ing event in which was the murder of the Lord Chief
Justice, Lord Kilwarden. While Emmet, in another part of the city, was
vainly striving to retrieve the disorder into which the excesses of
some of his followers had broken up the plan of attack, Lord
Kilwarden's carriage was stopped by a body of undisciplined and
infuriated rioters, and one man thrust a pike into Kilwarden's body.
Emmet himself came too late upon the scene to rescue the Chief Justice,
and from that moment he gave up all hope of anything like orderly
action on the part of the insurgents, and indeed his whole effort was
to get his followers to disperse and to stop any rising in the adjacent
counties. Kilwarden died soon after he had received his wound, but not
before he had uttered the noble injunction that no man should suffer
for his death without full and lawful trial. Seldom has even the
assassin's hand stricken a worse blow than that which killed Lord
Kilwarden. In an age when corrupt judges and partial judges were not
uncommon, Kilwarden was upright, honorable and just. The fiercest
nationalist of the day lamented his death. He had again and again
stood before the Crown officials and interposed the shield of law
between them and the victims whom they strove by any process to bring
to death. Emmet made his way into Wicklow with {329} the main purpose
of stopping the intended outbreak of insurrection there, as he saw now
that no such attempts could, under the conditions, end in anything but
useless bloodshed. His friends urged him to make his escape to France,
and he might easily have escaped but that he went back to Dublin with
the hope of seeing once again Sarah Curran, the youngest daughter of
the great advocate, with whom he was devotedly in love. He was
recognized, arrested, and sent to trial before Lord Norbury, a judge
who bore a very different sort of reputation from that which honored
Lord Kilwarden. Emmet made a brilliant and touching speech, not in
defence of himself against the charge of trying to create a rebellion,
for he avowed his purpose and glorified it, but in vindication of his
cause and in utter denial of the accusation commonly brought against
him that he intended to make his country the subject of France.
[Sidenote: 1803--The execution of Robert Emmet] He was found guilty,
sentenced to death, and executed on the morning after his trial.
Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, who was a college friend of Emmet's, has
embalmed his