The Montgomery advertiser., 1903-11-01
CENTENARY OF ROBERT EMMET
Louise Imogen Quincy Tells the Love Story of the Patriot Who Died
 One Hundred Years Ago.

St. Louis Post-Dispath.
 No on who has an eye for character and the romance of character can forget that today marks the centuary or the execution of Robert Emmet and of that mirage-ike afterglow of the Ss, the Irisine No-rising of 1sos There are but two opinions, equally ehpmaticli :aaooiqd two opinions, equally emphatic. held to- day about Emmet's politics; there is but one about himself. He had every charm which birth and breeding, heroism and fascination, culture and power, genius and disinterested goodness can give to a young man. His mind fed upon Roman literature, and he might be called the last genuine republican tribune; or, to make a yet truer historical utilization, he was a straggler from Vergiaud's Gi- ronde. His very face is a purely Glron- din face In It's set wistfulness and pre- mature sagacity, and he had all the Girondin turn for theorizing under con- ditions which make the application of lofty ideas not only foolish but f1atly inn possible. Innocence in a publicist Is fatal handicap. Emmet, by i'll luck. car ried no insincerities in his pack, and no cynicisms for the nal d. Adamo. He seems to have been the only denizen of his own jasper walled universe. and to have made the mistake of thinking that he could serve men in ours. He was not wholly unlike Shelley. A contemporary said of him: "So gifted a creature does not appear once in a thousand years"
 Emmet was all virtue as well as all brain; and about both there is just enough eighteenth century dignity and precision (here he parts company with Shelley) to give him a touch of quaint ness as seen from our lowered social point of view. To everybody. who knew, from the juniors of his first term at col lege, who looked to him for great things at the bar down to the supposedly stern 1ailer. who cried his heart out, few short years later, to see him go forth to execution there was or could be but one Robert Emmet in the world An almost fiawless human creature, he dreamed his dream, lived his life and went his way the good way of liberty or of death. Failure and wreck are inevitable with all such. England certainly has never known what to do with them; and per haps their only commonwealth is eter- nifty. In that one country an ideal must also be a working hypothesis, and nasty accidents can never play ducks and drakes with the angelic course of action
 Emmet unlike Irish visionaries in gen. eral was born with all the domestic graces. Beyond the cherished home ties he had early chosen to make one other tie of his own with an exquisite being whom we know could have been no gen tier, indeed. and no purer than himself But his love for Sarah Curran and his love for Ireland were flame on flame and wing on wing," almost the self-same master passion. One can scarcely doubt that she looked to him as to some of Us now the very spirit of Innisfail, with her girlish brows full of sweet strangeness. her soft. slow ironies of speech in that wonderfully musical voice, her uncon- scious air of silent foreboding and noble sorrow.
 There is no more pathetic idyll of lov- CTS parted. It Is known that Emmet might have saved himself and escaped to America after the foul unforeseen events of July 23, 1903, had he not rushed back by night from the mountains to the out skirts of the capital, impelled by his de- sire to see Miss Curran again and whet- ted to the farewell adventure by the many risks surrounding it. After all. he was barely three and twenty; my love Sarah" was younger. Once the prison doors are finally closed upon him. Robert Emmet sits in his cell plating his sweet hearts lock of hair to wear to the scaf- fold, or drawing with his own spirited pencil a grim serial of himself in two parts (bloodless head and headless body ) Elsewhere his lonely mother, stricken because of the fate hanging over the
 
 tunate children. quietly slips out of life, and the barrister Leonard McNally, an | accomplished hypocrite and false friend brings the news to her son. The peasant girl Anne DeVlin. who had been "Mr Robert's' servant, endears her name for ever by her fortitude and victorious loy- alty to him under torture; and her name sake in another walk of life, the Lady Anne FitzGerald Gas if to provide the Shakespearean touch of comic relief in Hamlet or Lear) writes in an unpub- lished frenzy of grammar and orthogra- phy to the officials that She disclaims old | friends who are rebels" that me and all my house are what we ought to be- and that her guiltless garden-sticks flor tyeing holly hooks and lily's have been reported to be pike handles" What a dramai
 Despite divers legends, Sarah Curran can have known nothing of the day set Tor her lover to die, of his magnificent impromptu speech In the dock, and of his resolute' controlled bearing at the end, as calm and gay as that of Algernon Sid ney whom he revered. He was intensely preoccupied with thoughts of her and of her future, but she was mercifully made oDnVlous or all for a time Her sister
 Amelia, took her broken body and mind away From the city; away from her father, angered at the neigh of h,s da- served fame by the discovery of her se- cret, as if that were complicftv In Ern- nets treason" She was to find another father and a more affectionate horne among strangers In the South. hnt io|, was over for Sarah Curran's soft worns1 soul sustained neither by religious faith