Vainglory is sometimes hidden under an air of modesty and reserve. People do not wish to proclaim their own merit, but they would be very glad that others should discover it. They would have the reputation both of virtue and of the desire to hide it.

As to the matter of speaking against ourselves, I do not either blame or recommend it. When it arises from true simplicity, and that hatred with which God inspires us for our sins, it is admirable, and thus I regard it in many holy men. But usually the surest and most simple way is not to speak unnecessarily of one's self, either good or evil. Self-love often prefers abuse to oblivion and silence; and when we have often spoken ill of ourselves, we are quite ready to be reconciled, just like angry lovers, who, after a quarrel, redouble their devotion to each other.

This simplicity is manifested in the exterior. As the mind is freed from this idea of self, we act more naturally, all art ceases, and we act rightly without thinking of what we are doing, by a sort of directness of purpose that is inexplicable to those who have no experience of it. To some we may appear less simple than those who have a more grave and practised manner; but these are people of bad taste, who take the affectation of modesty for modesty itself, and who have no knowledge of true simplicity. This true simplicity has sometimes a careless and irregular appearance, but it has the charm of truth and candor, and sheds around it I know not what of purity and innocence, of cheerfulness and peace; a loveliness that wins us when we see it intimately and with pure eyes.

How desirable is this simplicity! who will give it to me? I will quit all else to obtain it, for it is the pearl of great price.

SPEECH WHEN UNDER SENTENCE OF DEATH

BY ROBERT EMMET

MY LORDS, what have I to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced on me according to law? I have nothing to say that can alter your predetermination, nor that it will become me to say with any view to the mitigation of that sentence which you are here to pronounce and I must abide by. But I have that to say which interests me more than life and which you have labored (as was necessarily your office in the present circumstances of this oppressed country) to destroy. I have much to say why my reputation should be rescued from the load of false accusation and calumny which has been heaped upon it. I do not imagine that, seated where you are, your minds can be so free from impurity as to receive the least impression from what I am going to utter-I have no hopes that I can anchor my character in the breast of a court constituted and trammeled as this is-I only wish, and it is the utmost I expect, that your lordships may suffer it to float down your memories, untainted by the foul breath of prejudice, until it finds some more hospitable harbor to shelter it from the storm by which it is at present buffeted.

Was I only to suffer death after being adjudged guilty by your tribunal, I should bow in silence and meet the fate that awaits me without a murmur; but the sentence of law which delivers my body to the executioner will, through the ministry of that law, labor in its own vindication to consign my character to obloquy-for there must be guilt somewhere: whether in the sentence of the court or in the catastrophe, posterity must determine.

A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated, but the difficulties of established prejudice: the man dies, but his memory lives. That mine may not perish, that it may live in the respect of my countrymen, I seize upon this opportunity to vindicate myself from some of the charges alleged against me.

When my spirit shall be wafted to a more friendly port; when my shade shall have joined the bands of those martyred heroes who have shed their blood on the scaffold and in the field in defense of their country and of virtue, this is my hope: I wish that my memory and name may animate those who survive me, while I look down with complacency on the destruction of that perfidious government which upholds its dominion by blasphemy of the Most High-which displays its power over man as over the beasts of the forest; which sets man upon his brother and lifts his hand in the name of God against the throat of his fellow who believes or doubts a little more or a little less than the government standard-a government which is steeled to barbarity by the cries of the orphans and the tears of the widows which it has made

[Here Lord Norbury interrupted Mr. Emmet, saying that the mean and wicked enthusiasts who felt as he did were not equal to the accomplishment of their wild designs.]

I appeal to the immaculate God-I swear by the throne of heaven, before which I must shortly appear by the blood of the murdered patriots who have gone before me— that my conduct has been, through all this peril and all my purposes, governed only by the convictions which I

have uttered, and by no other view than that of their cure and the emancipation of my country from the superhuman oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed; and that I confidently and assuredly hope that, wild and chimerical as it may appear, there is still union and strength in Ireland to accomplish this noble enterprise. Of this I speak with the confidence of intimate knowledge and with the consolation that appertains to that confidence. Think not, my lord, I say this for the petty gratification of giving you a transitory uneasiness; a man who never yet raised his voice to assert a lie will not hazard his character with posterity by asserting a falsehood on a subject so important to his country and on an occasion like this. Yes, my lords, a man who does not wish to have his epitaph written until his country is liberated will not leave a weapon in the power of envy, nor a pretense to impeach the probity which he means to preserve even in the grave to which tyranny consigns him.

[Here he was again interrupted by the court.]

Again I say, that what I have spoken was not intended for your lordship, whose situation I commiserate rather than envy-my expressions were for my countrymen; if there is a true Irishman present, let my last words cheer him in the hour of his affliction.

[Here he was again interrupted. Lord Norbury said he did not sit there to hear treason.]

I have always understood it to be the duty of a judge, when a prisoner has been convicted, to pronounce the sentence of the law; I have also understood that judges some

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times think it their duty to hear with patience and to speak with humanity; to exhort the victim of the laws and to offer with tender benignity his opinions of the motives by which he was actuated in the crime of which he had been adjudged guilty that a judge has thought it his duty so to have done, I have no doubt-but where is the boasted freedom of your institutions, where is the vaunted impartiality, clemency, and mildness of your courts of justice, if an unfortunate prisoner, whom your policy, and not pure justice, is about to deliver into the hands of the executioner, is not suffered to explain his motives sincerely and truly, and to vindicate the principles by which he was actuated?

My lords, it may be a part of the system of angry justice to bow a man's mind by humiliation to the purposed ignominy of the scaffold; but worse to me than the purposed shame or the scaffold's terrors would be the shame of such foul and unfounded imputations as have been laid against me in this court. You, my lord, are a judge; I am the supposed culprit; I am a man, you are a man also; by a revolution of power we might change places, tho we never could change characters. If I stand at the bar of this court and dare not vindicate my character, what a farce is your justice? If I stand at this bar and dare not vindicate my character, how dare you calumniate it? Does the sentence of death which your unhallowed policy inflicts on my body also condemn my tongue to silence and my reputation to reproach? Your executioner may abridge the period of my existence; but while I exist I shall not forbear to vindicate my character and motives from your aspersions; and as a man to whom fame is dearer than life I will make the last use of that life in doing justice to that reputation which is to live after me, and which is the only legacy I can leave