Rashness, and the immediate ruin consequent upon it, two things which men can taste, smell, handle, hear, and see, are not redeemed, in their opinion, by anything so unsubstantial as motive. History, a tissue of externals, cannot afford to take account of that. Hence it falls out that certain spirits are finally given over, with their illegitimate deeds in arm, to folk-lore and balladry. Of these are Charlotte Corday, and John Brown of Ossawatomie, and Robert Emmet. There is no need of exculpating them in the forum of the people, where they were never held to be at fault; and exculpation is a waste of words to the rest of us. We understand too well what social havoc these pure-eyed hot-hearted angels bring in their wake, when they condescend to interfere with our fixed affairs. They call into being in their own despite our most self-protective measures: measures, in short, which amount to an international coalition against the undesirable immigrant. Relentless inhospitality to such innovators, in every generation and in every clime, is the habit of this planet. Such as our affairs are, we do not seem to wish them made over into duplicates of those of the Kingdom of Heaven. The executed meddlers, however, often take on an unaccountable posthumous grace, and may even be approached upon anniversaries in a mood none other than that of affectionate congratulation. The anomaly of our own situation has passed with their death: though they never change, we grow up in time to be Posterity, and to see with them the ultimate correlations of things, in a region of intellectual space where nothing goes by its old name. To be unbiassed and Irish is to love Robert Emmet; to be generously English is to love him; to be American is to love him anyhow.
“Aristogeiton! here is for thy sword A myrtle of Mount Vernon, plucked this day.”
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. Edinburgh & London
[1] The name in the original MS. was probably Burrowes.
[2] The bracketed words are conjectures of the present writer. The MS. has suffered greatly from the damp, so as to be practically illegible in places.
Transcriber’s Note: Page 84, “n” changed to “in” (in a very clever)
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Robert Emmet, by Louise Imogen Guiney