their light from beneath broad and shaggy brows, exhibited a mind whose faculties it did not seem to be in the power of time to impair." His gifts of personal attraction and pulpit eloquence did not, however, arouse the enthusiastic affection in which he was held. "It not unfrequently happened that he was in formed in the midst of a winter's night that some person at a considerable distance from the college was on the point of death. The old man, who did not seem to know what hardship was, would leap from his hard bed, and having hurried on his clothes, would go forth with a lantern, attended by a lay-brother of the Order, and making his way over the fens and morasses by which the college was surrounded, hasten to the door of the expiring sinner, and arrive at his bedside in time to speed his soul to heaven."

Sheil's studies at Stonyhurst were almost exclusively classical, and his success in their pursuit, to the injurious neglect, perhaps, of science, is constantly exhibited in his oratory, in which classical allusions are sometimes so common as to induce weakness, and present the appearance of affectation.

His

From Stonyhurst, Sheil went to Trinity College, in which he acquired no distinction, except as an eccentric member of the historical society. His earlier efforts at oratory gave little promise of his future renown. style was stilted and wearisome, overburdened with ornament, and lacking in incisiveness; he was immersed in the past, and his thoughts were engaged with the nations, the heroes, the achievements, and the literature of antiquity. His voice was shrill, of small register, and of slight volume. His personal manners-abstracted rather than awkward, but never uncouth-won him few friends.

He

was considered a student of books, with large acquisitive capacity; but nobody suspected that he would ever occupy a front place in the highest

From Dublin he

rank of orators. went to Lincoln's Inn, and having completed the law course, returned to Ireland in 1813.

Sheil's dramatic career, brief and not without reward, seems to have been inspired by necessity rather than choice. His father, who was engaged in trade in Dublin, failed, and Sheil found himself without the means necessary to enter upon legal practice. Dramatic writing was at that time as popular as journalism now, and impecunious clever young men, especially Irishmen, turned to it, in the hope of money if not of fame, with the readiness with which their countrymen now flock into newspaper work; and commonly, with the same intention of making it only an accommodating shift-the stepping-stone to something permanent and more profitable. It was in fact a period prolific of all kinds of popular literature, and the stage, and the periodicals, which were gradually being transformed from essays, of which the fashion had been set by Montaigne, and successfully introduced into English by Addison and Steele, into monthlies, weeklies, and dailies, engrossed popular attention to an extraordinary degree. There was an intimate alliance between the dramatic profession and the journalists.

They were both revelling in a new license; they employed the same sensational methods of attracting the attention of the government and the people. The reviews, from dealing with men and events of classic or later antiquity, devoted themselves to the discussion of persons and politics; and the stage, elevated by the genius of Shakspeare and the rank of Beaumont from disrepute into respectability, had become the most popular amusement the world has ever known, and had cast aside the themes, the usages, and the traditions of both Sophocles and Shakspeare, in order to represent society as it existed. Light literature, the periodicals, and the drama,

were the attractions of all classes of the people, and the talented among rich and poor equally clamored for distinction in one or the other.

It was essentially a period of literary invention and criticism, brilliant, dazzling, and largely transient. More men and women who wrote, from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, have been forgotten in proportion to the whole number writing, than at any previous epoch in English, and probably, also, in continental literature; for the same causes of literary production were at work contemporaneously in France. This fecundity was the inevitable result of the splendid success achieved by the few. It was the period of Swift, Goldsmith, Gay, Johnson, Scott, Garrick, Foote, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Talfourd, Southey, Charles Lamb, Byron, Moore, Shelley, Keats, Joanna Baillie, Campbell, Landor, Miss Mitford, Sheridan, Sidney Smith, and a multitude of men and women of less genius, but, while they lived, of as great notoriety. The Edinburgh Review had been established by Brougham, Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, and Horner; and the Quarterly Review became necessary to counteract its liberal opinions, the latter receiving its chief impetus from George Canning, who, in the same year, was challenged and wounded by the Irish traitor, Castlereagh, and who, a few years later, stepped abruptly into the place and power quitted by that misguided man in the infamy of suicide. Byron's savage but not wholly unjust epigram on Castlereagh shows at once the audacious quality of the writing of the time, as well as the estimation in which Englishmen held Irish trai

tors:

"So he has cut his throat at last! He? Who? The man who cut his country's long ago.'

Both the stage and the press were enjoying, in fact, their first season of carnival; both had been practically emancipated from arbitrary restraints,

with the exception of a libel statute, recourse to which, even in flagrant cases, too often resulted in a farthing's damages and a popular cheer for the defendant, which the latter not unnaturally construed into a cry of "go on!" The press was watched, especially in Ireland, where the iron hand of the government lay very near the editor's pens; but in England and Scotland any man capable of writing bitter brilliancy was sure to find a publisher and plenty of readers. Indeed, the independent condition of the Scottish periodicals attracted the talents of more than one Irishman, and Dr. Maguire was not the only wit who robbed his native land of a son's prestige, in order to increase the circulation of the London and Edinburgh Reviews.

