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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