If one could believe him as free as he believed himself, one might regret that he maintained too perfect a secrecy, and counted too much upon the elasticity of Irish impulse. He had been careful to avoid what he thought the error of the United Irishmen in establishing too many posts for revolutionary action, and confiding knowledge of preliminaries to innumerable persons all over the country, some of whom would be almost certain to play him false. He worked in the dark, with but a dozen friends at his elbow, spending his money freely but heedfully on manufacturing and storing weapons of war in Dublin. He looked towards a moment when a disaffected legion would arise at a summons, like the men from the heath in _The Lady of the Lake:_ a legion which he could arm and command and weld, in one magic moment, for Ireland’s regeneration. He leaned overmuch, not on human goodness, but on human intelligence in making opportunity: and it failed him. He was like the purely literary playwright labouring with the average theatre audience; he was never in the least, for all his wit, cunning enough to deal scientifically with a corporation on whom hints, half-tones, adumbrations, are thrown away; the law of whose being is still to crave a presentation of the “undisputed thing in such a solemn way.” As drama through its processes, act after act, does well to assume that we are all blockheads, and then, as the case requires, to modify, so any flaming revolutionary genius would do well to trust nothing whatever to a moral inspiration only too likely to be non-existent. It is a terribly costly thing to be, as we say, equal to an emergency, before the emergency is quite ready to be equalled. And that was Emmet’s plight. A French fleet had been promised to begin military operations towards the end of August, but an unforeseen explosion in one of Emmet’s Dublin magazines led him to declare his toy war against the English Crown prematurely. The local volunteer troops were to be reinforced by others, well armed, from the outlying counties, at the firing of a rocket agreed upon; the Castle was to be seized as the chief move, and a Provisional Government, according to printed programme, set up. The time for assembling was hurriedly fixed for July 23, 1803, early in the evening. The gentlemen leaders and the trusty battalions failed to appear, kept away by mysterious quasi-authentic advices; appeared instead, as time wore on, many unknown, unprepossessing insurgents, the drunken refuse of the city taverns. The cramp-irons, the scaling-ladders, the blunderbusses, the fuses for the grenades, were not ready; signals had been delayed or suppressed; the prepared slow-matches were mixed in with others; treachery was at work and running like fire in oil under the eyes of one who could believe no ill of human kind. Beyond Dublin, the Wicklow men under Dwyer, an epic peasant figure, received no message; the Wexford men waited in vain for orders all night; the