Ireland -- History -- Rebellion of 1798; Women -- Ireland -- Biography
Set side by side two pictures. One is that drawn, in such tragic
intensity of black and white, by Madden, of a woman of sixty-three, who
having drained to the dregs the cup of life’s sorrows, lay down in the
home of her widowhood, from which all her children save one were absent,
to die of the malady, for which science has found no cure: a broken
heart. Nine months earlier her husband had been taken from her and now
she, “like the mother of the Shearses, was hurried to her grave by the
calamity which had fallen on her youngest son; who, it was vainly hoped,
was to have occupied one of the vacant places in the house, and in the
heart of his afflicted parents. Vainly had they looked up to Thomas
Addis Emmet to supply that place which had been left a void by the death
of their eldest and most gifted son, Christopher Temple Emmet. And when
Thomas Addis was taken away from them and banished, to whom had they to
look but to the younger son; and of that last life-hope of theirs they
might have spoken with the feelings which animated the Lacedemonian
mother, when one of her sons had fallen fighting for his country, and
looking on the last of them then living she said ‘_Ejus locum expleat
frater_.’ And that son was taken from them, incarcerated for four years,
and doomed to civil death. Thomas Addis Emmet was then a proscribed man
in exile. The father had sunk under the trial, although he was a man of
courage and equanimity of mind; but the mother’s last hope in her
youngest son sustained in some degree her broken strength and spirit;
and that one hope was dashed down never to rise again, when her
favourite child, the prop of her old age, was taken from her, and the
terrible idea of his frightful fate became her one fixed thought—from
the instant the dreadful tidings of his apprehension reached her till
the approaching term of the crowning catastrophe, when, in mercy to her,
she was taken away from her great misery.”
“Orangemen of Ireland ... these are your triumphs; the desolation of the
home of an aged, virtuous couple—the ruin in which all belonging to them
were involved, the ignominious death of their youngest and gifted
child.”[5]
Footnote 5:
Madden, _op. cit._ pp. 463-464.
The other picture is one we paint for ourselves of a fair young girl,
very slim and graceful in her riding habit, with a charming face,
usually a little too serious for its twenty summers, showing now a
dainty flush of excitement under the piquant riding hood, and clear
eyes, usually somewhat too grave for their youth, shining now with an
unwonted light. For background a stately eighteenth-century country
seat, set in a landscape of exquisite beauty—(What need to describe the
entrancing loveliness of woodland, lake and mountain, when it is
sufficiently summed up by the magic word, Killarney?) Over it all a sky
aflush with the colours of the summer dawn! The haze of summer over the
bird-filled, fragrant woods, that sway lightly to the breezes of the
virginal new day!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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