None among those who have written of Robert Emmet have noted for what reason the news of the death of Lord Kilwarden must have been to him a last desperate blow. Quite apart from his natural horror of the blundering crime, he had the most intimate cause to lament it. Lord Kilwarden was the person in all the world whom John Philpot Curran most revered: “my guardian angel,” he was wont to call him, summing up in the words all his tutelary service of long years to a junior colleague. It would have gone hard with Mr. Curran, so high was partisan passion at the time, if, in his defence of the State prisoners during the terrible series of prosecutions in the ’98, he had not been protected, day after day, by the strong influence of Kilwarden. Emmet, if he could have leaned for once on a merely selfish motive, might have looked forward, as to the blackness of hell, to that hour when Curran should learn that his dearest friend’s indirect murderer was none other than his daughter’s betrothed lover. Apprehensions of danger to his sweetheart must have haunted Robert Emmet through the sleepless nights among the outlawed folk on the wild fragrant Wicklow hillsides. Below, in a little port, was a fishing-smack under full sail, which meant liberty and security, would he but abandon all and come away. But the insistent beat of his own heart was to see his beautiful Sarah again; to learn how she looked upon him, or whether she would fly with him now that his first great endeavour was over, and only the rag of a pure motive was left to clothe his soiled dream and his abject undoing. It was a mad deed; but Robert Emmet, in relics of his tarnished regimentals, stole back to Dublin. He was so young that the adventure took on multiple attractions.