dropped in. Next appeared at the inner bar, the more eminent practitioners tottering under their huge bags, upon which many a briefless senior threw a mournful and repining glance. First came Mr. Pennefather, with his calm and unruffled forehead, his flushed cheek, and his subtilising and somewhat over-anxious eye. He was succeeded by Mr. Sergeant Lefroy, who after casting a smile of pious recognition upon a brace of neophytes behind, rolled out a ponderous brief, and reluctantly betook himself to the occupations of this sublunary world. Next came Mr. Blackburne, with his smug features, but beaming and wily eye; Mr. Crampton, with an air of elaborated frankness; Mr. Warren, with an expression of atrabilious honesty; Mr. Saurin, looking as if he had never been attorney-general; and Mr. Plunket, as if he never could cease to be so.* Lastly appeared my Lord Manners, with that strong affinity to the Stuart cast of face, and that fine urbanity of manner, which, united with a sallow face and a meagre figure, make him seem like The Phantom of Charles the Second. The Court was crowded, the business of the day was called on; Mr. Prendergast, with that depth of registerial intonation which belongs to him, had called on the first cause, when suddenly a cry, or rather an Irish howl, of My Lord, my Lord,' rose from the remote seats of the court, and made the whole assembly look back. A barrister in a wig and gown was seen clambering from bench to bench, and upsetting all opposition, rolling over some and knocking down others, and uttering in a vehement and repeated ejaculation, My Lord, my Lord,' as he advanced, or rather tumbled over every impediment. At length he reached the lower bench, where he remained breathless for a moment, overcome by the exertion which he had made to gain that prominent station in the court. The first sensation was one of astonishment; this was succeeded by reiterated laughter, which even the strictness of Chancery etiquette could not restrain. I could not for a moment believe the assurance of my senses, until, looking at him again and again, I became satisfied that this strange barrister (for a barrister it was)

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* Mr. Pennefather is now Chief Justice; Mr. Lefroy is a Baron of the Exchequer; Mr. Blackburne is Master of the Rolls; Mr. Crampton is one of the Justices of the Queen's Bench; Mr. Saurin is dead, and Lord Plunket was Lord Chancellor until Sir J. Campbell thrust him from his place. Mr. Warren still continues to practice with great distinction and success.-ED.

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was no other than the miserable man whom I had observed in the Hall, and of whom I have given a faint and imperfect picture. After the roar of ridicule had subsided, the unfortunate gentleman received an intimation from Lord Manners that he should be heard, when he addressed the court in a speech, of the style of delivery of which it is impossible to convey to an English reader any adequate notion, but which ran to the following effect. It is now, may it please your honourable Lordship, more than forty years, since with a mournful step and a heavy heart, I followed the remains of your Lordship's illustrious relative, the Duke of Rutland, to the grave.' The moment this sentence had been pronounced, and it was uttered with a barbarous impressiveness, the Chancellor leaned forward, and assumed an aspect of profound attention. The Bar immediately composed their features into sympathy with the judicial countenance, and a general expression of compassion pervaded the court. The extraordinary orator continued, Yes, my Lord, the unfortunate man who stands before you, did, as a scholar of Trinity College, attend the funeral procession with which the members of the University of Dublin followed the relics of your noble relative to an untimely tomb. My eyes, my Lord, are now filled by my own calamities, but they were then moistened by that sorrow, which, in common with the whole of the loyal part of the Irish nation, (for, my Lord, I am a Protestant) I felt for the loss of your noble and ever to be lamented kinsman.' (The Bar looked up to Lord Manners, and, perceiving his Lordship's attention still more strongly riveted, preserved their gravity.) 'Oh, my Lord, I feel that I am addressing myself to a man who carries a true nobleness of sentiment in every drop of his honourable blood. God Almighty bless your Lordship! you belong, ay, every bit of you, to the noble house of Rutland; and aren't you the uncle of a duke, and the brother of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury?''But in what cause, Mr. Mac Mahon, are you counsel?'

In my own, my Lord. It is a saying, my Lord, that he who is his own counsel, has a madman for his client. But, my Lord, I have no money to fee my brethren. I haven't the quiddam honorarium, my Lord; and if I am mad, it is poverty and persecution, and the Jesuits, that have made me so. Ay, my Lord, the Jesuits. For who is counsel against me? I don't mean that

Popish demagogue Daniel O'Connell, though he was brought up at St. Omer, and bad enough he is too, for abusing your Lordship about the appeals; but I mean that real son of Loyola, Tom who was once a practising parson, and is now nothing but a Jesuit in disguise. But let him beware. Bagnal Harvey, who was one of my persecutors, came to an untimely end.' "Such was the exordium of Counsellor Mac Mahon,* the rest of whose oration was in perfect conformity with the introductory passages from which I have given an extract. But, in order to form any estimate of his eloquence, you should have seen the prodigy itself: the vehemence of his gesture corresponded with the intensity of his emotions. His hands were violently clenched, and furiously dashed against his forehead. His mouth was spattered with discoloured foam. His wig, of unpowdered horse-hair, was flung off, and in the variety of frantic attitude which he assumed, his gown was thrown open, and he stood with scarcely any covering but his ragged shirt, in a state of frightful emaciation, before the court.

