bourhood by the name of "The Angler." He was frequently pressed upon to declare his true name, but never complied except on one occasion, when he said it was Matthew Smith. He was miserably dressed, wore a long beard, and carried about with him all the utensils for fishing. Some months back he was accompanied by a person whom he represented to be his brother, and whom he sometimes brought with him as attendant to a tavern, where he would dine, and allow his supposed brother to do so at a different table, after he had availed himself of his services as waiter. At his death he refused the attendance of any clergyman. When his body was about to be placed in the coffin, there was found, in a swathe girded round his body, a quantity of gold, to the amount of forty guineas. This sum is now in the hands of Mr. Rossiter, above-mentioned, and will be given to his nearest relative, after the affinity is satisfactorily proved."

GRANBY.-This is another novel, founded upon the manners of high life, and able to give information to those who require enlightenment thereon. Mr. Brummell has turned us away from the iniquity of sending up our plates twice for soup; and warned us against the reprobate state of eating cabbage. After Granby, nobody can plead ignorance of what is done in the country at lords' houses, or of what ought not to be done in town of a Wednesday. The author perhaps is not without his objections to the very highest and most assuming order of dandies,— a class which he also informs us is on the decrease; but on all other points, even these gods of great people, our Dii majorum gentium, would allow him to be good authority. They might think him perhaps a little too anxious to make his favourites lords; and not sufficiently aware of the superfluousness of denouncing Bond Street in November. In plain truth, the author of Granby is a young man of considerable promise, and of much agreeable performance. He evidently moves in the upper circles, has an eye for portrait-painting and landscape; and in the course of a love-story, which shows him to possess a good taste in heroines, and a proper healthy belief in generosity and good faith, gives

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some piquant hints towards the character of a dandy wit, and a tragical and well-sustained history of a gambler. The book is too long; and too much is set down, with the intention of giving the dialogue an air of reality. The colouring is often thin; the canvass too much betrayed but the groundwork, we fear, only so much the more faithfully represents the region he copies. If the author, the next time he writes, will lessen his dialogue, introduce more pictures, metropolitan or otherwise, and animate them with a few more of his best portraits, always taking care to preserve his good-heartedness, and belief in good, which leaves a pleasant taste in one's mouth, and is one of the wise things for which we admire him, he will produce a book twice as amusing as Granby itself, and not lose a jot either of his lustre in the fashionable world. The description of a morning for sportsmen, and of the principal characters who assemble for the chace, we take to be masterly.

SKETCHES OF THE IRISH BAR.-NO. XII.

Calamities of the Bar.

Not very long after I had been called to the Bar, I one day chanced to observe a person standing beside a pillar in the Hall of the Four Courts, the peculiar wretchedness of whose aspect attracted my notice. I was upon my way to the subterranean chamber where the wigs and gowns of lawyers are kept, and was revolving at the moment the dignity and importance of the station to which I had been raised by my enrolment among the members of the Irish Bar. I was interrupted in this interesting meditation by the miserable object upon which my eyes had happened to rest; and without being a dilettante in affliction, I could not help pausing to consider the remarkable specimen of wretchedness that stood before me. Had the unfortunate man been utterly naked, his condition would not have appeared so pitiable. His raiment served to set his destitution off. A coat which had once been black, but which appeared to have been steeped in a compound of all rusty hues, hung in rags about him. It was closely pinned at his throat, to conceal the absence of a neckcloth. He was without a vest. A shirt of tattered yellow, which from a time beyond memory had adhered to his withered body, appeared through numerous apertures in his upper garment, and jutted out round that portion of his person where a garb without a name is usually attached. The latter part of his attire, which was conspicuous for a prismatic diversity of colour, was fastened with a piece of twine to the extreme button of his upper habiliment, and very incompletely supplied the purpose for which the progenitors of mankind, after their first initiation into knowledge, employed a vegetable veil. Through the inferior regions of this imperfect integument, there depended a shred or two of that inner garment, which had been long sacred to nastiness, and which the fingers of the laundress never had profaned. His stockings were compounded of ragged worsted and accumulated mire. They covered a pair of fleshless bones, but did not extend to the feet, the squalid nakedness of which was visible through the shoes that hung soaked with wet about them. He was dripping with rain, and shivering with cold. His figure was shrunken and diminutive. A few grey locks were wildly scattered upon a small and irregularly shaped head. Despair and famine sat upon his face, which was of the strong Celtic mould, with its features thrown in disorder, and destitute of all symmetry or proportion, but deriving from the passions, by which they were distorted, an expression of ferocious haggardness. His beard was like that which grows upon the dead. The flesh was of a cadaverous complexion. His grey eyes, although laden with rheum, caught a savageness from the eyelids which were bordered with a jagged rim of diseased and bloody red. A hideous mouth was lined with a row of shattered ebony, and from the instinct of long hunger had acquired an habitual gape for food. The wretched man was speaking vehemently and incoherently to himself. It was a sort of insane jabbering-a mad soliloquy, in which "my lord" was frequently repeated. I turned away with a mingled sentiment of disgust and horror, and, endeavouring to release my recollection from the painful image which so frightful an object had left behind, I proceeded to inFeb.-VOL. XVI. NO. LXII.

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vest myself in my professional trappings, tied a band with precision about my neck, complained, as is the wont with the junior bar, that my wig had not been duly besprinkled with powder, and that its curls were not developed in sufficient amplitude, set it rectilinearly upon my head, and, after casting a look into the glass, and marking the judicial organ in a certain prominence upon my brow, I readjusted the folds of my gown, and reascended the Hall of the Four Courts in a pleasurable state of unqualified contentedness with myself. I directed my steps to the Court of Chancery, and, having no better occupation, I determined to follow the example of certain sagacious aspirants to the office of Commissioner of Bankrupts, and to dedicate the day to an experiment in nodding, which I had seen put into practice with effect. There are a set of juvenile gentlemen who have taken for their motto the words of a Scotch ballad, which, upon a recent motion for an injunction, Lord Eldon affected not to understand, but which, if he had looked for a moment upon the benches of youthful counsellors before him, while in the act of delivering a judicial aphorism, he would have found interpreted in one of the senses of which they are susceptible, and have discovered a meaning in "We're all a nodding," of obvious application to the Bar. Confident in the flexibility of my neck, and a certain plastic facility of expression, I imagined that I was not without some talent for assentation; and accordingly seated myself in such a place that the eye of my Lord Manners, in seeking refuge from the inquisitorial physiognomy of Mr. Plunket, would probably rest upon me. The Court began to fill. The young aristocracy of the Bar, the sons of judges, and fifth cousins of members of parliament, and the whole rising generation of the Kildare-street Club, gradually 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, makes 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) 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'Connel, 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

*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.

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.

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

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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 forlorn 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