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Footnotes to Irish Melodies by Thomas Moore

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1: "Let Erin remember the days of old."

2: "Oh, breathe not his name."

3: "She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps."

4: Miss Curran.

5: So thought higher authorities; among the extracts from The Press quoted by the Secret Committee of the House of Commons, to show how formidable had been the designs of the United Irishmen, there are two or three paragraphs cited from this redoubtable Letter.

6: Of the depth and extent to which Hudson had involved himself in the conspiracy, none of our family had harboured the least notion; till, on the seizure of the thirteen Leinster delegates at Oliver Bond's, in the month of March, 1798, we found, to our astonishment and sorrow, that he was one of the number. To those unread in the painful history of this period, it is right to mention that almost all the leaders of the United Iri sh conspiracy were Protestants. Among those companions of my own alluded to in these pages, I scarcely remember a single Catholic.

7: In the Report from the Secret Committee of the Irish House of Lords, this extension of the plot to the College is noted as "a desperate project of the same faction to corrupt the youth of the country by introducing their organised system of treason into the University."

8: One of these brothers has long been a general in the French army; having taken a part in those great enterprises of Napoleon which have now become matter of history. Should these pages meet the eye of General xxxxxxx, they will call to his mind the days we passed together in Normandy, a few summers since; -- more specifically our excursion to Baeux, when, as we talked on the way of old college times and friends, all the eventf ul and stormy scenes he had passed through seemed forgotten.

9: There had been two questions put to all those examined on the first day, -- "Were you ever asked to join any of these societies " -- and "By whom were you asked? " -- which I should have refused to answer, and must, of course, have abided the consequences.

10: For the correctness of the above report of this short examination, I can pretty confidently answer. It may amuse, therefore, my readers, -- as showing the manner in which biographers make the most of small facts, -- to see an extract or two from another account of this affair, published not many years since by an old and zealous friend of our family. After stating with tolerable correctness one or two of my answers, the writ er thus proceeds: -- "Upon this, Lord Clare repeated the question, and young Moore made such an appeal, as caused his lordship to relax, austere and rigid as he was. The words I cannot exactly remember; the substance was as follows: -- that he entered college to receive the education of a scholar and a gentleman; that he knew not how to compromise these characters by informing against his college companions; that his own speeches in the debating society had been ill construed, when the worst that could be said of them was, if truth had been spoken, that they were patriotic . . . . that he was aware of the high-minded nobleman he had the honour of appealing to, and if his lordship could for a moment condescend to step from his high station, and place himself in his situation, then say how he would act under such circumstances, -- it would be his guidance." Werbert's Irish Varieties.< /I> London, 1836.

11: "When in consequence of the compact entered into between government and the chief leaders of the conspiracy, the State Prisoners, before proceeding to exile, were allowed to see their friends, I paid a visit to Edward Hudson, in the jail of Kilmainham, where he had then lain immured for four or five months, hearing of friend after friend being led out to death, and expecting every week his own turn to come. I found that to a muse his solitude he had made a large drawing with charcoal on the wall of his prison, representing the fancied origin of the Irish Harp which, some years after, I adopted as thh subject of one of the Melodies.'" -- Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, vol i.

12: Quarterly Review, vol. xli., p. 294.

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