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 outlawry. Curran was elected to the Irish House of Commons for Banagher in May 1800. There followed the Act of Union, to which Curran was firmly opposed. In 1785 he declared that the union would be ‘the annihilation of Ireland.’ Disheartened with the sufferings of his country, weakened by a surgical operation, he thought of going to America, spent much time in England, especially with his friends Lord Moira and Godwin, and contemplated joining the English bar. In 1802, during the peace, he revisited Paris, and saw much of the Abbé Grégoire. He continued, however, his Irish practice. On 13 April 1801 he prosecuted at the Cork assizes Sir Henry Hayes for the abduction of a quaker heiress, Miss Pike. Hayes was convicted, sentenced to death, and ultimately transported. On 17 May 1802 he appeared for the plaintiff Hevey in an action tried before Lord Kilwarden against Sirr, the town-major of Dublin, for false imprisonment, and alleged against Sirr gross brutality towards Hevey during the insurrectionary period. He obtained a verdict for 150l. In February 1804 he prosecuted Ensign John Castley for a conspiracy to murder Father W. Ledwich; in July he appeared at the Ennis assizes in the celebrated crim. con. case for Mr. Massey against the Marquis of Headfort, and obtained the huge sum of 10,000l. damages. On 4 Feb. 1804 he appeared for Mr. Justice Johnson, who was prosecuted for a libel by him signed ‘Juverna,’ reflecting on Lord Hardwicke and Lord Redesdale and on other judges, and published in Cobbett's ‘Political Register’ on 5 Nov. 1803, Cobbett having given up his name after being convicted at Westminster. Johnson was found guilty and allowed to retire on his pension. Domestic trouble now overwhelmed Curran. His wife eloped with a clergyman named Sandys. When, in 1803, Robert Emmett was arrested after his brief and ill-fated insurrection of 23 July 1803, Curran's house was searched and he himself appeared before the privy council prepared to answer any inquiries, but he was generously treated. It appeared that Emmett was secretly attached to Sarah, Curran's youngest daughter, and had spent the hours when he might have escaped in lingering about the Priory to say farewell to her. Sarah left her father's house and went to a Mr. Penrose's at Cork, where she married a Captain Sturgeon, but in a few months died in Sicily of a broken heart, and was buried at Newmarket. To her Moore's lines, ‘She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,’ are addressed. These circumstances prevented Curran from defending Emmett as had been intended. He appeared, however, on 1 Sept. for several of the nineteen persons who were tried for complicity in this rising, though he spoke only on behalf of the tailor, Owen Kirwan. Kirwan was hanged on 3 Sept.

In 1806 Pitt died and the whigs came in, and Curran looked for his well-earned promotion. He desired the attorney-generalship. In 1789, when the opposition was formally constituted, it had been arranged that when they took office Ponsonby was to have the first and he the second legal post. The heads of the party in London seem to have intended that he should be attorney-general, but Lord Ellenborough refused to join a cabinet which sanctioned the appointment. It was difficult to know what to do for him. He was certainly unfit to be a judge. Grattan suggested an Irish bishopric. Ponsonby remaining silent, Curran employed a friend Burne to expostulate with him. Ponsonby then proposed that he should be master of the rolls, with a seat in the privy council. Curran was disposed to have refused; he was still in the prime of life and did not wish, as he said, ‘to be stuck in a window a spectator of the procession.’ His family, however, pressed him, and he accepted. To induce Sir Michael Smith, the then master of the rolls, to retire, a pension was promised to him and to each of his four inferior officers. Curran was not consulted about this, and when the short-lived ministry went out without having obtained grants for these pensions, Curran found himself expected to pay them to the amount of 800l. a year. This he refused to do, and Ponsonby was compelled to find the money, after which, to the end of their days, Curran and he were never reconciled. On the bench Curran was never at home. In spite of many efforts he could neither grasp the practice nor the principles of equity, and his only decision of any importance was that in Merry v. Power. Since the union Dublin society had lost much of its brilliancy, and after removing in 1807 to a house in Harcourt Street, and afterwards to 80 Stephen's Green South, he spent most of his time at the Priory, and took refuge as often as possible in England among his friends Lord Holland, Lord Erskine, Moore, and Godwin. He had some thoughts of writing a novel, some of writing memoirs, and did indeed commit to paper some of his views on Irish affairs. He spent a portion of the year 1810 in Scotland and at Cheltenham. For some time he and his friends had desired that he should be returned to the United Parliament to assist Grattan in his advocacy of catholic emancipation. This was not incompatible with his Irish judicial position. After some disappointed hopes