Emancipation Clubs "where the Protestant and Catholic should sit alternatively and a Catholic and Protestant chairman [would be] elected in their turn". As in the 1790s, while he deemed Catholic emancipation essential, Drennan's overriding goal remained a union of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter that could advance and carry parliamentary reform. On the Union In response to the 1800 Acts of Union which abolished the old Kingdom of Ireland and its parliament, Drennan, consistent with his letters to Pitt, was at first defiant. He urged Irishmen to enter into a "Solemn League and Covenant [to] maintain their country". In autobiographical verses written in 1806, Drennan presents the failure to attain Irish independence as a measure of a life unfulfilled:Still shrinking from praise, tho' in search of a name He trod on the brink of precipitate fame;And stretch'd forth his arm to the beckoning form,A vision of glory, which flashed through the storm,INDEPENDENCE shot past him in letter of light,Then the scroll seemed to shrivel and vanish in the night;And all the illumin'd horizon became,In the shift of a moment a darkness--a dreamLater, he appeared to relent. The new United Kingdom Parliament at Westminster might in time realise the original aim of his conspiracy: "a full, free and frequent representation of the people" "What", he asked a Belfast town meeting in 1817, "is a country justly considered, but a free constitution"? He continued to criticise the manner of the Union's passage, its administration and its deadening effect on political life. But he did not join calls for the restoration of an Irish parliament. Calls for repeal, he suggested, created "division amongst reformers in the two islands" at a time when they should be joining forces "to seek parliamentary reform". (a conviction expressed in his admiration for Charles Fox and the coverage his magazine extended to John Horne Tooke, Francis Burdett and other leading English reformers). But nowhere in his Belfast Monthly Magazine" was there "indication that William Drennan had moderated his politics or regretted his past involvements".. Literary legacy In his last years, Drennan published two volumes of verse, Fugitive Pieces (1815) and Glendalough and Other Poems (1815), and a translation of the Electra of Sophocles (1817). Drennan's literary output is largely forgotten. In its day his Wake of William Orr (1797), a eulogy to the eve-of-rebellion United Irish martyr, electrified the public and contributed to the cries of "Remember Orr" at