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 CURRAN S63 its way, where there was a mortal pang to be wrung. With such gifts what might not such a man have been, removed from the low prejudices, and petty factions, and desperate objects that thickened the atmosphere of public life in Ireland, into the large prospects, and noble and healthfol aspirations that elated the spirit in this country, then rising to that summit of eminence from which the world at last lies beneath her! If it were permitted to enter into the recesses of such a mind, some painful consciousness.cf this fate would probably have been found to account for that occasional irritation and spleen of heart, with which he shaded bis publie life, and disguised the homage which he must have felt for a country like England. It must have been nothing inferior to this bitter sense of utter expulsion, which could have made such a being, gazing upon her unclouded glory, lift his voice only to tell her how he hated her beams. He must have mentally mea- sured his strength with her mighty men; Burke and Pitt and Fox were then moving in their courses above the eyes of the world, great luminaries, passing over in different orbits, but all illustrating the same superb and general system. He had one moment not unlike theirs. But the Irish Revolution of 1780 was too brief for the labours or the celebrity of patriotism, and this powerful and eccentric mind, after rushing from its obscuration just near enough to be mingled with, and glow in the system, was again hurried away to chillness and darkness beyond the gaze of mankind. " The details of Curran's private life are for the biogra- pher. But of that portion which, lying between public labours and domestic privacy, forms the chief ground for the individual character, we may speak with no slight panegyric. Few men of his means of inflicting pain could have been more reluctant to use them; few men whose lives passed in continual public conflict could have had fewer personal enemies, and perhaps no man of his time has left sincerer regrets among his personal friends He was fond of encouraging the rising talent of his pro-