melancholy and romantic: he had fed it from the pure fountain of classic literature, and might be said to have lived not so much in the scene around him as in the society of the illustrious and sainted dead. The poets of antiquity were his companions, its patriots his models, and its republics his admiration. He had but just entered upon the world, full of the ardour which such studies might be supposed to have excited, and unhappily at a period in the history of his country when such noble feelings were not only detrimental but dangerous.” When Emmet was in his twentieth year the so-called Rebellion, in which Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald were leaders, broke out. In the agitation which led up to it and sustained it, Thomas Addis Emmet was deeply implicated, nor did his younger brother go unsinged by the travelling flame. Sitting once by the pianoforte in Thomas Moore’s rooms, listening to _Let Erin Remember_, he stood up suddenly, with a brief pregnant speech, such as was habitual with him: “O that I were at the head of twenty thousand men, marching to that air!” As it was, he made one of the nineteen of her best spirits whom his University then thought fit to dismiss without benisons. One of these was no fiery undergraduate, but a Fellow and a famous scholar, Dr. Whitley Stokes. Their chief offence was that they had refused to tell what they knew of others who shared their outspoken opinions. There is no need here to dwell upon the memorable rising of 1798, or upon the rooted general opposition to that Union with Great Britain which wholesale bribery was so soon to consummate. One need but bear in mind that the Anglo-Irish (chiefly the Presbyterians and members of the dominant Church, the landed classes, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by their championship of disenfranchised Catholics and the countless poor) came angrily to the fore as the defenders of nationalism, at a time when exile, the dungeon, and the axe, active for two generations, had deprived Ireland of the last of her native Jacobite gentry. Saurin, the great jurist, had written: “Whether it would be prudent in the people to avail themselves of that right would be another question; but if a Legislative Union were forced on the country against the will of its inhabitants, it would be a nullity: ... [To take issue with it] would be a struggle against usurpation, not resistance against law.” Emmet had only to cross the street from his College to hear the debates in either House of Parliament, to hear the like doctrine from Grattan in his glory; and with “malignants” of the loftiest character, like Lord Cloncurry, then the Rt. Hon. Valentine Lawless, he and his associated every day. It was inevitable, with such counsels of perfection brought to bear upon his daring and his entire disinterestedness, that Robert Emmet should attempt a popular emancipation, and succeed but in ruining himself. It was a poignant case of chronological and topographical misplacement.