Born of a house never remarkable before nor since his time for attachment to creed or country; educated far from the influences of his native land, we find him returning to it just as he had completed his majority, an accomplished scholar and a barrister, with nothing to depend upon but his own labors for support, yet full of ambition and eager for distinction. Had he followed the traditions of his family, he would have settled down quietly to the practice of his profession, and in course of time, doubtless, would have become wealthy and a useful assistant to the hostile power that controlled the destinies of his nation, as too many of his professional brothers had already done. But the young lawyer, to the dismay of many of his relations, soon showed that he was made of sterner stuff. He could not "bend the pregnant hinges of the knee, that thrift might follow fawning." He had arrived home in time to witness the horrors of '98; he had seen his fellow-Catholics, even then four-fifths of the population of Ireland, bowed down to the very dust, sneered at, reprobated, and, on their own soil, denied every social, commercial, and political right to which as freemen they were entitled; and, with a courage that never deserted him, and a capacity for labor that was truly remarkable, he ranged himself on the side of the proscribed, and took up the gauntlet cast down to the oppressed by the powerful and unscrupulous faction which then, as now, represented British supremacy in Ireland. His first appearance in public, being then but twenty-three years old, was in 1799, when the question of a legislative union between Ireland and England convulsed the former and deeply moved the public mind of the latter country. At a meeting in Dublin, he denounced the measure in terms so bold, clear, and forcible that those who listened to him had little difficulty in foreseeing his future eminence and usefulness to the national cause. The scheme of Pitt and Castlereagh was, however, carried out, the Irish parliament was destroyed, and the Catholics saw themselves at the beginning of the century not only without a domestic legislature, but shut out from all representation, not only in the united Lords and Commons, but even in the most insignificant corporation and local boards.