this world to him—­in the bloom of youth, with fond attachments, and with all the fascinating charms of health and innocence; to his death I look back even in this moment with rapture.  I have travelled much, and seen various parts of the world, and I think the Irish are the most virtuous nation on the face of the earth—­they are a good and brave people, and had I a thousand lives I would yield them in their service.  If it be the will of God that I suffer for that with which I stand charged, I am perfectly resigned to His holy will and dispensation.  I do not wish to trespass much more on the time of those that hear me, and did I do so an indisposition which has seized on me since I came into court would prevent my purpose.  Before I depart from this for a better world I wish to address myself to the landed aristocracy of this country.  The word ‘aristocracy’ I do not mean to use as an insulting epithet, but in the common sense of the expression.

“Perhaps, as my voice may now be considered as a voice crying from the grave, what I now say may have some weight.  I see around me many, who during the last years of my life have disseminated principles for which I am now to die.  Those gentlemen, who have all the wealth and the power of the country in their hands, I strongly advise, and earnestly exhort, to pay attention to the poor—­by the poor I mean the labouring class of the community, their tenantry and dependents.  I advise them for their good to look into their grievances, to sympathize in their distress, and to spread comfort and happiness around their dwellings.  It might be that they may not hold their power long, but at all events to attend to the wants and distresses of the poor is their truest interest.  If they hold their power, they will thus have friends around them; if they lose it, their fall will be gentle, and I am sure unless they act thus they can never be happy.  I shall now appeal to the right honourable gentleman in whose hands the lives of the other prisoners are, and entreat that he will rest satisfied with my death, and let that atone for those errors into which I may have been supposed to have deluded others.  I trust the gentleman will restore them to their families and friends.  If he shall do so, I can assure him that the breeze which conveys to him the prayers and blessings of their wives and children will be more grateful than that which may be tainted with the stench of putrid corpses, or carrying with it the cries of the widow and the orphan.  Standing as I do in the presence of God and of man, I entreat him to let my life atone for the faults of all, and that my blood alone may flow.

“If I am then to die, I have therefore two requests to make.  The first is, that as I have been engaged in a work possibly of some advantage to the world, I may be indulged with three days for its completion; secondly, that as there are those ties which even death cannot sever, and as there