It is curious, too, to note in what degree Ireland at that time furnished topics as well as talent to the British press. O'Connell, from 1810 to 1847, was, as he himself was wont to say, "the best-abused man," not in Ireland only, but in the United Kingdom. Even when absent from Parliament, he was the cynosure of all eyes, and the target for every shaft. "There are three great instances on record," says Lecky, "of politicians, discouraged by overwhelming majorities, seceding from Parliament. Grattan gave up his seat, and became utterly powerless in the country. Fox retired from the debate, though retaining his seat, and he, too, for a time, became little more than a cipher. O'Connell followed the example of Fox, but he drew with him the attention of Europe. In no previous portion of his career, not even when he had gained Emancipation from the humbled ministry of Wellington, did he attract greater attention or admiration. Whoever turns over the magazines or newspapers of the period will easily perceive how grandly he had dispelled the indifference that had so long prevailed on Irish questions, how clearly his agitation stands forth as the great

fact of the time." For many years Sheil shared the interest, the hate, and the admiration bestowed on O'Connell.

It was in the drama, however, that Sheil first secured a hearing. A careful authority states that his three plays "Adelaide," "Bellarmina,' and "Evadne"-"were written, for the purpose of giving new characters for embodiment by Miss O'Neil, the Irish tragedienne,' whom D'Arcy McGee characterizes as "accomplished and reproachless," and whose dramatic gifts won for her applause from "English bards and Scotch reviewers," notwithstanding her intense loyalty to her national traditions, and notwithstanding, also, that she suffered the contrast suggested by noted contemporaries, among whom was Mrs. Siddons, whose sun reached its setting as Miss O'Neil's dawned.

The facts appear to be, however, that Sheil wrote "Adelaide" for the purpose of paying the expenses of his call to the bar; and the "Apostate" and "Bellarmina" were inspired by the household necessities which followed his marriage, in 1816, with Miss O'Halloran, who was accomplished, beautiful, and dowerless. "Evadne," written in 1819, was the only one of his dramas which succeeded on its merits, and it is original only in the scenes and style, the substance of the play being found in "The Traitor," by James Shirley, an English dramatist of the sixteenth century, whose forty plays are all forgotten. The connection of Miss O'Neil with Sheil's dramatic efforts was an exceedingly fortunate circumstance for the author; she won for "Adelaide" a momentary success, simply because it was she who played in the leading rôle; she could not save the others, however; but "Evadne," with its vigorous action and spirited dialogue, added as much to her reputation as to Sheil's. The latter received some ten

Dr. Shelton Mackenzie, in the notes to the American edition (1872) of Noctes Ambrosiana.

thousand dollars altogether through his association with the stage, which was undoubtedly more than he could have earned at the bar.

McGee says that Miss O'Neil took lessons in attitude from Sheil. This is incredible; for, while the actress was in slight need of such instruction, Sheil was assuredly incapable of imparting it. He was well acquainted with the theory of grace, both in repose and movement; but any attempt on his part to illustrate the one or the other must have been extremely fantastic. He was small in stature, and wholly devoid of symmetry; his angular littleness affording a laughable foil for O'Connell's giant proportions when they spoke on the same platform. His face was neither pleasing nor expressive, and his gestures in oratory were inappropriate and ridiculous. He may have imparted to Miss O'Neil a more intelligent reading, a more delicate appreciation of his lines, and thus assisted her to heighten and refine those gradual shades of interpretation, in the producing of which, attitude or action, tone and glance, combine for the chiaroscuro of a histrionic picture. His dramatic. career was, in truth, almost entirely accidental. His own necessities were its direct inspiration; but it is scarcely probable that even necessity would have turned him into an occupation for which he was so little fitted mentally and physically, if it were not the urgent fashion for men of literary attainments to write a play or two. How many men, even the most demure, yielded to what must be pronounced a mere literary and social eccentricity, and temporarily withdrew from the bench, the bar, and the pulpit, forgot the dazzle of the drawing-room, and neglected the functions of the minister, or the aims of the politician, to steal, invent, or construct tragedies and comedies, which the most exalted genius of the stage, never more resplendent than at that time, could

perform only with the greatest difficulty, but could not even then rescue from inevitable ridicule! We need not wonder at Sheil. Besides, he was, in a measure, successful. "Evadne" and the "Apostate" still survive.

His Sketches of the Irish Bar, written in conjunction with Mr. Curran, son of the Irish advocate, attracted much attention, on account of their pungency of comment and aptness of personal characterization. They were widely read in the United Kingdom, English and Scotch interest being secured by the vehicle of their publication, The New Monthly Magazine, of which the poet, Thomas Campbell, was the editor. Sheil's indictment of Lord Norbury, him to whom Robert Emmet's tragical oration was addressed from the condemned prisoner's box, produced a marked sensation at the time, revealing, as it did, a curious and infamous piece of Irish political history. Lord Norbury was an intimate friend of Mr. Saurin, who, when Grattan was fighting the attempt to coerce the legislative union of England and Ireland, said, "If a legislative union should be so forced upon this country against the will of its inhabitants it would be a nullity, and resistance to it would be a struggle against usurpation, and not a resistance against law. You may make it binding as a law, but you cannot make it obligatory upon conscience. It will be obeyed as long as England is strong, but resistance to it will be in the abstract a duty, and the exhibition of that resistance will be a mere question of prudence."

