There are several historic instances of a like fatherliness in fathers, a century ago. Mr. Curran doubtless felt outraged in every fibre, and not more indignant at the independent conduct of his meek domestic vassal than at the astounding ignorance in which she had contrived to keep him. Yet there were powerful pleas for compassion in such a case inherent in his own history. In early manhood he himself had figured as collaborator in a similar headlong falling in love, a similar breach of parental discipline. John Philpot Curran had been for a short time tutor in the family of a fellow-Whig, Dr. Richard Creagh of Creagh Castle, near Spenser’s Doneraile, when with Miss Creagh, a young lady of beauty and of moderate fortune, he contracted a private marriage. The discovery brought on storms; but on further reflection Dr. Creagh saw fit to forgive the offenders, to receive them once more beneath his roof, and even to allow his daughter’s portion to be expended without stint on Mr. Curran, until he had completed his legal studies in London, and begun to establish his inevitable ascendancy at the Bar. The match, however, seems never to have been a happy one. Conjugal differences seldom lack their annotation. Without adopting the adjective missiles of either faction, let it suffice to say that they parted, in the summary fashion of which we are already aware. Mr. Curran had earned a right, he may have thought, to his opinion of women. The memory of his calamity may well have operated to make him both excessively exacting as to female behaviour and pitiless towards any supposed violation of it. In one touching story of domestic ruin, at least, he had a deplorable influence. Mr. W. J. Fitzpatrick, in his _Life, Times, and Contemporaries of Lord Cloncurry_, records that after the Lady Cloncurry’s trespass, her generous husband would have taken her back, “were it not for his well-beloved J——n P——t C——n, who urged him, in strong and persuasive language, to the contrary.” Moreover, an Irish father is as likely as not to cherish spacious ideas of his own governing prerogative, and refuse to be tied in the matter to “anything so temporal,” as Lowell says in another application, “as a responsibility.” Mr. Curran could have bespoken for his children other destinies if they had ever known freedom of the heart at home.