“THE GRAVE OF RUSSELL.”

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We have now closed our reference to the portion of Irish history comprised within the years 1798 and 1803, and as far as concerns the men who suffered for Ireland in those disastrous days our “Speeches from the Dock” are concluded.  We leave behind us the struggle of 1798 and the men who organized it; we turn from the records of a period reeking with the gore of Ireland’s truest sons, and echoing with the cries and curses of the innocent and oppressed; we pass without notice the butcheries and outrages that filled the land, while our countrymen were being sabred into submission; and we leave behind us, too, the short-lived insurrection of 1803, and the chivalrous young patriot who perished with it.  We turn to more recent events, less appalling in their general aspect, but not less important in their consequences, or less interesting to the present generation, and take up the next link in the unbroken chain of protests against British rule in Ireland with the lives and the fortunes of the patriots of 1848.  How faithfully the principles of freedom have been handed down—­how nobly the men of our own times have imitated the patriots of the past—­how thoroughly the sentiments expressed from the Green-street dock nineteen years ago coincide with the declarations of Tone, of Emmet, and of Russell—­our readers will shortly have an opportunity of judging.  They will see how all the sufferings and all the calamities that darkened the path of the martyrs of ’98 were insufficient to deter others, as gifted, as earnest, and as chivalrous as they, from following in their footsteps; and how unquenchable and unending, as the altar light of the fire-worshipper, the generous glow of patriotic enthusiasm was transmitted through generations, unaffected by the torrents of blood in which it was sought to extinguish it.

The events of our own generation—­the acts of contemporary patriots—­now claim our attention; but we are reluctant as yet to turn over the page, and drop the curtain on the scenes with which we have hitherto been dealing, and which we feel we have inadequately described.  We have spoken of the men whose speeches from the dock are on record, but we still linger over the history of the events in which they shared, and of the men who were associated with them in their endeavours.  The patriots whose careers we have glanced at are but a few out of the number of Irishmen who suffered during the same period, and in the same cause, and whose actions recommend them to the admiration and esteem of posterity.  Confining ourselves strictly to those whose speeches after conviction have reached us, the list could not well be extended; but there are many who acted as brave a part, and whose memories are inseparable from the history of the period.  We should have desired to speak, were the scope of our labours more extended, of the brave Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the gallant and the true, who sacrificed