Some of the most finished of those verses were devoted to the memory of Emmett, and they could not have been devoted to a subject more unworthy of his poetry. In Ireland, for the last five hundred years, every fault, folly, and failure of the nation is laid to the charge of England. The man who _invents_ a “grievance” is sure to be popular; but if he is to achieve the supreme triumph of popularity, he must fasten his grievance on the back of England; and if he pushes his charge into practice, and is ultimately banished or hanged, he is canonised in the popular calendar of patriotism. This absurdity, equally unaccountable and incurable, actually places Emmett in the rank of the Wallaces and Kosciuskos;—thus degrading men of conduct and courage, encountering great hazards for great principles, with a selfish simpleton, a trifler with conspiracy, and a runaway from the first sight of the danger which he himself had created. Moore’s hero was a feeble romancer; his national regenerator a street rioter; and his patriotic statesman merely a giddy gambler, who staked his pittance on a silly and solitary throw for supremacy, and saw his stake swept away by the policeman! Totally foolish as Ireland has ever been in her politics, she ought to be most ashamed of this display before the world—of inaugurating this stripling-revolutionist, this fugitive champion, this milk-and-water Jacobin, among her claims to the homage of posterity. Yet this was the personage on whose death Moore wrote these touching lines:— “O breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade, Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid; Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shed, As the night-dew that falls on the grass o’er his head. But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps, Still brightens with verdure the grave where he sleeps, And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.”