to College, and in 1779, at the age of fifteen, he was matriculated at the University of Dublin. His regular academic career gave good promise of future success; though opposed to several able competitors, he carried off many college prizes; and in his third year he obtained a scholarship, then the highest distinction open

to undergraduates. But he was less conspicuous in the Examination Hall of Trinity College than in another arena more suited to his natural genius. In 1747 Edmund Burke 'had founded the Historical Club,' a debating society in which, with others who became eminent in later life, he discussed questions of law and politics, and prepared himself for the great part he was to play at St. Stephens hereafter. The Club flourished in the air of a capital often agitated by political excitement, and never without rhetorical talent; and almost all the distinguished men who from 1750 to 1780 became famous in the Irish Parliament were at different times in the roll of its members. In 1770 the club was affiliated to Trinity College; received the name of the Historical Society;' and, having been the precursor and the type of the Speculative "Society' and the two Unions,' survives after a hundred and twenty years in undiminished prosperity and vigour. In the latter part of the last century the Historical Society was at its zenith; it had become a nursery for the Irish Parliament, many of whose chief speakers attended its debates; and it was allied so closely to that assembly, that a gallery in the House of Commons was allotted to its members.

Plunket joined the Society in 1782, and though at this time a remarkable number of brilliant youths were among its ranks, he became quickly its acknowledged leader. His votes on the questions chosen for debate are still on record among the Society's papers, and are interesting as they throw light on his character. They are, for the most part, on the popular side; but though at this juncture the Irish world was running wild with political excitement, we infer from some of them that in youth he was as cautious and sedate as in manhood. While these volumes were passing through the press two specimens of his speeches of this date were discovered; though somewhat stilted and grandiose in tone, they contain several forcible expressions, and one is remarkable as it illustrates the high conception the future orator had formed of the art he was to excel in. Considering the speaker was only nineteen, the following passage is curious and striking:

"When I say that every man amongst you may make himself an orator, I would be understood to mean this only in a certain degree. I would be understood to mean only that every man may so qualify himself as to be listened to on every occasion with attention and pleasure. To reach perfection in the art must indeed require an uncommon share of talents, a judicious store of learning, an active, an unremitting diligence. To animate a nation, to moderate the fury of an incensed, or to rouse the sleeping passions of an indolent

people these are the objects which call the powers of the finished orator into action, which require the collected experience of ages, the deepest knowledge of the secret springs and movements of the human heart a fancy, a genius to give life to the great mass of learning, to convince, to charm, to transport the hearers beyond themselves, and at the same time a coolness and sagacity to give their heated passions the proper bent, and to direct their agitated minds to the proper object. It was this that hurried along the orator of Greece with that resistless vehemence which so long enabled him to withstand every effort, and to baffle every art of Macedonian force and Macedonian cunning. It was this which lighted up the obscurity of him of Rome into that* conflagration, which has remained, with undiminished force and splendour, the admiration and astonishment of all succeeding ages.'

Among other results of Plunket's successes at the Historical Society as a debater, was one of lasting advantage to him. He formed some friendships of great value among the brilliant and able young men who looked up to him as a chief and representative. His political views, and the course of events, soon separated him from Thomas Addis Emmett and from the enthusiast Wolf Tone; but he remained through life in the closest intimacy with Bushe, afterwards Chief Justice of Ireland, with Magee, the future Archbishop of Dublin, with Sir Lawrence Parsons, the opponent of the Union, and their influence on his career was fortunate. Plunket's politics, too, were determined probably through his position in the Historical Society. In 1782-3 he listened frequently from the students' gallery' to the animated debates of the Irish Parliament; and in that brief hour of national glory, he doubtless adopted the political creed of which he became sixteen years afterwards the undaunted and almost unrivalled exponent. At this juncture, the patriot party in the dominant oligarchy which for thirty years had contended against the rule of the Castle, had for a moment turned for support to the long down-trodden Catholic nation; and, in the agony of the American war, had extorted from England the abolition of many of the vexatious restraints that had held the island in colonial bondage. A large measure of Freetrade had been gained; the Penal Code had been partly relaxed; the Irish judicature had been emancipated; and while Protestant and Catholic Ireland rallied round the cannon of the volunteers, the Irish Parliament had been declared an independent and sovereign Legislature. It was a time of

* This striking, but rather strained expression, is not Plunket's own; it is taken from a remarkable description by Grattan of Chatham, Mansfield, and Anthony Malone.