Henceforward the Irish Parliament drops away into all but complete insignificance.  After two or three abortive efforts to again bring forward reform, Grattan gave up the hopeless attempt, and retired broken-hearted from public life.  The “United Irishmen,” in the first instance an open political body, inaugurated and chiefly supported by Protestants, now rapidly changed its character.  Its leaders were now all at heart republicans, and thoroughly impregnated with the leaven of the French Revolution.  It was suppressed and apparently broken up by the Government in 1795, but was almost immediately afterwards reconstructed and re-organized upon an immense scale.  Every member was bound to take an oath of secrecy, and its avowed object had become the erection by force of a republican form of Government in Ireland.  The rebellion was bound to come now, and only accident could decide how soon.

[Illustration:  RIGHT HON.  EDMUND BURKE. (From a sketch from life.)]

LIII.

’NINETY-EIGHT.

It was not long delayed.  The Society of United Irishmen had now grown to be little more than a mere nest of Jacobinism, filled with all the turbulent and disaffected elements afloat in the whole country.  Of this society Wolfe Tone was the creator, guide, and moving spirit.  Any one who wishes to understand the movement rather as it originally took shape than in the form which it assumed when accident had deprived it of all its leaders, should carefully study his autobiography.  As he reads its transparent pages, brimful of all the foolish, generous enthusiasms of the day, he will find it not a little hard, I think, to avoid some amount of sympathy with the man, however much he may, and probably will, reprobate the cause which he had so at heart.

Amongst the other leaders of the rising were Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a brother of the Duke of Leinster, Arthur O’Connor, a nephew of Lord Longueville, Thomas Addis Emmett, elder brother of the better known Robert Emmett—­whose attempted rebellion in 1803, was a sort of postscript to this earlier one—­and the two Sheare brothers.  Compared to Wolfe Tone, however, all these were mere amateurs in insurrection, and pale and shadowy dabblers in rebellion.  Lord Edward was an amiable warm-hearted visionary, high-minded and gallant, but without much ballast, and to a great degree under the guidance of others.  The mainspring of the whole movement, as has been seen, was Protestant and Northern, and now that all hope of constitutional reform was gone, it was resolved to appeal openly to force and to call in the aid of the enemies of England to assist in the coming struggle.