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"When this ridiculous but painful scene had concluded, So much,' I whispered to myself, for the dignity of the Irish Bar!' I confess that I divested myself of my professional trappings, after having witnessed this exhibition of degradation and of misery, with very different feelings from those with which I had put them on; and as I walked from the Courts with the impression of mingled shame and commiseration still fresh upon me, I ventured to inquire of my own consciousness whether there was anything so cabalistic in the title of Counsellor, which I shared in common with the wretched man, whom I afterwards found to be in daily attendance upon the Hall, and whether I had not a little exaggerated the importance to which I imagined that every barrister possessed an indisputable claim? It occurred to me, of course, that the instance of calamity which I had just witnessed was a peculiar one, and carried with it more of the outward and visible signs of distress than are ordinarily revealed. But is agony the less poignant, because its groans are hushed? Is it because sorrow is silent, that it does not consume the heart ?'

*This unfortunate man, who had distinguished himself in the University of Dublin, and in early life had married a woman of large fortune, was lately found dead in Sackville street.

or did the Spartan feel less pain, because the fangs that tore him were hidden beneath his robe ?

“There is at the Irish Bar a much larger quantity of affliction than is generally known. The necessity of concealing calamity, is in itself a great ill. The struggle between poverty and gentility, which the ostentatious publicity of the profession in Ireland has produced, has, I believe, broken many hearts. If the Hall of the Four Courts were the Palace of Truth, and all its inmates carried a transparency in their bosoms, we should see a swarm of corroding passions at court in the breasts of many whose countenances are now arrayed in an artificial hilarity of look; and even as it is, how many a glimpse of misery may be caught by the scrutinizing eye that pierces through the faces into the souls of men. The masque by which it is sought to conceal the real features of the mind will often drop off, and intimations of affliction will, upon a sudden, be involuntarily given. This is the case even with those whom the world is disposed to account among the prosperous; but there is a large class, who, to an attentive and practised observer, appear habitually under the influence of painful emotion. The author of Vathek (a man conversant in affliction) has represented the condemned pacing through the Hall of Eblis with the same slow and everlasting foot-fall; and I confess, that the blank and dejected air, the forforn and hopeless eye, the measured and heart-broken pace of many a man, whom I have observed in his revolution through the same eternal round in the Hall of the Four Courts, have sometimes recalled to me the recollection of Mr. Beckford's melancholy fancies.

"If I were called upon to assign the principal cause of the calamities of which so many examples occur at the Irish Bar, I should be disposed to say that their chief source lay in the unnatural elevation to which the members of that body are exalted by the provincial inferiority to which Ireland is reduced. The absence from the metropolis of the chief proprietors, and indeed of almost all the leading gentry, has occasioned the substitution of a kind of spurious aristocracy. An Irish barrister is indebted for his importance to the insignificance of his country; but this artificial station becomes eventually a misfortune to those who are dependent upon their daily exertions for their support; and who,

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instead of practising those habits of provident frugality, which are imposed by their comparative obscurity upon the cloistered tenants of the two Temples, become slaves to their transitory consequence; and after having wasted the hard earnings of their youth and manhood in preposterous efforts at display, leave their families no better inheritance than the ephemeral sympathy of that public, whose worthless respect they had purchased at so large a cost. Let any man look back to the numerous instances in which appeals have been made to the general commiseration upon the decease of some eminent member of the Bar, and he will not be disposed to controvert the justice of this censure upon the ostentatious tendencies of the profession. The life of an eminent lawyer may be thus rapidly sketched. He is called without any other property than those talents which have not in general a descendible quality. For some years he remains unemployed: at last gets a brief, creeps into the partialities of a solicitor, and sets up a bag and a wife together. Irish morality does not permit the introduction into the chambers of a barrister of those moveable objects of unwedded endearment, which Lord Thurlow used to recommend to the juvenile members of the profession; and marriage, that perpetual blister, is prescribed as the only effectual sanative for the turbulent passions of the Irish Bar. In the spirit of imprudence, which is often mistaken for romance, our young counsellor enters with some dowerless beauty into an indissoluble copartnership of the heart. A pretty pauper is almost sure to be a prodigal. Live like yourself,' is soon my lady's word. Shall Mrs. O'Brallaghan, the wife of a mere attorney, provokingly display her amorphous ankle, as she ascends the crimson steps of her carriage, with all the airs of fashionable impertinence; and is the wife of a counsellor in full practice, though she may have ridden double' at her aunt Deborah's, to be unprovided with that ordinary convenience of persons of condition?' After a faint show of resistance, the conjugal injunction is obeyed. But is it in an obscure street that the coachman is to bring his clattering horses to an instantaneous stand? Is he to draw up in an alley, and to wheel round in a cul de sac? And then there is such a bargain to be had of a house in Merrion-square. A house in Merrion-square is accordingly purchased, and a bond, with warrant of attorney