CURRAN, JOHN PHILPOT. 



DOVE, HEINRICH WILHELM. 



992 



success as before. On obtaining his liberty he quietly returned to his 

 ordinary occupations. Subsequently he published the second part of 

 his Adventures, in which ho gave the history of his second confine- 

 ment, or ' Chelnea Campaign,' as ho calls it in his title-page ; and also 

 an account of the trial, and endeavoured in vain to obtain an audience 

 of the king in order to present a copy of the two parts. He also, as 

 he says, ' pleaded very hard that the honour of knighthood might be 

 conferred upon him," the object being " to fulfill the prophecy about 

 being made a member of parliament for the city of London." He 

 seems to have actually got himself nominated (April 30, 1754,) as a 

 candidate for the city ; lout he acknowledges that few hands were held 

 up for him. In 1755 he published the third part of his Adventures, 

 in which he relates the ill-success of a motion he made in person for a 

 new trial ; of his applications for knighthood, and for admission into 

 the House of Commons; but the chief part is taken up with a 'History 

 of his Love Adventures, with his Letters, &c., sent to the amiable 

 Mrs. Whitaker, a lady of shining character and of great eminence,' in 

 which he was as unlucky as in other matters. Impressed with a 

 belief that he had a mission to reform the public manners, he went to 

 preach to the prisoners in Newgate, and then made a journey to 

 Oxford in order to preach to the students at the university. Dis- 

 gusted at the reception he met with, he abandoned preaching, but 

 arming himself with a large sponge, he went about the streets re- 

 moving any expressions on the walls which appeared to him offensive 

 to decency ; and when the affair of Wilkes and No. 45 of the ' North 

 Briton" was exciting so much public ire, his loyalty led him to the 

 active use of his sponge in effacing the offensive number. His insanity 

 seems to have expended itself in this harmless manner. He continued 

 to pursue his ordinary employments, and found time to enlarge and 

 revise his Concordance. He also published 'Alexander the Corrector's 

 Humble Address ;' and other pamphlets relating to the reformation of 

 manners, the American war, &c., all marked by strong indications of 

 insanity. He died at Islington in November 1770. Cruden's 'English 

 Concordance' was far more complete and valuable than any preceding 

 one, aud it still retains its value. Three editions of it were published 

 during Cruden's lifetime, the last aud the best in 1769; it has since 

 gone through innumerable editions of all degrees of correctness : one 

 of the most esteemed is that of 1810. 



CURRAN, JOHN PHILPOT, was born on July 24, 1750, at New- 

 market, in the county of Cork, Ireland. His parents were respectable, 

 but not wealthy; his father having been an officer to a manorial 

 court, and possessing the advantages of a classical education. His 

 mother, perceiving early indications of talent, was in hopes of his 

 becoming a clergyman, and efforts were accordingly made to procure 

 him a suitable education. Being Protestants, they first procured him 

 some instruction from the Rev. Nathaniel Eoyse, the resident clergy- 

 man, with whom he maintained a continued friendship. He was 

 next sent to the Free Grammar-School at Middleton, and afterwards 

 entered as a sizar in Trinity College, Dublin. After acquiring a con- 

 siderable proficiency in classical learning at that university, he aban- 

 doned his first intention of entering the church, and determined to 

 adopt the profession of the law. Accordingly, having passed through 

 the university with great credit, he went to London, and entered him- 

 self at the Middle Temple in 1773. Here his straitened means occa- 

 sioned him some inconveniences, but he studied law with considerable 

 assiduity, and practised oratory at some debating societies, where he 

 is said to have displayed his talent for energetic and sarcastic speak- 

 ing. In one of the vacations, between the terms, he returned to Ire- 

 land, and married a daughter of Dr. Creagh in 1774. With her he 

 received a small portion, which somewhat smoothed the remainder of 

 his term of probation, and, in 1775, he was called to the Irish bar. 

 His success was almost immediate. His style was precisely suited to 

 the Irish courts ; humourous, discursive, often flowery and poetical, 

 vehemently appealing to the feelings, never wearying by dry legal 

 arguments, but when urging them enlivening their dryness by occa- 

 sional witty or satirical illustrations, and he soon obtained a leading 

 business. His social habits also operated in his favour, and though 

 he had already adopted a political belief in opposition to the reigning 

 government, he was a general favourite even with his political 

 opponents, while his independent bearing to the judges won him 

 the favour of the public. The fearlessness of his addresses however 

 sometimes brought its inconveniences. As counsel in an action for 

 assault by the Marquis of Doneraile on a poor old Roman Catholic 

 clergyman, he had styled Mr. St. Leger, one of the witnesses for the 

 defence, " a renegado soldier, a drummed-out dragoon," a duel fol- 

 lowed, when he declined returning Mr. St. Leger's fire, and the affair 

 ended. He had been always a warm politician, and in 1782 he was 

 returned to parliament as member for Kilbeggan, on the interest of a 

 Mr. Longfield. As a specimen of the state of the Irish parliament, 

 we may mention that soon after entering the House of Commons he 

 found himself differing in political opinions with his patron, and as 

 he had no way of vacating his seat he coolly offered to buy another 

 seat, to be filled by any one Mr. Longfield might choose to appoint. 

