oung patriot, and after lying for
some weeks in concealment, he was arrested on the 19th day of May, 1798,
two months after his associates in the direction of the movement had
been arrested at Oliver Bond's. His gallant struggle with his captors,
fighting like a lion at bay, against the miscreants who assailed him;
his assassination, his imprisonment, and his death, are events to which
the minds of the Irish nationalists perpetually recur, and which,
celebrated in song and story, are told with sympathising regret wherever
a group of Irish blood are gathered around the hearth-stone. His genius,
his talents, and his influence, his unswerving attachment to his
country, and his melancholy end, cast an air of romance around his
history; and the last ray of gratitude must fade from the Irish heart
before the name of the martyred patriot, who sleeps in the vaults of St.
Werburgh, will be forgotten in the land of his birth.

In less than a fortnight after Lord Edward expired in Newgate another
Irish rebel, distinguished by his talents, his fidelity, and his
position, expiated with his life the crime of "loving his country above
his king." It is hard to mention Thomas Russell and ignore Henry Joy
M'Cracken--it is hard to speak of the Insurrection of '98 and forget the
gallant young Irishman who commanded at the battle of Antrim, and who
perished a few weeks subsequently, in the bloom of his manhood, on the
scaffold in Belfast. Henry Joy M'Cracken was one of the first members of
the Society of United Irishmen, and he was one of the best. He was
arrested, owing to private information received by the government, on
the 10th of October, 1796--three weeks after Russell, his friend and
confidant, was flung into prison--and lodged in Newgate Jail, where he
remained until the 8th of September in the following year. He was then
liberated on bail, and immediately, on regaining his liberty, returned
to Belfast, still bent on accomplishing at all hazards the liberation of
his country. Previous to the outbreak in May, '98, he had frequent
interviews with the patriot leaders in Dublin, and M'Cracken was
appointed to the command of the insurgent forces in Antrim. Filled with
impatience and patriotic ardour, he heard of the stirring events that
followed the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald; he concentrated all his
energies in preparing the Northern patriots for action, but
circumstances delayed the outbreak in that quarter, and it was not until