Robert Emmet was born on the 4th of March, 1778.  He was the third son of Doctor Robert Emmet, a well-known and highly respectable physician of Dublin.  Thomas Addis Emmet, already mentioned in these pages, the associate of Tone, the Sheareses, and other members of the United Irish organization, was an elder brother of Robert, and his senior by some sixteen years.  Just about the period when the United Irishmen were forming themselves into a secret revolutionary society, young Emmet was sent to receive his education in Trinity College.  There the bent of the lad’s political opinions was soon detected; but among his fellow students he found many, and amongst them older heads than his own, who not only shared his views, but went beyond them in the direction of liberal and democratic principles.  In the Historical Society—­composed of the alumni of the college, and on whose books at this time were many names that subsequently became famous—­those kindred spirits made for themselves many opportunities of giving expression to their sentiments, and showing that their hearts beat in unison with the great movement for human freedom which was then agitating the world.  To their debates Emmet brought the aid of a fine intellect and a fluent utterance, and he soon became the orator of the patriot party.

So great was the effect created by his fervid eloquence and his admirable reasoning, that the heads of the college thought it prudent on several occasions to send one of the ablest of their body to take part in the proceedings, and assist in refuting the argumentation of the “young Jacobin.”  And to such extremities did matters proceed at last that Emmet, with several of his political friends, was expelled the college, others less obnoxious to the authorities were subjected to a severe reprimand, and the society, thus terrorised and weakened, soon ceased to exist.  Our national poet, Thomas Moore, the fellow-student and intimate friend of young Emmet, witnessed many of those displays of his abilities, and in his “Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald,” speaks of him in terms of the highest admiration.  “Were I,” he says, “to number the men among all I have ever known who appeared to me to combine in the greatest degree pure moral worth with intellectual power, I should, among the highest of the few, place Robert Emmet.”  “He was,” writes the same authority, “wholly free from the follies and frailties of youth—­though how capable he was of the most devoted passion events afterwards proved.”  Of his oratory, he says, “I have heard little since that appeared to me of a loftier, or what is a far more rare quality in Irish eloquence, purer character.”  And the appearance of this greatly gifted youth, he thus describes:  “Simple in all his habits, and with a repose of look and manner indicating but little movement within, it was only when the spring was touched that set his feelings, and through them his intellect in motion, that he at all rose above the level of ordinary men.  No two individuals indeed could be much more unlike to each other than was the same youth to himself before rising to speak and after; the brow that had appeared inanimate and almost drooping, at once elevating itself to all the consciousness of power, and the whole countenance and figure of the speaker assuming a change as of one suddenly inspired.”