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invulnerable } in whose pure and polished convex , ere the lifted blow has fallen , the tyrant beholds his own image and is turned into stone : —it is at those periods that the honest man
dares not speak , because truth is too dreadful to be told ; , it is then , humanity has no ears , because humanity has no tongue . It is then the protid man scorns to speak , but Hke a physician baffled by the wayward excessei of his dying patient , retires incl&gnantJy frofn the bed of an unhappy wretch , whose ear is too fastidious to bear the
sound of wholesome advice , whose palate is too debauched to bear the salutary bitter of the medicine that might redeem him ; and therefore leaves him to the felonious piety of the slaves , that talk to him of life and strip him before he is cold .
8 . Ii ish Informers . I speak not now of the public proclamation for informers , with a promise *> f stferepy and of extravagant reward ; I speak « ofc of the fate of -those horrid wretches who "have been
so often transferred from the ( witness table to the dock , and from the dock to the pillory ^ I speak of what your own eyes have seem day after day during the course of this commission , from the box where you are now sitting ; the number of horrid miscreants who avowed upon their oaths , that
they had come from the very seat of government , —from the Castle , where they had been worked upon by the fear of death and the hope of compensation , to give evidence against their fellows , —( each a proof ) that the mild and wholesome councils of this government are holdeu over those
catacombs oflivingdeath , where the wretch that is buried a man , lies until his heart has time to fester and dissolve , and is then dug up a witness ! Is this fancy * is it . fact ? Have you not seen him after his resurrection from that tomb ,- —after having been dug out of the region of death and
corruption , make his appearance upon the table , the living imag > e of life and death , and the sovereign arbiter of both ? Have you not marked , when he entered ,, how the stormy wave > of the multitude retired at his approach ? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy < of his power , in the undissembled homage
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of deferential horror ? How his glan ce * like the lightning from heaven , seemed to rive the body of the accused , and mark it for the grave , while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe
and death ;—a death which no inno ~ ceuce can escape , no art elude , no force resist ? There was an antidotea juror ' s oath $ but ev £ n tl'iat adamantine chain that bound the integrity of hian to the throne of eternal ju ^ tjeef , is solved atid rne I fed iri the breath Hlat
issues from the informer ' s mouTh ; cbnscience wings from her mooVnigs , and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety in the surrender of the victim :- — Et qnac sibi quisque timebat Unius in rniseri exitium couversa tuJere .
9- From Mr . C . ' s Defence of Finnerty t charged with a Libel for having published an exposure of the unjust conduct of the Irish Government in their treatment of Mr . Orr 9 who had been executed-as a Consoirator . The
cirstances ofthis treatment will be learnt front the Extract . But , gentlemen , in order to bring the charge of insolence and vulgarity to the test , let me ask you whether you know of any language which
could have adequately described the idea of mercy denied , where it ought to have been granted $ or of any phrase vigorous enough to convey the indignation which an honest man would have felt on such a subject ? Let me
heg of you for a moment to suppose that any of you had been the writer of this very severe expostulation with the Viceroy , and " that you had been the witness of the whole progress of that never-to-fce-forgotten catastrophe . Let me suppose that \ ou had kiiown
the charge oil which Mr . Orr had been apprehended , the charge of abjuring that bigotry which h ? id torn and disgrared his country , of pledging himself to restore the people of his country to their place in the Constitution , and of binding himself never to be the betra \ er of iiis fellow la I oure r i ? i that
enterprize ;—that you had seen him upon that charge taken from his industry and confined in a - * ol ; that through the slow and lingering progress of twelve tedious months you had seen him confined in a dungeon , shut out from the common use of air and of
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546 Specimens of Mr . Curran ' s Eloquence .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1818, page 546, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2480/page/10/
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