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Born in 1778, died in 1803; became a leader of the United Irishmen, and in 1803 led an unsuccessful rising in Dublin; escaping to the mountains he returned to Dublin to take leave of his fiancée, Sarah Curran, daughter of the orator, and was captured and hanged.
My Lords:—What have I to say why sentence of death should not be pronounced on me according to law! I have nothing to say that can alter your predetermination, nor that it will become me to say with any view to the mitigation of that sentence which you are here to pronounce, and I must abide by. But I have that to say which interests me more than life, and which you have labored (as was necessarily your office in the present circumstances of this
- ↑ Delivered at the Session House in Dublin before the court which had convicted him of high treason, September 19, 1803. Emmet, at that time only twenty-three years old, had taken part in a rebellion against the government. The famous address here given was an impromptu one, delivered while Emmet stood forward in the dock in front of the bench. Curran's daughter, to whom Emmet was engaged, and of whom Moore wrote the poem beginning, "She is far from the land where her young here sleeps," two years afterward married an officer of some distinction in the Royal Staff Corps, Major Sturgeon. She died in Sicily a few months later—it is said of a broken heart.
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