The Press.
London, England, 1856-06-21 00:00:00

fiteraturc.

Speeches of Lord Plunket at the Bar and in
the Senate. Edited, with a Memoir and
Historical Notices, by John Cashel Hoey.
Dublin : Duffy.
FOR the intellectual powers of the late Lord
Plunket we entertain much respect, but we
feel no admiration for his tortuous and
intensely selfish career. He was undoubtedly
a consummate Parliamentary orator. and had
rare faculties of strong reasoning As a
forensic advocate he was inferior to Erskine
and Curran, and we think also to O'Connell.
He could not melt the heart nor moisten the
eye of manhood ; and his speeches are unequal,
some parts being wonderfully grand, and others
sinking into the commonplace and trivial.
"If bred to Pa.rhament," said Sir James
Mackintosh, " Plunket would have been the
" greatest speaker that ever appeared in it "—a
most preposterous exaggeration, as no training
could make Plunket the equal of Bolingbroke,
or Chatham, or Chatham's son. Argument,
passion. 'and masculine energy belonged
to his style ; but he could not sap or insinuate
with subtle art, and he never could maintain
the tone of a practical statesman. "On his
legs " he was formidable, but on the Bench he
was feeble ; in the Cabinet he was rash and wa-
vering, and in public life he was flagrantly in-
consistent. He was immeasurably inferior in
moral dignity and worth of character to his own
countrymen, Burke, Grattan, and Curran ; and
he never could wield over the public mind that
extraordinary power which Henry Brougham
from 1820 to 1832, and Lord Lyndhurst from
1838 to 1841, exercised in Parliamentary politics.
It seriously detracts, also, from Lord Plun-
ket's reputation that he is chiefly an orator of
one subject. The " Catholic Question " was
to Lori Plunket what " The French Revolu-
tion " was to Mr. Croker, or the Corn Laws to
Mr. Cobden. On all social questions Lord
Plunket was second rate, and he has no pre-
tensions to the fame of a statesman or of a
s►►ccessful administrator. That he feared
" Mr. Brougham " in debate is beyond doubt,
and we coull cite the particular discussion in
which Brougham put him down. Invective
in the English Legislature Lord Plunket judi-
ciously abstained from, except in one instance,
when (after some provocation) he ferociously
assailed the late Marquis (Charles William) of
Londonderry. He kept carefully clear of
Brougham and Lyndhurst, and would cer-
tainly have avoided collision with O'Connell at
the time when Mr. Macaulay shrunk from the
Agitator.
Another consideration, also, detracts from
the fame of Lord Plunket. From first to last
we find him " crammed" from Burke's tracts ;
and parallel passages between his speeches
and Burke's works would not redound to the
originality of Plunket as a thinker. In short,
Plunket was only a lawyer politician of the
first rank, but he was neither a patriot nor a
practical or phil )sophical statesman. Like
men of his day, he overrated the political
value of the " Catho►ic Question." The social
problem in Ireland, its tangled perplexities,
and the manifold economic questions suggested
by it, received from him no appreciation. He
was decidedly superficial in his views

He rendered vast services to the Catholics
by artfully disarming many Protestants of
their political fears of the consequences of
concession. He always argued the question as
one of security for the Establishment. So
late as 1828 Lord Plunket thus delivere.l him-
self in the House of Lords upon the Irish
Church :

I look on the Protestant
fundamental principle of our imperial
take it to have been unalterably settled at the Union, and
that to talk of changing the Protestant religion of Ireland
without shaking the Protestant Establishment of the
empire is idle. I speak no new language, now that for
the drat time I have had an opportunity of delivering my
sentiments in the presence of the right reverend bench : I
utter but the opiniqns I have entertained find expressed in
the other House of Parliament. I think a religious estab-
lishment essential to oar well being, and that without a
dignified estalilishruent in times like these, religion itself
world be degraded. I am, therefore, persuaded, not only
that the establishment is necessary, but that the rank,
affluence, and dignity of the hierarchy art important to

of Ireland as a