as friends, after sharing in our perils and elevating our destiny.  These were my objects; not to receive new taskmasters, but to expel old tyrants.  It was for these ends I sought aid from France; because France, even as an enemy, could not be more implacable than the enemy already in the bosom of my country.”

   [Here he was interrupted by the court.]

“I have been charged with that importance in the emancipation of my country, as to be consided the key-stone of the combination of Irishmen; or, as your lordship expressed it, ’the life and blood of the conspiracy.’  You do me honour over much; you have given to the subaltern all the credit of a superior.  There are men engaged in this conspiracy who are not only superior to me, but even to your own conceptions of yourself, my lord—­men before the splendour of whose genius and virtues I should bow with respectful deference, and who would think themselves disgraced by shaking your blood-stained hand.”

   [Here he was interrupted.]

“What, my lord, shall you tell me, on the passage to the scaffold, which that tyranny (of which you are only the intermediary executioner) has erected for my murder, that I am accountable for all the blood that has and will be shed in this struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor—­shall you tell me this, and must I be so very a slave as not to repel it?  I do not fear to approach the Omnipotent Judge to answer for the conduct of my whole life; and am I to be appalled and falsified by a mere remnant of mortality here?  By you, too, although if it were possible to collect all the innocent blood that you have shed in your unhallowed ministry in one great reservoir your lordship might swim in it.”

   [Here the judge interfered.]

“Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory, by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country’s liberty and independence; or that I could have become the pliant minion of power, in the oppression and misery of my country.  The proclamation of the Provisional Government speaks for our views; no inference can be tortured from it to countenance barbarity or debasement at home, or subjection, humiliation, or treachery from abroad.  I would not have submitted to a foreign oppressor, for the same reason that I would resist the foreign and domestic oppressor.  In the dignity of freedom, I would have fought upon the threshold of my country, and its enemy should enter only by passing over my lifeless corpse.  And am I, who lived but for my country, and who have subjected myself to the dangers of the jealous and watchful oppressor, and the bondage of the grave, only to give my countrymen their rights, and my country her independence, am I to be loaded with calumny, and not suffered to resent it?  No; God forbid!”

Here Lord Norbury told Mr. Emmet that