which nothing can elude. The most slippery distinction that glides across him, he can grasp and hold "pres is manibus," until he pleases to set it free. But his argumentative powers lose much of their effect from want of arrangement. His thoughts have too much of the impatience of conscious strength to submit to an orderly disposition. Instead of moving to the conflict in compact array, they rush forward like a tumultuary Insurgent mass, jostling and overturning one another in the confusion of the charge; and though finally beating down all opposition by sheer strength and numbers, still reminding us of the far greater things they might have achieved had they been better drilled. But O'Connell has by temperament a disdain of every thing that is methodical and sedate. You can see this running through his whole deportment in Court. I never knew a learned personage who resorted so little to the ordinary tricks of his vocation. As he sits waiting till his turn comes to "blaze away," he appears totally exempt from the usual throes and heavings of animo-gestation. There is no hermetically-sealing of the lips, as if nothing less could restrain the fermentation within; there are no trances of abstraction, as if the thoughts had left their home on a distant voyage of discovery; no haughty swellings of the mind into alto-relievos on the learned brow ;-there is nothing of this about O'Connell. On the contrary, his countenance and manners impress you with the notion, that he looks forward to the coming effort as to a pastime in which he takes delight. Instead of assuming the "Sir Oracle," he is all gaiety and good-humour, and seldom fails to disturb the gravity of the proceedings by a series of disorderly jokes, for which he is duly rebuked by his antagonists with a solemnity of indignation that provokes a repetition of the offence; but his insubordinate levity is, for the most part, so redeemed by his imperturbable good-temper, that even the judges, when compelled to interfere and pronounce him out of order, are generally shaking their sides as heartily as the most enraptured of his admirers in the galleries. In the midst, however, of this seeming carelessness, his mind is in reality attending with the keenest vigilance to the subject-matter of discussion; and the contrast is often quite amusing. While his eyes are wantoning round the court in search of an object to be knocked down by a blow of his boisterous playfulness, or, in a more serious mood, while he is sketching on the margin of his brief the outline of an impossible republic, or running through a rough calculation of the number of Irishmen capable of bearing pikes according to the latest returns of the population, if the minutest irregularity or misstatement is attempted on the other side, up he is sure to start with all imaginable alertness, and, reassuming the advocate, puts forward his objection with a degree of vigour and perspicuity which manifests that his attention had not wandered for an instant from the business before him.

Mr. O'Connell is in particular request in jury-cases. There he is in his element. Next to the harp of his country," an Irish jury is the instrument on which he delights to play; and no one better understands its qualities and compass. I have already glanced at his versatility. It is here that it is displayed. His powers as a Nisi-prius advocate consist not so much in the perfection of any of the qualities necessary to the art of persuasion, as in the number of them that he has at command, and the skill with which he selects and adapts them to the exi

gency of each particular case. He has a thorough knowledge of human nature, as it prevails in the class of men whom he has to mould to his purposes. I know of no one that exhibits a more quick and accurate perception of the essential peculiarities of the Irish character. It is not merely with reference to their passions that he understands them, though here he is pre-eminently adroit. He can cajole a dozen of miserable corporation-hacks into the persuasion that the honour of their country is concentred in their persons. His mere acting on such occasions is admirable: no matter how base and stupid, and how poisoned by political antipathy to himself he may believe them to be, he affects the most complimentary ignorance of their real characters. He hides his scorn and contempt under a look of unbounded reliance. He addresses them with all the deference due to upright and high-minded jurors. He talks to them of" the eyes of all Europe," and the present gratitude of Ireland, and the residuary blessings of posterity, with the most perfidious command of countenance. In short, by dint of unmerited commendations, he belabours them into the belief that, after all, they have some reputation to sustain, and sets them chuckling with anticipated exultation at the honours with which a verdict according to the evidence is to consecrate their names. But, in addition to the art of heating the passions of his hearers to the malleable point, O'Connell manifests powers of observation of another, and, for general purposes, a more valuable kind. He knows that strange modification of humanity, the Irish mind, not only in its moral but in its metaphysical peculiarities. Throw him upon any particular class of men, and you would imagine that he must have lived among them all his life, so intuitively does he accommodate his style of argument to their particular modes of thinking and reasoning. He knows the exact quantity of strict logic which they will bear or can comprehend. Hence, (where it serves his purpose) instead of attempting to drag them along with him, whether they will or no, by a chain of unbroken demonstration, he has the address to make them imagine that their movements are directed solely by themselves. He pays their capacities the compliment of not making things too clear. Familiar with the habitual tendencies of their minds, he contents himself with throwing off rather materials for reasoning than elaborate reasonings-mere fragments, or seeds of thought, which, from his knowledge of the soil in which they drop, he confidently predicts will shoot up and expand into precisely the conclusions that he wants. This method has the disadvantage, as far as personally regards the speaker, of giving the character of more than his usual looseness and irregularity to O'Connell's jury-speeches; but his client, for whom alone he labours, is a gainer by it-directly in the way I have been stating, and indirectly for this reason, that it keeps the jury in the dark as to the points of the case in which he feels he is weak. By abstaining from a show of rigorous demonstration, where all the argument is evidently upon his side, he excites no suspicion by keeping at an equal distance from topics which he could not venture to approach. This, of course, is not to be taken as O'Connell's invariable manner, for he has no invariable manner, but as a specimen of that dexterous accommodation of particular means to a particular end, from which his general powers as a Nisi-prius advocate may be inferred. And so too of the tone in which he labours to extort a verdict;

