Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/139

 10-- s. iv. AUG. 5,1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES. Ill 'English Dictionary,' 1740, certainly under- stood this word in the sense of " to bend one's mind to," French plier and Latin incumbo. To ply one's oars is to bend on them in rowing ; to ply one's trade is to bend one's mind to it, folding (plicare) itself being a bending process. J. HOLDEN MACMICHAEL. SARAH CURRAN, EGBERT EMMET, AND MAJOR SIRR'S PAPERS (10th S. iii. 303, 413, 470; iv. 52).—Madden (vol. iii. p. 513), in his reference to the destruction of Sarah Curran's letters by Major Sirr, gives it on "good authority "—i.e., Phillips's ' Curran and his Contemporaries.1 I have not any of the earlier editions of this book, and it must be from one of them that Dr. Madden quotes. In the edition I have (the fifth) no reference is made to the weeping over the letters or the destruction of them. Does this mean that Phillips had ceased to believe that either the weeping or the burning had taken place 1 In his preface to this last edition (published after the first edition of Madden had ap- peared) he claims for it that "a variety of anecdotes have also been introduced, and one or two omitted, which did not seem sufficiently authenticated." I venture to suggest that we seem to have travelled a long way from my original query anent Mr. O'Harte's statement of a sealed box which contained, amongst other documents, "all the letters of Robert Emmet's father and mother with the celebrated love letters from Sarah Curran to Emmet (which Major Sirr, of 1798 memory, found so pathetic that he says he wept over them " (O'Harte's ' Irish Pedigrees,' appendix, note, p. 544). If these letters are discovered, then, and only then, can the terrible charge of J. D. S. be finally confirmed or refuted. If J. D. S. was really Major Sirr's son, it seems strange that he should carefully defeat his father's humane intentions about the letters. If J. D. S. was the Rev. DArcy Sirr, his charge against Sarah Curran is a very serious one, and all possible information on the subject should be gathered. If J. D. S. was only " some underling in the major's battalion " {Madden, vol. iii. p. 514), then his opinion or assertion may be safely disregarded. It must be remembered that not unfre- •quently it has been stated that documents have been destroyed, and yet subsequently those documents have been found. The famous letters of Swift to Vanessa were stated to be destroyed, but were afterwards found in transcript in the possession of the Rev. Edward Berwick. The Wickham papers —Union and Emmet insurrection period— were stated to have been destroyed, but "his grandson tells me that the papers are safely in his possession" ('Secret Service under Pitt,' p. 193, note). Since writing the above I have carefully read MB. MACDONAGH'S book ' The Viceroy's Post-Bag.' It cannot be held to settle the question, Did or did not Major Sirr destroy Sarah Curran's letters? because in this book only two letters of hers and one of Emmet's are given—all that MR. MAcDoNAGH found. That other letters once existed is evident, as Emmet writes from prison: "I was seized and searched with a pistol over me, before I could destroy your letters. They have been, compared with those found before." MR. SIRR, therefore, is so far right that these two letters now published were not the whole correspondence. The Chief Secretary, Mr. Wickham, states that when Major Sirr went to the Priory to arrest Sarah Curran and to search for letters, she fell into convulsions, and while he and her younger sister were assisting her, her eldest sister, Amelia Curran, " continued to destroy some papers, the few scraps of which that were saved were in Mr. Emmet's hand- writing." This seems to indicate that they had been too much torn to be read, though the handwriting might be recognized. In the Hardwicke correspondence there is no indication that there was anything "atro- cious " or " diabolical " in the letters seized. As Emmet's letters were destroyed by the eldest Miss Curran, J. D. S. cannot have seen them "sealed up in six or seven immense piles, occupying a yard square." and then "deliberately consumed." In the two letters of Sarah Curran in ' The Viceroy's Post-Bag,' though her father's name is not mentioned, yet it is evident that she felt acute remorse at having concealed her engagement from him. She attributes all her misfortunes to her failure in duty, and even terms her attachment" a perverse in- clination." Of " this departure from duty " she tells her lover : " Such is the perfect con- fidence that I feel subsists between us that I have no fear of misconstruction on your part of any uneasiness I feel. On the con- trarv, I know you share it, and cannot think it blameable. At all events. I wish you to know me exactly as I am." In a second letter, written in the expectation that the ocean would soon part them for ever, she remarks: " I should wish you to re- collect that the violation of promise or duty brought most abundantly with it its punish- ment " ; and there are other passages of like import. The writer of those letters was