Speeches from the Dock, Part I by Various
page 58 of 276 (21%)
page 58 of 276 (21%)
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This affecting address was spoken--as we learn from the painstaking and
generous biographer of the United Irishmen, Dr, Madden--"in so loud a voice as to be distinctly heard at the outer doors of the court-house; and yet, though he spoke in a loud tone, there was nothing boisterous in his manner; his accents and cadence of voice, on the contrary, were exquisitely modulated. His action was very remarkable, its greater or lesser vehemence corresponded with the rise and fall of his voice. He is described as moving about the dock, as he warmed in his address, with rapid, but not ungraceful motions--now in front of the railing before the bench, then retiring, as if his body, as well as his mind, were spelling beyond the measure of its chains. His action was not confined to his hands; he seemed to have acquired a swaying motion of the body when he spoke in public, which was peculiar to him, but there was no affectation in it." At ten o'clock, p.m., on the day of his trial, the barbarous sentence of the law--the same that we have so recently heard passed on prisoners standing in that same dock, accused of the same offence against the rulers of this country--was passed on Robert Emmet. Only a few hours were given him in which to withdraw his thoughts from the things of this world and fix them on the next. He was hurried away, at midnight, from Newgate to Kilmainham jail, passing through Thomas-street, the scene of his attempted insurrection. Hardly had the prison van driven through, when workmen arrived and commenced the erection of the gibbet from which his body was to be suspended. About the hour of noon, on the 20th of September, he mounted the scaffold with a firm and composed demeanour; a minute or two more and the lifeless remains of one of the most gifted of God's creatures hung from the cross beams--strangled by the enemies of his country--cut off in the bloom of youth, in the prime of his physical and intellectual powers, because he had loved his own land, hated her |
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