Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/80

 Philpot Curran. er provocation. If some figures were exag gerated, some imaginations necessary to be touched were dull and sluggish. And then he was an Irishman, with all his native bril liancy and constitutional weaknesses, blending imperceptibly the one into the other. Pa thos and humor, wit and sarcasm — all that enters into the composition of a master of emotional oratory were the nobility of his brain. The misty legends of a romantic past were the intellectual food of his earliest years, and as he grew older and began to view himself the moss-covered remains ofthat golden era, his imagination carried him into an emo tional love of the land of his nativity. The poetic nature of the mother manifested itself in the fancy of the son. Killarney's magic lakes, the glittering stars, the solitude of the hills, where poets glean the wild flow ers of the night, the ruined castles, eloquent with tales untold — all the poetry of nature permeated his personality. He was a part of nature's self. The un natural confinement of the artificial garden he never knew. He clambered over the hills and fields, associated with all kinds of men, and found, perchance, as much of poetry in the plain tale of wrinkled age as in the glow ing pages of the poets. Destined as he was to pass his life in the most exalted circles, he never learned to scorn the lowly cabins of his childhood. In the wild Celtic dance, the weird wake, the midnight carousal, and round the fireside of the humble, he learned men as well as books; and here he found that magic chain that bound him to his kind. By all the ties of consanguinity and association, he was bound to that great body of the common people who constituted the major part of the Irish population. In after years, he knew every chord that vibrates in the breast, from keeping alive and active every feeling of his own. Enriching his naturally brilliant mind with all the priceless lore of Greece and Rome, he cultivated his emotional nature in the university of experi j

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ence. And so we should expect to find in the oratory of Curran, that emotion and facts predominate over unembellished intellect and theory. A man of heart and feeling, he conveyed his messages in words of fire, and painted pictures that will live when canvas scenes have turned to dust. In rich and glowing sentences, with a voluptuous diction,, he painted pictures and touched the mind and heart as men have seldom done. To read his defense of Rowan and Finnerty is to know the knack of pouring forth one's heart in words — to feel the throb of a heart that long has ceased to beat. His forte was with a jury, where emotion plays the heaviest part. Still, when occasion called, as in the case of Justice Johnson, he could, in addressing a court, be as concise in statement, subtle in logic, and pure in taste as x>ur own Webster or Mason. His greatest efforts were reserved for more tempestuous occasions when, in the late hours of night, he arose in the light of flickering candles, and regardless of frowning arms and sneering judge and hostile audi ence, he bent all his matchless energy to the accomplishment of one end — to touch the heart and wring the conscience of a corrupt or intimidated jury. Then pictures beauti ful or horrid were^conjured up by his imagi nation and painted with "artistic skill; per jurers were lashed by his scorpion-like invective until they fled from the room to escape the lava of the awful truth; pathetic tales of persecution and suffering were re lated with a tenderness and vividness that bring tears to the eyes to-day; luí mor flashed, wit pierced, sarcasm lacerated, and as we float with him along the unresisting stream, we pass scenes of association sweet to the hearts of patriots, flowers and meadows, cabin and prison gloom, sunshine and shadow — all, — everything that wrings the heart and leads the will-power captive, combining to make us partisans of the speaker's cause. He was superb 'in invective. His denun