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Home  »  Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men  »  Lord Plunket

S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.

Lord Plunket

  • [William Conyngham Plunket, first Lord Plunket; an eminent Irish orator and judge; born at Enniskillen, July, 1764; educated at Trinity College, Dublin; member of the Irish Parliament; solicitor-general, 1803; attorney-general, 1805, in which year he was elected to the British House of Commons; lord chief justice of the common pleas for Ireland, 1827–30; lord chancellor, 1830–41; died 1854.]
  • Stop, and you shall have something more to take down!

  • When some one in the Irish House of Commons called out to take down Plunket’s words, which interruption enabled the orator to draw a still stronger picture of the misfortunes of his country. When some one remarked how sick of his promotion a storm must have made Lord Campbell in crossing the Irish Channel, to succeed Plunket as Irish Chancellor; “Yes,” said the latter, “but it won’t make him throw up the seals.”
  • When asked by a judge, during the trial of a cause, the meaning of the word “kites,” a slang term for bills of exchange, Plunket replied, “In England the wind raises the kites, but in Ireland the kites raise the wind.”