RICHARD LALOR, the son of Edward Sheil, who, in his early years, had made a considerable fortune as a merchant at Cadiz, was born on the 17th of August 1791, at Drumdowney, a small country house, then occupied by his family previously to the completion of Bellevue, near Waterford, which his father had recently purchased. The home of the childhood of Sheil was situated amid charming scenery, on the left bank of the Suir. On the mind of the moody and imaginative boy it made a deep and lasting impression. His first instructions were received in French and Latin from a French Abbé; and he was subsequently conducted to Kensington-House School, London, an institution, presided over by Monsieur le Prince de Broglie, for the children of French refugees. Having spent some short time here, where the instruction was miserably defective, he next proceeded to a Jesuit school at Stoneyhurst, near Clitheroe in Lancashire, on the 24th of October 1804. Here he soon rose to a distinguished position in the school, and seems even then to have formed plans for his future conduct, which implied either a strong natural disposition to dramatic oratory, or an eminent degree of quickness and sagacity in divining where the power of the public speaker lay. In recitation, it was observed, he displayed singular flexibility of intonation, and a matchless ear for rhythm; but laboured under the almost insuperable difficulty, and one from which he never recovered, of having a sharp, squeaking, tuneless voice. He left Stoneyhurst in 1807, and entered Trinity College, Dublin, and subsequently resolved to study for the bar. Meanwhile his father had been ruined by commercial speculations, and his family had removed to Dublin. He took his degree of bachelor of arts in July 1811, and shortly after entered Lincoln's Inn, recently opened to Roman Catholics, to study for the Irish bar. Sheil was a leader in all public societies, both in Dublin and London, constantly declaiming or debating, according to the temper of those among whom he moved. His speeches were more noted for their gorgeous display of imagination than for the harder elements of argument; but the forensic club of Lincoln's Inn did much to correct this extravagant tendency in the young Irish lawyer. One catches a glimpse of a very attractive speech, delivered by Sheil about this time, on the side of the Vetoists, in O'Connell's rude castigation of it, when that brilliant speaker "rose to unravel the flimsy web of sophistry which was hid beneath the tinsel glare of meretricious ornament." Making allowance for the rhetorical tricks in which the great "Agitator" was fond of indulging, this criticism at least lays bare, in a somewhat rough manner, the darling sin of Sheil's early days of speech-making.

Richard Sheil was called to the bar in 1814, and contrived to eke out his scanty revenue by writing some really successful dramas. These were, Adelaide, 1816; the Apostate, 1817; Bellamira, 1818; Evelina, a raffinement of Shirley's Traitor, 1819; Montoni, 1820; and The Huguenot, 1822, the last and the best of his dramatic compositions, but which met with almost total neglect. Could this be accounted for by the absence of the popular actress, Miss O'Neil? At all events, she had appeared hitherto in all Sheil's former dramas, and was only withheld from representing her part in the Huguenot by her marriage with Sir William Beecher. This was the opinion of Mr Macready, who sustained his part in this play with his accustomed eclat. It was the last dramatic composition in which Sheil indulged. Henceforward he devoted his spare energies to the more remunerative walk of politico-religious agitation.

In the year 1822 appeared the first of those well-known Sketches of the Irish Bar, which came out in the New Monthly Magazine, then conducted by the poet Campbell. These Sketches have since been published, in 2 vols, 1855. Here Sheil achieved a considerable literary reputation; and one can hardly help regretting that so little of the energy of a very superior mind should have been given to what, in the long run, would have proved a more remunerative expenditure for the resources of his genius than the business of an agitator, however successful. But he was possibly compelled, both from temperament and from necessity, to think more of the "bubble reputation" of the hour, than of the slower but more enduring fame which attends all the permanent productions of an exalted mind. In keen observation, in subtle sensibility, in high imagination, and in acute analysis, these Sketches found few equals among the best productions of the day. They are doubtless tinctured, sometimes, too largely with a tendency to extravagance, both in conception and in expression; but the luxuriance is always kept in such fine proportion and subordination to the whole picture, and the idealization is constantly so elevated and grand, that the reader, although finding, on reflection, that it is not all real, is disposed to pardon the writer who has ministered so largely to his enjoyment, by presenting him with a series of dazzling delineations of the passing life and manners of the time.