for though when compelled by circumstances, he can be soft and soothing, as I have above described him, yet on other occasions, where it can be done with safety, he does not hesitate to apprise a jury, whose purity he suspects, of his real opinion of their merits, and indeed, not unfrequently, in the roundest terms defies them to balance for an instant between their malignant prejudices and the clear and resistless justice of the case.

There is one, the most difficult, it is said, and certainly the most anxious and responsible part of an advocate's duties, in which O'Connell is without a rival at the Irish Bar-I allude to his skill in conducting defences in the Crown Court. His ability in this branch of his profession illustrates one of those inconsistencies in his character to which I have already adverted. Though habitually so bold and sanguine, he is here a model of forethought and undeviating caution. In his most rapid cross-examinations, he never puts a dangerous question. He presses a witness upon collateral facts, and beats him down by argument and jokes and vociferation; but wisely presuming his client to be guilty until he has the good luck to escape conviction, he never affords the witness an opportunity of repeating his original narrative, and perhaps, by supplying an omitted item, of sealing the doom of the accused.

O'Connell's ordinary style is vigorous and copious, but incorrect. The want of compactness in his periods, however, I attribute chiefly to inattention. He has phrase in abundance at command, and his ear is sensible of melody. Every now and then he throws off sentences not only free from all defect, but extremely felicitous specimens of diction. As to his general powers of eloquence, he rarely fails, in a case admitting of emotion, to make a deep impression upon a jury; and in a popular assembly he is supreme. Still there is much more of eloquence in his manner and topics than in his conceptions. He unquestionably proves, by occasional bursts, that the elements of oratory, and perhaps of the highest order, are about him; but he has had too many pressing demands of another kind to distract him from the cultivation of this the rarest of all attainments, and accordingly I am not aware that any of his efforts, however able and successful, have deserved, as examples of public speaking, to survive the occasion. His manner, though far from graceful, is earnest and impressive. It has a steady and natural warmth, without any of that snappish animation in which gentlemen of the long robe are prone to indulge. His voice is powerful, and the intonations full and graduated. I understand that when first he appeared at the Bar, his accent at once betrayed his foreign education. To this day there is a remaining dash of Foigardism in his pronunciation of particular words; but, on the whole, he has brought himself, as far as delivery is concerned, to talk pretty much like a British subject.

It was my original intention to have dwelt in some detail upon O'Connell, as a popular leader, but I have no longer space, and I could scarcely effect my purpose without plunging into that "sea of troubles," the present politics of Ireland: yet a word or two upon the subject before I have done. Indeed, in common fairness, I feel bound to correct any depreciating inferences that may be drawn from the tone of levity in which I may have glanced at some traits of his public

deportment, and which I should have hesitated to indulge in, if I had not given him credit for the full measure of good-humour and good sense, that can discriminate at once (should these pages meet his eye) between an inoffensive sally and a hostile sneer.

