of a borough formerly belonging to Lord Camelford, he accepted the invitation of the electors of Newry to contest that place in 1812 against General Needham, the government candidate. He was received with enthusiasm, and his horses taken out two miles from the town, but after one speech, almost the only considerable one to a purely popular assembly, he retired on 17 Oct., the sixth day of the contest, the numbers then being Needham 346, Curran 144. In 1814 there was some suggestion that he should contest Westminster, but he was indisposed to do so. Withdrawn from the active life of the bar, his mind preyed on itself, and falling into ill-health and the settled melancholy to which he was always prone, he retired from the bench in 1814 on a pension of 2,700l. a year, receiving on his retirement an address from the Roman catholic board. He travelled in France in June, and during the last year of his life resided entirely at 7 Amelia Place, Brompton. While still master of the rolls his melancholy led him to seek relief and amusement by asking junior barristers picked up in the hall of the Four Courts to the Priory rather than his old associates at the bar. Later, music, of which he was passionately fond, being himself a good performer on the violoncello, exasperated him beyond control. In the spring of 1817, while dining with Moore, he had a slight attack of paralysis and was ordered to Italy, but after a last visit to Dublin to arrange his affairs he returned to London in September, was seized with apoplexy on 8 Oct. and died on the 14th. He was buried privately on 4 Nov., and in 1834 his remains were removed by public subscription to a tomb at Glasnevin, designed by Moore, and at the same time a medallion was placed in St. Patrick's in Dublin. In spite of irregularities in his habits, ‘a prudence almost Scottish’ accumulated a fair fortune. He had at his death the Priory, ten or twelve thousand pounds in Irish 3½ per cents., and some sums in the American funds. To his wife he left 80l. a year for life; the only child mentioned in his will was his daughter Amelia. He had several children, William Henry, a member of the Irish bar and his biographer; Richard, also a barrister, who retired under a mental attack of settled melancholy; John, a captain in the navy; and James, who died in the East Indies. His daughters were Amelia, who died a spinster in Rome, and is buried in the church of St. Isidore; another, who married an English clergyman named Taylor; Sarah; and Gertrude, a child of great musical promise, to whom he was passionately attached, who died on 6 Oct. 1792, at the age of twelve. In figure he was under the middle height, with intensely bright black eyes, perfectly straight jet black hair, a thick complexion, and a protruding under-lip on a retreating face. Yet though very ugly, he was as a young man highly successful in his amours. There are two portraits of him, one, the most characteristic, by J. Comerford of Dublin, engraved in his son's life of him, the other by Sir T. Lawrence in Phillips's book. His knowledge of English literature was considerable, though he had an extraordinary antipathy to Milton; he read French much and with pleasure, and some Italian. His speeches were prepared while walking in his garden or playing the violoncello, but to write them out or even to prepare the words, spoilt, he found, the freedom of his eloquence. Though often turgid and pompous, they abound in passages of extraordinary eloquence, which made him the first orator of his time. But of their effect little judgment can be formed, for they were ill reported, and except in one or two cases he never would prepare them for the press, though offered considerable sums to do so—indeed he offered 500l. to suppress the existing editions. Croker, an observer by no means prejudiced in his favour, says: ‘I have heard four orators, Pitt, Canning, Kirwan, and Curran … perhaps Curran was the most striking, for you began by being prejudiced against him by his bad character and ill-looking appearance, like the devil with his tail cut off, and you were at last carried away by his splendid language and by the power of his metaphors’ (Croker Papers, iii. 215). His wit and conversational powers were so brilliant that they have almost eclipsed his reputation as a statesman and an advocate. At table the servants were frequently incapacitated from attending to the guests by laughter at his talk. During the peace of Amiens, when he was just falling into his later state of settled gloom, Dr. Birkbeck was with him in Paris, and said of him: ‘For five weeks there were not five consecutive minutes in which he could not make me both laugh and cry.’ Byron writes: ‘He has fifty faces and twice as many voices when he mimics. … I have heard that man speak more poetry than I have ever seen written, though I saw him seldom and but occasionally.’ Yet, on the other hand, when irritated or discomposed he could render himself inconceivably disagreeable. His tastes and mode of life were simple; but, partly owing to domestic circumstances, partly to the habits of the times, he was, especially in his earlier life, very convivial, and even dissolute. His dress was very shabby and dirty, and his manners fidgety. Of his judgment
