And so to poor Emmet, Fate, in her most diabolical mood, had for
the last time played the postman. He shook hands with the masked
executioner, removed his own stock, and helped to adjust both the cap
and the noose. The correspondent of the _London Daily Chronicle_, after
a fervent “God forbid that I should see many persons with Emmet’s
principles!” adds in unwilling tribute—and those were the days when a
hanging was a favourite spectacle with persons of elegant leisure—“As
it was, I never saw one die like him.” When all was over, and the head,
with every feature composed and pale as in life, had been held up with
the formula proper to traitors, that and the body were brought back to
the gaol, and shortly after buried in the common ground, Bully’s Acre,
none of Emmet’s few living kindred appearing then to claim it. His
parents were not long dead; his only brother was in exile; his sister
was a delicate woman, probably crushed by her latest grief, and her
husband, Mr. Robert Holmes, a most serviceable friend, was in prison;
John Patten, Thomas Addis Emmet’s brother-in-law, was far away; St.
John Mason, a cousin of the Emmets, and one heart and soul with them
in all that pertained to the wished-for welfare of Ireland, was, like
Mr. Holmes, and for the same reason, the tenant of a cell. Others,
more remotely connected by affection with Robert Emmet, might have
come forward in time had any one realised the blight, the paralysis,
which events had imposed simultaneously on the entire family. It seems
pretty conclusive from a valuable pamphlet just published by Mr. David
A. Quaid (though the facts are not yet verified), that Robert Emmet
was laid to rest in his father’s vault in the churchyard of St. Peter,
Aungier Street. There one may leave that sentinel dust until the day of
conciser habit than his own shall carve the good word above it which he
foreknew.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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