All this is showy if not new; yet, in defiance even of Curran's authority, its argument is practically denied by all human nature. What man ever acts _for_ the praise of posterity alone? Present impulses, excited by present rewards, are the law of the living; and Alexander charging through the Granicus, and sweeping the royal Persian cavalry before him, had probably a heart as full of the most powerful impulses, as if he could have assured himself of the inheritance for ten thousand years of the plaudits of the globe. We are also to remember, that he _has_ inherited the great legacy of fame, to this hour--that, to the minds of all the intelligent, he is still the hero of heroes; that clowns are not the clients of memory, or the distributors of renown; and that the man whose history has already survived his throne two thousand years, has exhibited in himself all the distinction between the perishableness of power and the immortality of fame. In 1775 Curran returned to Ireland, and after anxiously pondering on the chances of abandoning Europe, and seeking fortune in America, as other eminent men--Edmund Burke among the number--had done before him, he fixed his fates at home. This portion of the subject begins with a high panegyric on the difficult but attractive profession into which Curran now threw himself, without income, connection, or friend:-- "It is not to be questioned, that to the Bar of that day the people of Ireland looked up in every emergency, with the most perfect reliance on their talent and their integrity. It was then the nursery of the parliament and the peerage; there was scarcely a noble family in the land that did not enrol its elect in that body, by the study of law and the exercise of eloquence to prepare them for the field of legislative exertion. And there not unfrequently arose a genius from the very lowest of the people, who won his way to the distinctions of the Senate, and wrested from pedigree the highest honours and offices of the Constitution."