Robert Emmet was born in 1780. His elder brother, Thomas, was one of the leaders of the rebellion of 1798, and, after its failure, was first imprisoned and then banished. Robert's earliest emotions were hatred of English tyranny and love of the Irish martyrs. Even as a boy he displayed a strength of character which foreshadowed the greatness of soul that he displayed as a man. At the age of twelve he was already absorbed in the study of mathematics and chemistry.[5] One day, immediately after making a chemical experiment, he sat down to solve a difficult mathematical problem, and, absently putting his hand to his mouth, poisoned himself with a corrosive sublimate which he had been handling a few moments before. The violent pains which he immediately felt, informed him of his danger. The fear of being forbidden to make such dangerous experiments in future led him to suppress anything of the nature of a cry. He went downstairs to his father's library, looked up the article on "Poison" in an encyclopædia, and found that chalk was recommended as an antidote in such cases as his. Remembering that he had seen a piece of chalk in the coach-house, he went there, broke open the door, which was locked, found the chalk, prepared and drank a solution of it, and returned to his mathematical problem. He appeared at breakfast next morning with a face so altered that it was hardly recognisable, and then confessed to his tutor that he had suffered excruciating tortures during the night, but added that one good result of his sleeplessness was that he had solved his problem. A boy with courage and composure of this quality was sure to grow into a man with a powerful influence over others. One of those whom Emmet influenced most strongly was Thomas Moore. The simplicity of appearance and manner which, in combination with the most delicate consideration for others, distinguished the young politician, changed, when the spring was touched that set his feelings, and through them, his intellect in motion, into an air of intellectual nobility and superiority which enchained the sympathy of the poet to be. "No two individuals," writes Moore, "could be much more unlike to each other, than was the same youth to himself, before rising to speak, and after;--the brow that had appeared inanimate, and almost drooping, at once elevating itself to all the consciousness of power, and the whole countenance and figure of the speaker assuming a change as of one suddenly inspired. Of his oratory, it must be recollected, I speak after youthful impressions; but I have heard little, since, that appeared to me of a loftier or purer character." Moore further asserts that Emmet's influence over his surroundings was due quite as much to the blamelessness of his life and the grave suavity of his manners as to his scientific attainments and his eloquence.