Everyone knows the rest: how, admitted to the New York Bar by suspension of rules, without probation, he died in all men’s honour, in 1827, Attorney-General of the State. Robert Emmet was even surer of an illustrious career. Alas! There is no documentary proof forthcoming for it as yet, but it is painfully probable that his little afterglow of a rebellion was long fostered, for reasons of their own, by great statesmen, and that their secret knowledge of it arose from Irish bad faith; that, in short, he was let dream his dream until it suited others to close the toils about him. The two or three highest in authority in Dublin, Lord Hardwicke chief among them, were kept ignorant as himself. Emmet was really victim and martyr. But to die prodigally at twenty-five, and to be enshrined with unwithered and unique passion in Irish hearts; to go down prematurely in dust and blood, and yet to be understood, felt, seen, for ever, in the sphere where “only the great things last,” is perhaps as enviable a privilege as young men often attain. His is one of several historic instances in which those who have wrought little else seem to have wrought an exquisite and quite enduring image of themselves in human tradition. With none of the celebrities of his own nation can he in point of actual service, compare; but every one of them, whether known to ancient folk-lore or to the printed annals of yesterday, is less of a living legend with Thierry’s “long-memoried people,” than “the youngest and last of the United Irishmen,” “the child of the heart of Ireland.” A knot of peasants gathered around a peat fire in the long evenings, pipe in hand, are the busy hereditary factors of apocryphal tales beginning “Once Robert Emmet (God love him),” &c.; and a certain coloured print, very green as to raiment, very melodramatic as to gesture, hangs to-day in the best room of their every cabin, and stands to them for all that was of old, and is not, and still should be.