and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.

The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.

In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen years
later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the Act of
Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend the means
whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions that the people
of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan the following cry of
indignation and wrath:--

"To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may mortify,
but to affirm that her judgment _against_ is _for_; to assert that
she has said _ay_ when she has pronounced _no_; to affect to refer
a great question to the people; finding the sense of the people,
like that of the parliament, against the question, to force the
question; to affirm the sense of the people to be _for_ the
question; to affirm that the question is persisted in, because the
sense of the people is for it; to make the falsification of the
country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of
the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty,
honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,--there is,
in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility,
that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and
disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether
he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in
shameless and supreme contempt for it.