"His landlady observed, 'What a sad thing it was to see the poor young gentleman all day talking to somebody he calls Mr Speaker, when there was no speaker in the house but himself.' Nor was the old lady singular in her opinion. In some few years afterwards, no less a man than Edmund Burke wrote over to Ireland, 'Will no one stop that madman, Grattan?' Assuredly when Burke himself enacted the dagger-scene on the floor of the House of Commons, the epithet was more applicable." We refer to this remark, chiefly to correct a misconception generally adopted. It has been supposed that Burke, to heighten the effect of his speech on the discontents then engendering against the State, actually purchased a dagger, to throw on the floor of Parliament. This, of course, would have been ridiculous; and it is to do the common duty of rescuing the fame of a great man from the slightest touch of ridicule that this explanation is given. One of his friends (we believe, a member of Parliament) had received, in the course of the day, from Birmingham, a newly-invented dagger, of a desperate kind, of which some _thousands_ had been ordered, evidently for the purpose of _assassination_. Burke, naturally shocked at this proof of the sanguinary designs spreading among the lower population, took the weapon with him, to convince those who constantly scoffed at him as an _alarmist_ that his alarms were true. The whole was a matter of accident; nothing could be less premeditated; and every hearer of the true statement will agree that, so far from being a theatrical exhibition, it was the very act which any rational and manly man would have done. The time was terrible: revolution threatened every hour. Jacobinism was hourly boasting that it had the Church and Throne in its grasp; and, at such a period, the positive statement of a man like Burke, that thousands (we believe five thousand) of weapons, evidently made for private _murder_, were actually ordered in one of our manufacturing towns, and the sight of one of those horrid instruments itself, was an important call on the vigilance of Government, and a salutary caution to the country. It is not at all improbable that this act crushed the conspiracy. Mr Phillips observes, that when Burke wrote "that madman Grattan, the _madman_ was contemplating the glorious future; his ardent mind beheld the vision of the country he so loved rising erect from the servitude of centuries, 'redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled' by his exertions. Nor was that vision baseless--he made of it a proud and grand reality: her chains fell off, as at the bidding, of an enchanter." Grattan's influence in Parliament was felt from his first entrance. But he earned it in the only way in which even genius can be _permanently_ successful.