of the restraints laid upon Irish trade and prosperity.  Upon the outbreak of the America war a two years’ embargo was laid upon Ireland, and a force of 4,000 men raised and despatched to America at its expense.  The state of defencelessness in which this left the country led, as will be seen in a succeeding chapter, to a great volunteer movement, in which all classes and creeds joined enthusiastically.  Flood was unable to resist the contagion.  His voice was once again heard upon the liberal side.  He flung away the trammels of office, surrendered his large salary, and returned to his old friends.  He never, however, regained his old place.  A greater man had in the meanwhile risen to the front, and in Henry Grattan Irish aspiration had found its clearest and strongest voice.

This was a source of profound mortification to Flood, and led eventually to a bitter quarrel between these two men—­patriots in the best sense both of them.  Flood tried to outbid Grattan by pushing the concessions won from England in the moment of her difficulty yet further, and by making use of the volunteers as a lever to enforce his demands.  This Grattan honourably, whether wisely or not, resisted, and the Parliament supported his resistance.  After an unsuccessful attempt to carry a Reform Bill, Flood retired, to a great degree, from Irish public life, and not long afterwards succeeded in getting a seat in the English Parliament.  His oratory there proved a failure.  He was “an oak of the forest too great and old,” as Grattan said, “to be transplanted at fifty.”  This failure was a fresh and a yet more mortifying disappointment, and his end was a gloomy and somewhat obscure one, but he will always be remembered with gratitude as one of the first who in the Irish Parliament lifted his voice against those restrictions under which the prosperity of the country lay shackled and all but dead.

XLIX.

HENRY GRATTAN.

“Great men,” wrote Sydney Smith, sixty years ago in an article in The Edinburgh Review, “hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.  What Irishman does not feel proud that he lived in the days of Grattan?  Who has not turned to him for comfort from the false friends and open enemies of Ireland?  Who did not remember him in the days of its burnings, wastings, and murders?”

Grattan is, indeed, pre-eminently the Irish politician to whom other Irish politicians—­however diverse their views or convictions—­turn unanimously with the common sense of admiration and homage.  Two characteristics—­usually supposed in Ireland to be inherently antagonistic—­met harmoniously in him.  He was consistently loyal and he was consistently patriotic.  From the beginning to the end of his career his patriotism never hindered him either from risking his popularity whenever he considered duty or the necessities of the case required him to do so; a resolution which more than once brought him into sharp collision with his countrymen, on one occasion even at some little risk to himself.