Temple Emmet, with his beautiful thought-burdened head, a little like the young Burke’s, passed by like a wonderful apparition in his day. His success at Trinity College was complete; it is said the examiners found their usual maximum of commendation, _Valde bene_, unequal to the occasion, and had a special _O quam bene!_ given to him with his degree. This has a sort of historic parallel in the incident at Wadham College, Oxford, just a century before, when Clarendon, Lord Chancellor of the University, set a kiss for eulogy upon the boyish cheek of John Wilmot, Master of Arts. Again serving as his own precedent, Temple Emmet became King’s Counsel at twenty-five. Two years later he was in his grave, whither his young wife quickly followed him. All his contemporaries qualified to appraise his worth, deplored him beyond common measure. Said the great Grattan, long after: “Temple Emmet, before he came to the Bar, knew more law than any of the judges on the Bench; and if he had been placed on one side and the whole Bench opposed to him, he could have been examined against them, and would have surpassed them all; he would have answered better both in law and divinity than any judge or bishop in the land.” His premature death called his next brother from the University of Glasgow, where he had just graduated in medicine, to the profession of the law.
The Emmet name was not destined to rise like a star where it had fallen, for bitter times were drawing nigh, and his own generosity and integrity were to bring Thomas Addis Emmet into fatal difficulties. With a great number of other zealous spirits, he flung himself with all his force of protest against the legalised iniquities destroying Ireland. Examined before the secret committee of the House of Lords, August 10, 1798, the young man, then as always quietly intrepid, let fall brave prophetic words. Asked if he had been an United Irishman, he righted the tense in answering: “My Lords, I am one”; then he continued: “Give me leave to tell you, my Lords, that if the Government of this country be not regulated so that the control may be wholly Irish, and that the commercial arrangements between the two countries be not put upon a footing of perfect equality, the connection [with England] cannot last.” Lord Glentworth said: “Then your intention was to destroy the Church?” Mr. Emmet replied: “No, my Lord, my intention never was to destroy the Church. My wish decidedly was to overturn the Establishment.” Here Lord Dillon interrupted: “I understand you. And have it as it is in France?” “As it is in America, my Lords.” When the chance for self-expatriation came, when “to retract was impossible, to proceed was death,” Thomas Addis Emmet followed the ancestral trail, and founded a new family in his approved America. The only one of his circle spared to continue the Emmet name, he came to flower sadly enough, because his hopes were broken, on what was not to him alien soil. Everyone knows the rest: how, admitted to the New York Bar by suspension of rules, without probation, he died in all men’s honour, in 1827, Attorney-General of the State.