Time had not weaned Moore from the absurdity of imagining that every rebel must be a hero, or that men who universally begged their lives, or died by the rope, were the true regenerators of the country. His early connection with the Emmett family had been distressingly renewed by the execution of Robert Emmett, justly punished for a combination of folly and wickedness, perhaps without example in the narratives of impotent convulsion. Emmett was a barrister, struggling through the first difficulties of his difficult profession, when somebody left him a luckless legacy of five hundred pounds. He laid it all out in powder and placards, and resolved to “make a Rebellion.” Without any one man of note to join him, without even any one patron or member of faction to give the slightest assistance, without any one hope but in _miracle_, he undertook to overthrow the Government, to crush the army, to extinguish the Constitution, to remodel the Aristocracy, to scourge the Church, to abolish the throne, and, having achieved these easy matters, to place Mr Robert Emmett on the summit of Irish empire. Accordingly, he purchased a green coat with a pair of gold epaulettes; rushed from a hovel in a back street, at the head of about fifty vagabonds with pikes; was met and beaten by a party of yeomanry going to parade; ran away with his _army_; hid himself in the vicinity of Dublin for a few days; was hunted out, and was tried and hanged. Those are the actual features of the transaction, where poetry has done its utmost to blazon the revolt, and partisanship has lavished its whole budget of lies on the heroism of the revolter; those _are_ the facts, and the only facts, of Mr Robert Emmett’s revolution. Moore made his full advantage of the disturbances of the time; and it must be allowed that they wonderfully improved his poetry. Their strong reality gave it a strength which it never possessed before, and the imaginary poutings of boys and girls were vividly exchanged for the imaginary grievances of men. What can be more animated than these lines:— “Oh, for the swords of former time! Oh, for the men who bore them! When, armed for Right, they stood sublime, And tyrants crouched before them. When, pure yet, ere courts began With honours to enslave him, The best honours worn by man, Were those which virtue gave him. Oh, for the swords, &c.” Or this— LAMENT.