360 CURRAN. spirits of human evil, and smiting with plague, and famine, and the sword. "Some criticism has been wasted on the presumed defi- ciencies of Curran's speeches on those memorable trials Throwing off the publie fact that those speeches were all un- corrected copies, Curran was of all orators the most dificult to follow by transcription. His elocution, rapid, exu- berant, and figurative in a signal degree, was often com- pressed into a pregnant pungency which gave a sentence in a word. The word lost, the charm was undone. But his manner could not be transferred, and it was created for his style. His eye, hand, and figure were in perpetual speech. Nothing was abrupt to those who could see him; nothing was lost, except when some flash would burst out, of such sudden splendour as to leave them suspended and dazzled too strongly to follow the lustres that shot after it with restless illumination. Of Curran's speeches, all have been impaired by the difficulty of the period, or the imme- diate circumstances of their delivery. Some have been totally lost. His speech on the trial of the two principal conductors of the conspiracy, the Shears's, barristers and men of family, was made at, midnight, and said to have been his most masterly effusion of pathetic eloquence Of this no remnant seems to have been preserved. The period was fatal to their authenticity.o When Erskine pleaded, he stood in the midst of a secure nation, and pleaded like a priest of the temple of justice, with his on the altar of the constitution, and all England below prepared to treasure every fantastie oracle that came from his lips. Curran pleaded, not on the floor of a shrine, but on a scaffold, with no companions but the wretched and culpable men who were to be plunged from it hour by hour, and no hearers but the multitude, who crouded anxious to that spot of hurried execution, and then rushed away glad to shake off all remembrance of scenes which had agitated and torn every heart among them. It is this which puts hiş speeches beyond the hand
