This touching letter has been printed before, but the two which follow,
long lost and newly found, have never been made public. The original
letters seem to have disappeared. The contemporary copies figure in
the Hardwicke or Wimpole collection, which has very recently been
made accessible to readers by the issue of the current Catalogue of
Additional Manuscripts at the British Museum. The shorter of them was
intended by Emmet for Thomas Addis Emmet and his wife Jane Patten, his
brother and sister-in-law. With it was sent a long historical document,
called _An Account of the late Plan of Insurrection in Dublin, and the
Causes of its Failure_. Hurriedly penned, in order to give the beloved
relatives a unique and direct knowledge of all that the writer had
meant and missed, it is a masterly detailed statement, as free from
all traces of morbidity, or even of agitation, as if it had been drawn
up “on happy mornings with a morning heart,” in the tents of victory.
Thanks to the practised duplicity of Dr. Trevor, to whose care it was
confided, Mr. Thomas Addis Emmet, then in Paris, never received it;
he complained bitterly of its suppression, and was only towards the
close of his life enabled to read it through the medium of the press.
But neither he nor any of his American descendants, inclusive of the
distinguished compiler of the quarto, privately printed in New York,
entitled _The Emmet Family_, seems to have suspected the existence
of the little personal note in which the _Account_ was enclosed. The
official draft of it figures in Hard. MS. 35,742, f. 197:—
“MY DEAREST TOM AND JANE: I am just going to do my
last duty to my country. It can be done as well on the
scaffold as in the field. Do not give way to any weak
feelings on my account, but rather encourage proud ones
that I have possessed fortitude and tranquillity of
mind to the last.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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