Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/499

 402

Within a few months they were to return to the Four Courts, their project a failure, and themselves criminals for whom Curran was to plead. Theobald Wolfe Tone was called to the bar in 1789, being twenty-six years old; but he was never in earnest in his profession, and spoke with contempt of his " silly wig and gown." In 1795 he was expatriated for participation in the Revolutionary movement, and went to America. From that time he lived through a romance before which fiction pales into commonplace. Desolate and friendless, he conceived the project of incit ing France to the invasion of Ireland. The conception was the vision of a madman; its fulfilment was the work of a genius. He left Philadelphia and landed in France in 1796, a pauper and unknown. He left Paris in ten months a chief of brigade, and one of an army of 15,000 men raised for the inva sion of his country. The failure of the three expeditions is matter of history. We meet Tone again when, having been captured on board a French frigate, he was taken to Dublin, tried by court-martial, and sentenced to death. Curran at once moved before Lord Kilwarden for a writ of habeas corpus to bring him up for civil trial. The writ was granted, but arrived too late. During the previous night Tone had opened an artery in his neck with a penknife. He lingered for eight days in great agony, and died in prison at the age of thirty-four. The trial of the Sheares in 1798 was in many ways the saddest and most solemn of any held in the Four Courts. Both men were rising juniors, as the phrase goes. To both of them rebellion seems to have been a romantic theory; they dabbled in treason as dilettanti, and only the arrest of the leaders of the movement and the lack of men of posi tion to fill the gap made the brothers rebels in deed. Their trial lasted a continuous twenty-four hours, and was marked throughout its weary length by the sympathy which the prisoners excited. It was at .midnight in a dense-

packed court that Curran rose to reply for the defence. Worn out in body and mind, he appealed to the judge for rest until he should have regained sufficient strength to combat the weight of evidence set out against him. His application was opposed by the Attorney-General and refused. Moved almost beyond himself by his old intercourse with the prisoners, his indignation at the haste of the prosecution, with no little sym pathy, perhaps, with the conduct he was called on to defend, Curran made an appeal to the jury almost awful in its impressiveness. But the charge was proved beyond hope of rebuttal, a verdict of " guilty " was brought in, and, on the application of the Attorney-General, the prisoners were hanged on the following day. Five years later Robert Emmet was brought up in the same court for instigating the rebellion in which Lord Kilwarden was murdered while on his way to the Four Courts. It is the last and perhaps the most remarkable of the list. Emmet knew that life was closed to him when he entered the dock. He had as his judge Lord Norbury, who when Attorney-General had conducted the prosecution of the Sheares. His one care was to deliver his Apologia, meant, as he said, for posterity, and unchecked by any fear of injuring his case. Hence we have the strange sight of a prisoner on trial for his life using the dock as vantage-ground from which to de liver a scathing attack on his judge and on the law of which he was the dispenser and head. Emmet was the only rebel of note at this time whom Curran did not defend. The secret attachment which existed between the young rebel and Miss Curran is an old story. It was unknown to the father until a government search at the house revealed a mass of correspondence between the two. It has supplied whatever romance is lacking in the plain story of these trials. There is no doubt that Emmet might have escaped from the country, had not the longing to say