It is to be feared that “little Robert” (the eldest of the children, afterwards Judge Robert Emmet of New York) did not receive his legacy. According to what testimony can be gathered, the watch which Emmet carried to the last was either presented to the executioner, or passed over to him with some understanding which has not transpired. Poor Emmet’s seal, a beautiful design of his own for the United Irishmen, went safely into friendly keeping; but most of his personal belongings worn on the scaffold, including his high Hessian boots and the stock with the precious hair sewed inside the lining, were actually sold at auction in Grafton Street, Dublin, during December, 1832. In this letter to his brother and sister, how piercing is the “I did hope,” iterated to them as to Richard Curran! It reminds us what a network of beneficent will and forethought made up that intense nature, and how the perishing leaf was but in the green. When the Lord Lieutenant, in the course of his industrious correspondence with his brother, sent to him, as a literary curio, a copy of Robert Emmet’s letter (Robert himself being newly dead), in reference to it, he hastens to add this significant sentence: “The letter to his brother will not be forwarded; but the passage respecting Miss Sarah Curran has been communicated to her father.” The Chief Secretary and Lord Hardwicke were joint contrivers of what seems to us (from the point of view of the most helpless of the persons chiefly concerned) an unnecessary if not unfeeling move. And Mr. Curran promptly replied to the former, the Right Honourable William Wickham, on the morrow (Hard. MS. 35,703, f. 158):—
“SIR: I have just received the honour of your letter, with the extract enclosed by desire of His Excellency. I have again to offer to His Excellency my more than gratitude, the feelings of the strongest attachment and respect for this new instance of considerate condescension. To you also, sir, believe me, I am most affectionately grateful for the part that you have been so kind as [to] take upon this unhappy occasion; few would, I am well aware, perhaps few could, have known how to act in the same manner.
“As to the communication of the extract, and the motive for doing so, I cannot answer them in the cold parade of official acknowledgment; I feel on the subject the warm and animated thanks of man to man, and these I presume to request that Lord Hardwicke and Mr. Wickham may be pleased to accept: it is, however, only justice to myself to say, that even on the first falling of this unexpected blow, I had resolved (and so mentioned to Mr. Attorney-General), that if I found no actual guilt upon her, I would act with as much moderation as possible towards a poor creature that had once held the warmest place in my heart. I did, even then, recollect that there was a point to which nothing but actual turpitude or the actual death of her parent ought to make a child an orphan; but even had I thought otherwise, I feel that this extract would have produced the effect it was intended to have, and that I should think so now. I feel how I should shrink from the idea of letting her sink so low as to become the subject of the testamentary order of a miscreant who could labour, by so foul means and under such odious circumstances, to connect her with his infamy, and to acquire any posthumous interest in her person or her fate. Blotted, therefore, as she may irretrievably be from my society, or the place she once held in my affection, she must not go adrift. So far, at least, ‘these protectors will not fall off.’