After the birth of their youngest child, Robert, in 1778, the Emmets moved from their house in Molesworth Street, to a splendid new mansion in Stephen’s Green. Those were the days of the Volunteers, and Ireland, stirred to the depths by the example of America’s struggle for freedom, was gathering her forces to make the same demand, which America had already secured—and to back it by the same arguments. Less fortunate than America—or less wisely and nobly led—Ireland did not force the question to the decision of the field of battle, but accepted in full settlement of her claim a something which only Grattan and his friends, blinded by their own verbal fire-works, could have mistaken for liberty. Dr. Robert Emmet was one of those who saw, from the beginning, the inadequacy of the Settlement of 1782; and there is no doubt but that it was from him that his sons learned that political creed—the doctrine of “Absolute Independence”—for which one of them was to suffer the “white martyrdom” of exile, and the other the “red martyrdom” of blood. Grattan and Curran and others of their ilk who could never forgive those who had the pluck and honesty to draw their logical conclusion from the premises which they themselves had instituted, have tried to discredit Dr. Emmet by throwing ridicule on him. Grattan’s son quotes his father as saying that “Dr. Emmet had his pill and his plan, and he mixed so much politics with his prescription, that he would kill the patient who took the one, and ruin the country that listened to the other.” And Curran loved to raise a laugh among his friends—Sir Jonah Barrington and other high-minded gentlemen—by “taking off” the Doctor administering “their morning draught” to his sons. “Well, Temple, what would you do for your country? Addis, would you kill your brother for your country? Would you kill your sister for your country? Would you kill me?” We can listen with equanimity to the bitter epigrams of Grattan, or the monkey-like buffoonery of Curran when we remember what his own sons thought of Dr. Emmet: “Dear shade of my venerated father,” cried Robert as he stood in the dock facing his iniquitous judges and accusers, “look down on your suffering son, and see has he for one moment deviated from those moral and patriotic principles which you so early instilled into his youthful mind, and for which he has now to offer up his life.” And Thomas Addis Emmet, writing to his mother from Brussels, on the receipt of the news of his father’s death (December, 1802), has drawn for his own, and his mother’s consolation, a noble portrait of him whom they had lost: “The first comfort you can know must spring up from within yourself, from your reflection and religion, from your recalling to memory that my father’s active and vigorous mind was always occupied in doing good to others. That his seventy-five years were unostentatiously but inestimably filled with perpetual services to his fellow-creatures. That