After forcing parliamentary independence the Volunteers meekly disbanded, and the United Irishmen took their place.  The brilliancy of Grattan’s parliament never fulfilled national aspirations.  Bristol was succeeded by another recruit from the aristocracy—­Lord Edward Fitzgerald.  With Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet he has become legendary.  All three attained popular canonization, for all three sealed their brief leadership with death.

Lord Edward was a dreamer, an Irish Bayard, too chivalrous to conspire successfully and too frankly courageous to match a government of guile.  Tone was far more dangerous.  He realized that foreign invasion was necessary to successful rebellion, and he allowed no scruple or obstacle in his path.  He washed his hands of law and politics entirely.  To divert Napoleon to Ireland was his object and the total separation of Ireland his ambition.  The United Irishmen favored the invasion, which the Volunteers had been formed to repel.  The feud between moral and physical force broke out.  The failure of the sterner policy in 1798 did not daunt Emmet from his ill-starred attempt in 1803.  He combined Lord Edward’s chivalry with some abilities worthy of Tone, but he failed.  The failure he redeemed by a swan-song from the dock and a demeanor on the scaffold which have become part of Irish tradition.

After the Union, Irish leaders sprang up in the English House, which Pitt had unwittingly made the cockpit of the racial struggle.  Far from absorbing the Irish element, the Commons found themselves forced to resist, rally, and finally succumb.

The Irish House cannot be dismissed without mention of Curran.  He was a brilliant enemy of corruption and servility.  O’Connell said “there was never so honest an Irishman,” which may account for his greater success as a lawyer than a politician.  To be an Irish leader and a successful lawyer is given to no man.  For the former the sacrifice of a great career is needed.  This sacrifice Daniel O’Connell was prepared to make.  His place in history will never be estimated, for few have been so loved or hated, or for stronger reasons.  Never did a tribune rising to power lift his people to such sudden hope and success.  Never did a champion leave his followers at his death and decline to more terrible despair.  Friend and foe admit his immensity.  He was the greatest Irishman that ever lived or seemingly could live.  In his own person he contained the whole genius of the Celt.  Ireland could not hold his emotions, which overflowed into the world for expression.  He rose on the crest of a religious agitation, but, Emancipation won, he had the foresight to associate the Irish cause with the advent of Reform and Liberalism throughout Europe.  He sounded the notes of free-trade and anti-slavery.  What he said in parliament one day, Ireland re-echoed the next.  To her he was all in all, her hero and her prophet, her Messias and her strong deliverer.  On the continent he roughly personified Christian Democracy.