In corroboration of those sentiments, if they could require any, it is observable how rapidly the loudest opponents of the measure lowered their voices, and adopted the tone of government. Plunket, the ablest rhetorician of the party--who had made his opposition conspicuous by the ultra-poetic extravagance, of pledging himself to swear his sons at the altar, as Hamilcar swore Hannibal to Roman hostility--took the first opportunity of reconciling his wrath to office, and settled down into a chancellor. Foster, the speaker, who had led the opposition, received his salary for life without a pang, and filled the office of chancellor of the Irish exchequer. Bushe, the Cicero of the house, glowing with oratorical indignation, condescended to be chief-justice. All the leaders, when the battle was over, quietly slipped off their armour, hung up sword and shield on their walls, put on the peace costume of handsome salary, and subsided into title and pension. No one blamed them then, nor need blame them now. They had all been _actors_--and who shall reproach the actor, when the lamps are put out and the audience gone, for thinking of his domestic meal, and dropping into his bed? Nature, like truth, is powerful, and the instinct of the lawyer _must_ prevail. One man alone "refused to be comforted." Grattan, the Demosthenes of Ireland, for years kept, without swearing it, the Carthaginian oath, which had slipped out of the mind of Plunket. He talked of the past with the rapt anguish of a visionary, and eschewed human occupation with the rigid inutility of a member of La Trappe. Grattan long continued to linger in Ireland, until he was hissed out of his patriotic romance, and laughed into England. There, he found, that he had lost the better part of his life in dreams, and that the world demanded evidence that he had not lived in vain. Fortunately for his own fame, he listened to the demand; forgot his sorrows over the dead in the claims of the living; threw in his share to the general contribution of the national heart against the tyranny of Napoleon; and by some noble speeches vindicated the character of his national eloquence, and left an honourable recollection of himself in that greatest temple of fame and free minds which the world has ever seen--the parliament of England. Lord Castlereagh, on the final dissolution of the Irish legislature, transferred his residence to London, where (in July 1802) he took office under the Addington ministry as President of the Board of Control--an appointment which, on the return of Pitt, he retained, until (in 1805) he was placed by the great minister in the office of secretary for the war and colonial department.