Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 1.djvu/357

946 convicted his client; but his last hope was prophetic; for his client was fined £500 and bound and east into the furnace of Newgate, for two years; and the redeeming spirit of an amiable and heroic wife, "walked with the sufferer through the flames," and by a notable stratagem extricated him from his prison, and saved him from the moral certainty of concerted destruction, had her plan been deferred or defeated.

Mr. Curran's next display was in the defence of a Mr. Finnerty, the publisher of a newspaper, entitled the Press: the whole of which speech was an uninterrupted blaze of eloquence. Canvassing the motives of government for this and similar prosecutions, and comparing transactions of this period to earlier occurrences in the reign of JAMES II.-

" I see you, gentlemen, turn your eyes to those pages of governmental abandonment, of popular degradation, of expiring liberty, and of merciless and sanguinary persecutions; to that miserable period in which the fallen and abject state of man might have been almost an argument in the mouth of the atheist, and the blasphemer against the existence of an all-just and an all-wise First Cause; if the glorious era of the revolution that followed it, had not refuted the impious inference by shewing, that if man descends, it is not in his own proper motion: that it is with labour and with pain; and that he can continue to sink only until by the force and pressure of the descent the spring of his immortal faculties acquires that recuperative energy and effort that hurries him as many miles aloft,- he sinks but to rise again. It is at that period that the state seeks for shelter in the destruction of the press; it is at a period like that the TYRANT prepares for an attack upon the people, by destroying the liberty of the press; by taking away that shield of wisdom and virtue, behind which the people are invulnerable, but in whose pare and polished convex, ere the lifted blow has fallen, he beholds his own image, and is turned into stone. It is at these periods that the honest man dares not speak, because truth