Saurin, however, having thus opposed the Union, was one of the first to accept a personal profit from its infamous consummation, notwithstanding that the means resorted to -bribery, promises, and intimidation-were perfectly understood at the time, and have never been denied. Saurin became Attorney-General for Ireland in 1807, and proved one of the most malignant foes of

Catholic Emancipation. O'Connell, while holding his legal powers in the highest estimation, enjoyed nothing better in his public career than to have him for an opponent at the bar, and more than one of the Liberator's impassioned and terrific outbursts were aimed at his traitorous adversary, whom he charged again and again with trading in the misfortunes of his country.

Norbury was in the habit of stuffing papers into the old chairs in his study, "to supply," as Sheil wrote, "the deficiency of horsehair which an incumbency of eighty years had produced in their bottoms." When they were no longer fit for use, the chairs were disposed of to a furniture-dealer, who, in turn, sold them to his own advantage. One passed into the possession of a Mr. Monaghan, who had been an attorney's clerk, and who was familiar with the handwriting of Saurin, and whose curiosity led him to extract the contents of the cushion. He chanced to find a letter from Mr. Saurin to Lord Norbury, urging him, when exercising his judicial functions in Ireland, to do all that he could against Catholic Emancipation. The baseness of a law officer of the crown beseeching a chief justice of Norbury's well-known vindictiveness to use, for the most degraded and wicked of party purposes, the terrors of a bench which awarded life and death, excited the most intense indignation when Sheil published the unanswerable proofs; but although the writer of the letter was still amenable to justice, and the judicial conduct of its ermined recipient warranted the conviction that the request had been freely complied with, neither was subjected even to an inquiry.

The serious business of Sheil's life began with a speech on the Catholic question when he was twenty-two years old. This speech, strangely enough, was delivered before the Catholic Board in opposition to

O'Connell, and in favor of Emancipation qualified by the veto; and is chiefly remarkable on account of the equally surprising fact that O'Connell deemed it worthy of reply. Sheil's effort is spoken of as "a brilliant harangue," and one of the patriotic chronicles of the time, whose ardor led it into frequent censure from the government and prosecution in the courts, makes the naïve remark that "it is an honor to his country, although we cannot help thinking it directed against his country's dearest interests. O'Connell, however, said, by way of preface, that he would "unravel the flimsy web of sophistry which is hid beneath the tinsel glare of meretricious ornament," and that was a very correct description of Sheil's oratory for many years. The speech was all style-no substance; but the style astounded by its elaborateness, delighted by its grace, and amazed by its profuse and pedantic learning. The resolution before the Board was, that neither as Irishmen nor Catholics would they ever consent that the crown, or the servants of the crown, should have any right to interfere in the appointment of Irish Catholic bishops. This resolution was directed against what came to be called "the Veto," then assuming that conspicuousness which it held for so long a period in the progress of Catholic Emancipation, and constituting one of the most obstinate and difficult elements in the politics of the British kingdom. It was a proposition, made by the English government, that the ministers would be willing to entertain the idea of abrogating the penal laws and emancipating the Catholics, provided the English sovereign were given by the Pope a veto on the appointment of Catholic bishops in Ireland.

If it seem preposterous to us now, that such a proposition should have received kindly consideration among Catholics, not only in England and

Ireland, but even among the directors of Catholic interests in Rome, it should be remembered that the conditions which surrounded Emancipation constituted impediments apparently insurmountable; and that, so despairing was the prospect, the friends of Emancipation were ready to treat with the government upon any terms which the latter were willing to offer. The Veto found many sincere advocates among stanch Catholics outside Ireland, and many partisans among the truest patriots. who have ever lifted their voices in behalf of Ireland's woes; and the long and bitter controversy which attended its discussion until Pope Pius VII finally refused to accede to it, simply adds another to the many testimonies, that equally able and perfectly honest minds may radically differ as to the means of accomplishing the same end.

Sheil agreed with Grattan and the Irish nobles that Emancipation should be accepted, no matter in what form it could be obtained; they argued that if the disfranchised four-fifths of the people could acquire political power, it made little difference upon what pretence that power, which could never be taken away from them, should be gained. Once in their hands, they could use it for their defence; once in their hands, they could compel the government to restore legislative independence, and, in their own Parliament, sitting as of yore, in College Green, they could easily recover any insubstantial advantages which prudence had compelled them to surrender in order to secure the first step forward toward religious and legislative liberty.

Grattan, indeed, was eager to make Emancipation subservient to Repeal, but only because he confidently believed that Repeal was but another name for Emancipation, while he held, at the same time, that Emancipation contained no equally certain assurance of Repeal. O'Connell, with broader vision,