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Curran's Imagination


"Curran!" (says Lord Byron) "Curran's the man who struck me most. Such

imagination!--there never was anything like it that I ever heard of.

His published life--his published speeches, give you no idea of the

man--none at all. He was a machine of imagination, as some one said

that Prior was an epigrammatic machine." Upon another occasion, Byron

said, "the riches of Curran's Irish imagination were exhaustless. I have

heard that man speak more poetry than I have ever seen written--though I

saw him seldom, and but occasionally. I saw him presented to Madame de

Stael, at Mackintosh's--it was the grand confluence between the Rhone

and the Saone; they were both so d----d ugly, that I could not help

wondering how the best intellects of France and Ireland could have taken

up respectively such residences."



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