I despair of conveying to my readers an adequate idea of the gloom and horror of the scene in which those immortal words were spoken.  Death, near and terrible, was in the future.  The recollection of ten days’ infamy peopled the present with ghastly images of evil.  Vindictiveness inexorable glared from the bench.  The dust around the feet of the speakers was laden with guilt.  It would not rise to the briskest breeze, beneath the clearest sky, in light summer air, so heavy had the tread of murder been upon it.  And oh, to think when they closed their eyes upon this world, what deeper death they left their country ...  Will no day of vengeance come, O God! . . .

One of those benefits of the British constitution, which excites the mortal envy of benighted “surrounding nations,” is this, that the law lies to the face of death, in the usual question addressed to the condemned:  “Whether he had anything to say why sentence of death and execution should not be passed upon him?” when the most conclusive reasons that ever innocence had to offer would be worse than vain.  On the morning of the 9th of October, 1848, this barbarous mockery was addressed to William Smith O’Brien, and he answered thus:—­

MR. O’BRIEN.—­“My lords, it is not my intention to enter into any vindication of my conduct, however much I might have desired to avail myself of this opportunity of so doing.  I am perfectly satisfied with the consciousness that I have performed my duty to my country—­that I have done only that which, in my opinion, it was the duty of every Irishman to have done, and I am now prepared to abide the consequences of having performed my duty to my native land.  Proceed with your sentence.” (Cheers in the gallery.)

On the morning of the 23rd of the same month, the same formula was repeated to Terence Bellew MacManus, Patrick O’Donohoe, and Thomas Francis Meagher, who replied respectively as follows:—­

MR. M’MANUS.—­“My lords, I trust I am enough of a Christian and enough of a man to understand the awful responsibility of the question that has been put to me.  My lords, standing on this my native soil—­standing in an Irish court of justice, and before the Irish nation—­I have much to say why the sentence of death, or the sentence of the law, should not be passed upon me.  But, my lords, on entering this court, I placed my life, and what is of much more importance to me—­my honour—­in the hands of two advocates; and, my lords, if I had ten thousand lives, and ten thousand honours, I would be content to place them under the watchful and the glorious genius of the one and the high legal ability of the other.  My lords, I am content.  In that regard I have nothing to say.  But I have a word to say, which no advocate, however anxious, can utter for me.  I have this to say, my lords, that whatever part I may have taken through any struggle for my country’s independence—­whatever part I may have acted in that short career—­I