"I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world. It is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph. When my country shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written." Emmet's words are established among the scriptures of the Irish people; but it may well be allowed that their fame would be less had not Moore caught up and amplified their thought with all his habitual felicity and more than his habitual passion. Nor is this all. "The Fire Worshippers" is the most characteristic of the four long poems set in the framework of _Lalla Rookh_, and "The Fire Worshippers" is a glorification of rebellion, which is merely made explicit in the following fine passage:-- "Rebellion! foul, dishonouring word, Whose wrongful blight so oft has stain'd The holiest cause that tongue or sword Of mortal ever lost or gain'd, How many a spirit, born to bless, Hath sunk beneath that withering name, Whom but a day's, an hour's success, Had wafted to eternal fame!" More than that, the rebels glorified are men like Emmet, who take up arms as a supreme protest, almost without hope of success. "Who, though they know the strife is vain, Who, though they know the riven chain Snaps but to enter in the heart Of him who rends its links apart, Yet dare the issue,--blest to be Even for one bleeding moment free, And die in pangs of liberty!" The affinity is not only between Emmet and the rebel hero Hafed. Hinda, the beloved of Hafed, has many traits that recall Emmet's betrothed, the beautiful and most unhappy Sarah Curran. For although John Philpot Curran was a leading supporter of Grattan's principles, yet no man more bitterly denounced Emmet's attempt; and Al Hassan himself, the fierce Moslem chief, could not have dealt more harshly with Hinda, had he detected her love for the Gheber, than did Curran when he was confronted with the proofs that his daughter continued her affection to a declared rebel. It is not hard to guess of whom Moore thought when he wrote the moving and beautiful lines which describe Hinda's passion in the days after her lover had been revealed to her for the foe of her father's arms:--