Sheil became a member of the Catholic Association in 1822, and three years afterwards was chosen, in conjunction with O'Connell, to plead at the bar of the House of Commons against the bill introduced for its suppression. The bill was passed into law; and the more incisive of the agitators became so violent in their oratorical zeal, that a prosecution of Sheil ensued, on a charge of having uttered seditious language. This prosecution was suddenly put an end to by the elevation of Mr Canning to the premiership. In the month of June 1827 Sheil received a severe fracture of the leg, caused by a fall from his horse, which confined him to his room for a considerable time. For the past three or four years he had familiarized himself to the Irish people. There had scarcely been a political meeting of any note, all over the country, from Sligo to the Boyne, that had not been inflamed by his speeches. He addressed meetings at night, he declaimed to assemblies by day, he harangued the electors of Clare to choose O'Connell for their representative. Ere the election week was over, the "Agitator" was returned by an immense majority; the wild huzzas of the peasants and the soldiery from the swarming hillsides adjoining rending the still July air, as a signalling of the triumph of what lay near to their hearts. The 24th of October 1828 has likewise to be recorded as one of those occasions on which Richard Sheil gained one of his oratorical triumphs. The meeting was held at Pensend Heath, in Kent, to petition against the passing of the Emancipation Bill; and of Sheil's appearance on that occasion Bentham said, "So masterly an union of logic and rhetoric as Mr Sheil's speech scarcely have I ever beheld." By the year 1829 he had attained considerable eminence at the bar, and next year he received his silk gown. On the 20th July of the same year he contracted a second marriage with Anastasia Lalor, the widow of Mr Power of Waterford, and from whom he acquired the addition of Lalor to his name, and a considerable addition to his means. Early in the year 1830 Lord Anglesea, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, wrote to Sheil, informing him that he might be returned for Milborne Port, in Dorsetshire. He readily embraced the offer; the long day-dream of his whole life was now to be fulfilled. The eloquent sarcasm and badinage of the agitator was now to be exchanged for the more peaceful and direct, if not less striking, manoeuvring of facts to suit the humour of the House. Nature, as has been already said, had been scrupulous enough in her justice to Sheil as an orator. Yet Christopher North, in one of his Noctes Ambrosianae (for Aug. 1831), in which he, as usual, abuses those who were not of his own party, says of the Irish orator on his appearance in the House, "Nature has given him as fine a pair of eyes as ever graced human head,—large, deeply set, dark, liquid, flashing like gems, and these fix you like a basilisk, so that you forget everything else about him." Sheil rapidly rose to be one of the foremost speakers in the House of Commons. Except Lord Stanley (now Lord Derby), for Macaulay was then absent in India, he might fairly be said to be without an oratorical rival in the House. Cobden, speaking of the vehemence of his manner, the intensity of his look, and his dramatic power of intonation, in 1842, said, "It was not like any other man I had ever heard making a speech; he seemed to me like one possessed." After the passing of the Reform Act, Sheil had at first refused, but finally consented, to join O'Connell in the repeal agitation. In December 1832, he took his seat for the county of Tipperary, having previously occupied that of Louth. In 1838 he was offered office by the Melbourne administration, and accepted a commissionership of Greenwich Hospital. Henceforward there was no more talk of repeal by him. Next year he was made vice-president of the Board of Trade, and was sworn into the Privy Council. He became Judge-Advocate-General in 1841, when he exchanged Tipperary for Dungarvan. On the advent of Lord John Russell to the premiership in 1846, Sheil was chosen Master of the Mint, a post which he held till November 1850, when he accepted the post of British ambassador to the court of Tuscany, and closed his parliamentary career. For twenty years he had occupied a prominent place in all the controversies of the state. Nearly all the principles for which he had contended had now become law; and the clouds which had gathered angrily in the political heavens when he commenced his career, had now shed away, and he could, in the calm sunset of his days, enjoy the glorious light as it fell soft and rosy over the landscape. But he had to take the prospect for the realization. He had been for many years troubled with the gout, and had taken to colchicum as an emollient of pain. The death of his own son sometime before, and the sad death of his step-son, all combined with this treacherous antidote to prey upon his health. He died at Florence of an attack of gout in the stomach, on the 23rd of May 1851, in his fifty-ninth year. (See Memoirs of the Right Honourable Richard Lalor Sheil, by W. T. McCullagh, 2 vols., 1855.)