Vol. VIII.
No. 7.
BOSTON.
July, 1896.
THOMAS ADDIS EMMET. By A. Oakey Hall. •' Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?" — Milton 's Epitaph on Shakespeare. THERE was an Irish lawyer who took the place at the New York Bar left vacant by the untimely death of Alexander Hamilton, who like him was an emigre from British dominions. His name was Thomas Addis Emmet, whose face and virtues are commemorated on a white marble shaft that faces every pedestrian who passes St. Paul's church on lower Broadway in New York City. The tradition of its Bar and its law reports during the first quarter of this cen tury keep his legal memory green. Con sidered as a mere man, the name of Thomas Addis Emmet is one for Irishmen every where to conjure with as having been a martyr to their revolutionary animosity to ward Great Britain. He was born in Cork, Ireland, twelve years before America's Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, was promul gated. His parents were of the first class of Irish commoners, his father being a physician of eminence; and Thomas was younger brother of the Robert Emmet whose first and also last speech in court has been read and re-read by every lawyer, and whose memory lives in song, under the shining light of Thomas Moore's Irish Melo dies. Thomas Addis Emmet was educated by his sire to follow in his own professional footsteps, and having that end in view, passed through Trinity College, Dublin, and in time received his degree of M.D.; but participation in a debating society
turned his sympathies toward the Irish Bar, and in more good time he joined it as a barrister of fine promise. A valuable open ing career attended his maiden efforts, when it was interrupted by his soon joining the United Irishmen, who as a society had organized to combat the rising English feel ing toward a Union, and a dissolution of Ireland's national parliament. He and his brother Robert collaborated in patriotic writings and perhaps rash undertakings which the English government called trea son. Together they crossed to the Conti nent in hopes of enlisting foreign aid, and at Brussels the younger brother saw his elder depart to engage in Irish rebellion, and to meet with unexampled courage a fate which, but for the Muses of History, might have been termed ignominious. Thomas Addis also followed his brother Robert to Ireland, himself only to be ar rested for treason, and imprisoned in Scot land, and in that Kilmainham jail made also famous in later times by the cells of O'Connell and Parnell. But as the Irish chroniclers of that day have said, the Eng lish government remained satisfied with the death of one Emmet, and so gave Thomas and his wife — who had shared his impris onment — their freedom, on condition that they left their native country never to return to it. They exiled themselves first to Paris, and next to New York, where they were received with open arms by its governor, -73
