CURRAN. 317 government of the country employed two reporters with liberal salaries and lucrative patronage, to take care of the speeches of the ministerial members. Two newspapers with large allowances were entirely devoted to the pur- pose, and many or most of the speakers from the treasury benches, anxious to display their talents and utility, gene- rally wrote their own speeches and sent them to the government prints.But with the popular newspapers, the case was quite different. They were generally in the hands of needy or parsimonious printers; and for each paper a single reporter, at the enormous salary of two guineas per week! attended in the gallery to note and detail the eloquence of the opposition orators, from the sitting of the house to its rising, frequently a period of eight, ten, or twelve hours a night; and then they adjourned to their printing offices, fatigued and exhausted in mind and body, to give such a sketch of the discussion as a news-printer had room or inclination to insert. Many of those reporters were men of considerable ability, and not as Mr. Hardy, the biographer of Lord Charlemont, has stated "the most ignorant and illiterate of the human race," but as competent to the task as any of those employed for the like purpose in London, where siz or eight are some- times engaged for each print. It is hoped this short and true explanation will, once for all, plead apology for the historians of Irish parliamentary eloquence, whose wretched emoluments were so utterly inadequate to remunerate their exertions; and who, to perform the task they have been charged with neglecting, must have had constitutions and capacities more than human Mr. Curran was not more fortunate in the details of his forensic orations; for the reporter in the law courts and in the house of commons was one and the same, and in- cluded both duties under the one miserable stipend. Short- hand was scarcely known in the country at the time, save by one or two gentlemen of the bar, to whose labours the world is indebted for the only sketches extant of Mr. Curran's speeches, approachiog to any thing like perfect
