We know he read the Litany there; and he also indulged a turn for secular, and even profane employment. In fact, it pleased Mr. Robert Emmet to draw himself (he drew exquisitely) as a posthumous serial in two parts. Some one found and recognised the grim _R. E., head_, the disconcerted _R. E., body_, on separate scraps of paper: they lay on his little table, when all was over, witnesses to the detached humour possible to an easy conscience. His industry was great during the few remaining hours. He possessed a lock of his absent Sarah’s hair, which she may have given him years before: this he wished to wear in his dying hour. As he sat plaiting it minutely, and tenderly fastening it into the fold of his velvet stock, he was noticed and questioned. Fearing that the treasure might be taken from him, he said that his occupation was “an innocent one.” The only persons allowed to see him were the chaplains and M’Nally, the fine flower of infamy, happy in Government pay, who to the end played with success the part of the assiduous friend. It was he who brought to Emmet on his final morning the news, then ten days old, of his mother’s death. The son took it, as he took all his losses, with what Mr. W. H. Curran briefly calls his “unostentatious fortitude.” After an instant of silence he looked up and found his voice. “It is better so,” he answered quietly. Her delicate proud heart had broken at the menace hanging over her darling: that much he had divined at once. She had written, during that last year, that she was “a parent supremely blest” in the virtues and dispositions of her children. Mr. M’Nally was intimate with Mr. Curran, for whom he had an affection as genuine as he was capable of feeling. It was like “Janus” Wainewright’s affection for Charles Lamb, and as exempt from the poison-cup otherwise dealt impartially to divers and sundry. It is possible, therefore, that Mr. M’Nally chose to acquaint his much-deceived client with the true state of Sarah’s health: a life-in-death which also was surely “better so.” But this is mere conjecture, as Emmet would never have inquired; rather than name his “nut-brown maid,” the truly “banished man” would still have endured all the inner turmoil of lonely love, “—surges Which wash both Heaven and Hell.”