O'Connell has been now for three and twenty years a busy actor upon an agitated scene. During that period no public character has been more zealously extolled, or more cordially reviled. Has the praise or blame been excessive, or has either been undeserved? Has he been a patriot, or an incendiary? for, such are the extreme points of view in which the question of his merits has been discussed by persons, too impassioned and too interested in the result to pronounce a sound opinion upon it. To one, however, who has never been provoked to admire or hate him to excess, the solution may not be difficult. After reviewing the whole of O'Connell's career as a politician, an impartial observer will be disposed to say of him, that he was a man of a strong understanding and of stronger feelings, occupied incessantly, and almost always without due preparation, upon questions where it would have perplexed the wisest to discern the exact medium between disgraceful submission and factious importunity-that by necessity a partisan, he has been steady to his cause, and consistent in his ultimate object, though many times inconsistent in the adoption of the means to obtain it; and that now in the long run, after all the charges of violence and indiscretion that have been heaped upon him, it is questioned by some of the clearest understandings in England, whether, in the present state of political morals, a more courtly policy than O'Connell's either is, or was ever, calculated to advance the interests of his body. But leaving his political incentives aside, and referring solely to the personal provocations to which he is daily exposed, I should say, that it would be utterly unnatural in such a man to be other than violent. To O'Connell, as a barrister, his disqualification is a grievous injustice. It is not in theory alone that it operates. It visits him in the practical details of his professional life, and in forms the most likely to gall a man of conscious powers and an ambitious temperament. He has the mortification of being incessantly reminded, that for years past his fortunes have been absolutely at a dead stop, while he was constantly condemned to see men who started with him and after him, none of them his superiors, many of them far beneath him, partially thrust before him, and lifted into stations of honour and emolument to which he is forbidden to aspire. The stoutest adversary of Papal encroachments must admit, that there is something irritating in this; for my part, instead of judging harshly of the spirit in which he retaliates, I rather honour the man for the energy with which he wrestles to the last with the system that would keep him down; and if now and then his resistance assumes such a form as to be in itself an evil, I am not sorry, for the sake of freedom and humanity, to see it proved that intolerant laws cannot be enforced without inconvenience. But in general (to speak the truth) O'Connell's vengeance is not of a very deadly description. He is, after all, a man of a kindly and forgiving nature; and where the general interests of his country are not concerned, is disposed to resent his personal wrongs with great command of temper. His forbearance in this respect is really creditable to him, and the more so as it meets with no return. The admirers of King William have no mercy for a man, who,

in his seditious moods, is so provoking as to tell the world that their idol was "a Dutch adventurer." Then his intolerable success in a profession where many a stanch protestant is condemned to starve, and his fashionable house in Merrion-square, and a greater eye-sore still, his dashing revolutionary equipage, green carriage, green liveries, and turbulent Popish steeds, prancing over a Protestant pavement to the terror of Protestant passengers-a nuisance that in the good old times would have been put down by Act of Parliament-these and other provocations of equal publicity, have exposed this learned culprit to the deep and irrevocable detestation of a numerous class of his Majesty's hating subjects in Ireland. And the feeling is duly communicated to the public. The loyal press of Dublin teems with the most astounding imputations upon his character and motives. As a dish for the periodical libellers of the day, O'Connell is quite a cut-and-come-again, from the crazy Churchman, foaming over the apprehended fall of tithes, down to the political striplings of the College, who, instead of trying their youthful genius upon the cardinal virtues, or "the lawfulness of killing Cæsar," devote their hours of classic leisure to the more laudable task of demonstrating, for the comfort of the Orange lodges, that "Counsellor O'Connell carries on a treasonable correspondence with Captain Rock." But the Counsellor, who happens to know a little more of the law of high treason than his accusers, has the good sense to laugh at them and their threats of the hangman. Now that all practical attempts upon life have been abandoned*, he bears the rest with true Christian patience and contempt; and whenever any of his defamers recant in extremis" and die good Catholics, as the most bigoted among them are said to do, if the fact be duly certified by his friend Mr. Denis Scully†, who has quite an instinct for collecting materials touching this portion of secret history, O'Connell, I am assured, not only forgives them all their libels, but contributes liberally towards setting on foot a few expiatory masses for their souls.

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* I allude to what was really a shocking occurrence.-A Corporation has been defined to be "a thing having neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned." With this definition before him, Mr. O'Connell did not imagine that he exceeded the limits of public debate in calling the Dublin Corporation a "beggarly Corporation." One of its most needy members, however, either volunteered or was incited to think otherwise, and called upon the speaker to apologize or fight. To Mr. O'Connell, a life of vital importance to a numerous family, and of great importance to the best part of the Irish public, the alternative was dreadful. He saw the ferocity of the transaction in its full light, but he committed his conduct to the decision of his friends, and a duel ensued. The aggressor was killed. Had the result been different, his claims would probably not have been overlooked by the patrons of the time (1815); at least such is understood to have been the expectation under which he provoked his fate.

The Catholic barrister, a gentleman quite clever and important enough to be treated of apart. For the present, I shall merely record of him that one of his favourite theories is, that no rank Orangeman ever "dies game." He can tell you the exact moment when Dr. Duigenan began to roar out for a priest. He has a a large stock of mortuary anecdotes illustrating his general doctrine, and he relates them with true Sardonic vivacity.