Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies, Vol.II [of 2] (London & Dublin 1821), pp.494-99.

SIR RICHARD BOYLE was descended from an ancient and respectably family, said to be a junior branch of the baronial house of Roche, Viscount Fermoy. He entered the military service of his country very early in life, and distinguished himself eminently in America, during that war, which terminated about the commencement of his late majesty’s reign and [494] in which the immortal Wolfe fell, and particularly at the taking of the Moro fort, at the Havannah. Shortly after his retirement from actual service in the army, he obtained a seat in the Irish House of Commons, of which he continued a member up to the period of the Union. In that assembly he was distinguished as a perpetual appendage to the ministerial establishment, and enjoyed from the government a small pension, together with the office of master of ceremonies at the castle of Dublin, for which he was nationally adapted, by the suavity of his provincial accent, and the good humour and gentlemanly politeness of a soldier of the old school. In Parliament, though his eloquence was not of the most polished or forcible cast, the richness of his national brogue, the humorous oddity of his rhetoric, and a supernatural propensity to that species of figure called the Bull, which might induce an astrologer to suppose him born under the influence of Taurus, rarely foiled to excite continued peals of laughter when he spoke in the house; and of those qualifications the ministers of the day, whom he always supported, constantly availed themselves, whenever the temper of the House required to be relieved from the irritating asperities of warm debate; or whenever the speech of a patriot, perhaps too powerful for refutation, was more conveniently to be answered by ridicule.

On those occasions it was rather amusing to see the worthy baronet, after repeated calls from the treasury benches, rising to answer some of the most splendid orations of Mr. Grattan, Mr. Ponsonby, or Mr. Curran, by observing upon them in his own way. The display made at many of those opportunities by the worthy baronet, though it excited perpetual laughter from the oddity of his language and the happy tropes which usually distinguished his stile of argument, sometimes surprised, by its order of arrangement and apposite point, those who were not in the secret of the worthy baronet’s previous arrangement for the discussion. The truth was, that whatever might have been his pitch of intellect, he was gifted with a most extraordinary memory; and could [495] get off by rote, at one or two readings, any written production of very considerable length. This faculty of his was well known to the ministers whom he supported; and there was rarely a fixed debate on any national subject, in which a part was not previously cast for Sir Boyle to act, and a speech written for him, by some of the grave wags of the treasury benches; which speech was furnished to him in due time for study, and which he contrived to translate into a version of his own. He acted as a sort of buffo the political opera. The late Mr. Edward Cooke, who, in various departments, still acted as a political engineer to the ruling party in Ireland, during the successive administrations of Lord Westmoreland, Lord Camden, and Lord Cornwallis, was known to have composed many of those orations for Sir Boyle. The author knew the whim both of the orator and the audience, and could skilfully anticipate where a peal of laughter could tend to damp the fire of debate, and restore good humour to the disputants; and Sir Boyle was selected as the fittest engine for this purpose.

There were some occasions where the worthy baronet’s eloquence was not previously thought necessary, and of course no speech was prepared for him. But he was an old soldier, and too full of the esprit de corps, to look calmly on the conflict without a zeal for taking his share of the battle. He sometimes, therefore, ventured to volunteer an extempore philippic of his own; and then it was that his native genius shone with all its genuine splendour, pure from the mine, and unmarred by the technical touches of any treasury artist; then it was, that all the figures of national rhetoric, to use the phrase of Junius, “danced the hays through his speech in all the mazes of metaphorical confusion.”

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