 That gentleman declined the offer ; but in the succeeding parliament 

 Mr. Curran bought a seat for himself. In the House of Commons he 

 soon took a leading part, generally acting with Mr. Grattau and the 

 few liberal members who then had seats. His speeches were of a 

 very similar character to those he made at the bar, and he was often 



appointed to make the reply from hia readiness and happy facility in 

 retorting charges or damaging the positions of his opponents. He 

 supported the formation of the Irish Volunteers in 1788, and the 

 unconditional appointment of the Prince of Wales to the regency on 

 the occasion of the king's illness in 1789, and his attacks on the 

 government led to a duel, first with Mr. Fitzgibbon, afterwards Earl 

 of Clare, and then with Major Hobart, in which Mr. Curran was the 

 challenger, in both of which neither party was injured. It was in 1794 

 and the few subsequent years that Mr. Curran's reputation attained its 

 climax. In the House of Commons Mr. Curran, Mr. Grattan, and 

 other?, had been continually pointing out to the government that their 

 measures were driving the people towards rebellion. The warnings 

 were unheeded, and in 1794 Mr. Hamilton Rowan was indicted for a 

 seditious libel issued in the form of an address to the volunteers of 

 Ireland from the society of United Irishmen (not the same as the 

 rebellious societies which afterwards took this name) of which he was 

 secretary. Mr. Curran was his counsel, arid made an eloquent and 

 vigorous defence, but Mr. Rowan was convicted and sentenced to im- 

 prisonment; and after the breaking out of the rebellion in 1798 he 

 was the counsel generally employed by the accused, among whom the 

 most remarkable were the two brothers Sheares, Theobald Wolfe Tone, 

 and Napper Tandy. He had retired from the Irish House of Com- 

 mons before the introduction of the measure for the Union, of which 

 he strongly disapproved and which he ever continued to lament. The 

 insurrection of 1803 brought trouble into his family ; Robert Emmet, 

 one of its leaders, had formed an attachment for Miss Sarah Curran, 

 which was returned ; and his correspondence with her, with his visits, 

 sometimes secretly, to her father's house, led to a suspicion of Mr. 

 Curran's loyalty, and to the searching of his house. He instantly 

 waited upon the Attorney-General Standish O'Grady, and the privy 

 council, by all of whom hia perfect want of complicity was instantly 

 admitted. Mr. Emmet had named him one of his counsel, but he did 

 not act. Mr. Emmet was convicted and executed ; his fate and his 

 love adventure form the subject of two of Moore's ' Irish Melodies." 

 Upon the death of Mr. Pitt, in 1806, the Whig ministry under Lord 

 Grenville created Currau Master of the Rolls in Ireland. This 

 appointment did not give him satisfaction; it withdrew him from 

 politics, and as his mind was not judicial, he felt himself out of place, 

 he thought he had been neglected, and his health declined. He held 

 the office till the early part of 1813, when he resigned; and he died 

 in London on October 14, 1817. Mr. Curran in the course of his life 

 wrote a considerable amount of verse of more than ordinary merit, 

 but which bears no comparison with his eloquent speeches. 



*DOVE, HEINRICH WILHELM, the eminent meteorologist, 

 professor in the University of Berlin, was born October 6, 1803, at 

 Leignitz, where his father was a merchant. He was educated in the 

 first instance at the Ritter akadiimie of his native town, whence he 

 proceeded, in 1821, to Breslau, aud thence, in 1824, to Berlin, devoting 

 himself in the latter places chiefly to physical and mathematical 

 studies. In 1826 he graduated, on which occasion he read an Essay, 

 ' De barometri mutatiouibus/ which was printed at Berlin in the same 

 year. From Berlin he went, in 1826, to Konigsberg, as private teacher 

 in the University, where he was created professor extraordinary in 

 1828 ; but in the following year he exchanged that for a similar post 

 in the University of Berlin. Somewhat later he was appointed ordi- 

 nary professor, and admitted into the Academy of Sciences. 



Professor Dove has, as a man of science, devoted his attention to the 

 comparison and elucidation of the observations and researches which, 

 throughout the civilised world, have been made on the temperature of 

 the atmosphere at the surface of the globe in other words, on the 

 circumstances which determine the climate of the various regions 

 and in the investigation he has exhibited a power of patient con- 

 tinuous inquiry, calm inductive reasoning, and broad generalisation, 

 which have been attended with the most important results, and he has 

 laid for the student a precise scientific basis on which he may labour 

 with entire confidence. In place of what was, to a great extent, vague 

 hypothesis, under his hands the true laws which regulate the atmos- 

 pheric phenomena have been evolved with beautiful precision. In his 

 Reports, and especially in his admirably-executed Isothermal Maps, he 

 first showed, as far as recorded observations permitted, the isother- 

 inals (or lines of equal temperature) of the whole globe in every mouth 

 of the year ; and subsequently added the average of all the tempera- 

 tures in each parallel of latitude in the same mouths, and the ' abnor- 

 mal temperature,' or the difference of the temperature of each place, 

 and the mean temperature of its parallel, the annual variations, and 

 other correlative information ; thus embodying in a tangible and 

 accessible form the collation and analysis of innumerable observations 

 and corrections, and placing in the hands of the scientific world a 

 body of general results educed with profound skill, and of which the 

 importance to the investigator of this branch of physical science can 

 hardly be overrated. Among the special results of his inquiries, may 

 be mentioned his development of the thermal influence of the Gulf- 

 stream ; his view of the different relations which prevail where the 

 atmosphere rests on a solid, aud where on a liquid base ; the separa- 

 tion of the pressures of the aqueous and gaseous portion of the atmos- 

 phere, by which, as Sabine notes, he has given "a new aspect to this 



