(who had already experienced his wife's elopement), was scandalised. He disowned Sarah, who was to die five years later of tuberculosis in Sicily. Curran did appear on 1 September 1803 for several of the nineteen persons who were tried for complicity with Emmet in the rising, though he spoke only on behalf of the tailor, Owen Kirwan. Representing Kirwan, Curran, recently returned from a visit to France, derided the rebel's trust in French intentions. Napoleon, he said, would have rewarded "his rapacious generals and soldiers by parcelling out the soil of the island among them, and by dividing you into lots of serfs to till the respective lands to which they belonged". Kirwan, like Emmet who at his trial offered no defence, was hanged on 3 September. Bitterness of his final years Curran was appointed Master of the Rolls in Ireland, in 1806, following Pitt's replacement by a more liberal cabinet. It was a highly remunerative office in the Irish Chancery, subsequently offered to, and refused, by Daniel O'Connell. In 1814, he retired and moved to London where he enjoyed the society of Thomas Erskine (his English counterpart in the defense of radicals and reformers), John Horne Took, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the Prince Regent, William Godwin and Thomas Moore (Ireland's national bard). But his latter days were embittered both by domestic troubles and by political disappointment and despair:Everything I see disgusts and depresses me: I look back at the streaming of blood for so many years, and everything everywhere relapse into its former degradation--France rechained, Spain again saddled for the priests, and Ireland, like a bastinadoed elephant, kneeling to receive the paltry rider.In the summer of 1817, he was seized by paralysis while dining at the table of Thomas Moore. He died on the 14 October 1817, aged 67. A few day before his death, at the mention of Irish politics he had hung his head and burst into tears. Memorials and commemoration In 1837, Curran's remains were transferred from Paddington Cemetery, London to Glasnevin Cemetery, where they were laid in an 8-foot-high classical-style sarcophagus. In 1845 a white marble memorial to him, with a carved bust by Christopher Moore, was placed near the west door of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin. Sir Jonah Barrington (infamous for his removal from the judiciary by parliamentary petition to the King in 1830) recalled, from an "intimacy" that was "long and close", that:Curran's person