"His industry was indomitable. The affairs of Parliament were to be thenceforth the business of his life, and he studied them minutely. The chief difficulty in this great speaker's way was the first five minutes. During his exordium, laughter was imminent. He bent his body almost to the ground, swung his arms over his head, up and down and around him, and added to the grotesqueness of his manner a hesitating tone and drawling emphasis. Still there was an earnestness about him, that at first besought, and, as he warmed, enforced--nay, commanded attention." His first entrance into the British House of Commons is described with the same graphic effect:-- "He had said of Flood 'that he forgot that he was an oak of the forest, too old and too great to be transplanted at fifty.' And yet here he was himself. Whether he would take root was the question, and for some moments very questionable it was. When he rose, every voice in that crowded House was hushed; the great rivals, Pitt and Fox, riveted their eyes upon him; he strode forth and gesticulated--the hush became unanimous; not a cheer was heard; men looked in one another's faces, and then at the phenomenon before them, as if doubting his identity. At last, and on a sudden, the indication of the master-spirit came. Pitt was the first generously to recognise it. He smote his thigh hastily with his hand--it was an impulse when he was pleased--his followers saw it, and knew it, and with a universal burst they hailed the advent and the triumph of the stranger." Grattan was sincere, and this sincerity gave at once substance to his popularity, and power to his eloquence. But, as a politician, he was rash; and as a prophet, he had to see the failure of all his predictions. He wielded a torch of exceeding brightness, it is true; but the torch at once blinded himself and inflamed the nation. His patriotism was pure, but it wanted practicability. He left no great measure of public utility behind him. His liberation, as he called it, of Ireland in 1782, was a showy fiction, to end in the disgrace of a painful discovery. It was the _liberation_ of a fever to end in exhaustion; of a dream of opulence and independence, to finish in an awaking of poverty and despair. Its closest resemblance was to the late festival at the Hanwell Asylum--an assemblage of lunatics dressed for the night in feathers and flowers, dancing and feasting, until the morning light sent them back to their cells, and the drudgery of their melancholy discipline.