exhausted by his enjoyments, and perspiring with ecstasy, amidst the transports of auditors to whom he imparts a rapture almost equal to his own.

Let me conduct the reader from Kildare-street to the Court of Chancery. Here an utter transformation takes place in the person of the learned Serjeant, which almost brings his indentity into doubt. Instead of eyes alternately veiled in the humility of their long and downcast lashes, or lifted up in visionary devotion, you behold them fixed upon the Chancellor, and watching with a subtle intensity all the shiftings of expression with which the judicial countenance intimates its approval or dissent. The whole face of the vigilant and wily pleader is overspread with craft. There is a lurking of design in every feature of his sharp and elongated visage. You will not perceive any nice play of the muscles, or shadowings of sentiment in his physiognomy; it is fixed, hard, and imperturbable. His deportment is in keeping with his countenance. He scarcely ever stands perfectly erect, and there is nothing upright or open in his bearing. His shoulders are contracted and drawn in; and the body is bent, while the neck is protruded. No rapidity of gesture, or suddenness of movement, indicates the unanticipated startings up of thought. The arm is never braced in the strenuous confidence of vigorous enforcement with which Plunket hurls the truth at the Bench; but the long and taper fingers just tip the green table on which they are laid with a peculiar lightness. In this attitude, in which he looks a sophism personified, he applies his talents and erudition to the sustainment of the most questionable case, with as much alacrity as if weeping innocence and virtuous misfortune clung to him for support. The doubtful merits of his client seem to give a new stimulus to his abilities; and if some obsolete form can be raised from oblivion, if some preposterous precedent can be found in the mass of antiquated decision under which all reason and justice are entombed; or if some petty flaw can be found in the pleadings of his adversary, which is sure to be detected by his minute and microscopic eye, woe to the widow and the orphan! The Chancellor is called upon to decide in conformity with some old monastic doctrine. The pious Serjeant presses him upon every side. He surrounds him with a horde of barbarous authorities; and giving no quarter to common sense, and having beaten equity down, and laid simple honesty prostrate, he sets up the factious demurrer and the malicious plea in trophy upon their ruins. Every expedient is called into aid facts are perverted, precedents are tortured, positions unheard before are laid down as sacred canons; and in order to effect the utter wreck of the opposite party, deceitful lights are held up as the great beacons of legal truth. In short, one who had previously seen the learned Serjeant for the first time in a Bible Society, would hardly believe him to be the same, but would almost be inclined to suspect that it was the Genius of Chicane which had invested itself with an angelic aspect, and, for the purpose of more effectually accomplishing its pernicious ends, had assumed the celestial guise of Mr. Serjeant Lefroy.

Let me not be considered as casting an imputation upon this able, and, I believe, amiable man. In the exhibition of so much professional dexterity and zeal, he does no more than what every advocate will

regard as his duty. I am only indulging in some surprise at the promptness and facility of his transition from the religious to the forensic mood; and at the success with which he divests himself of that moral squeamishness, which one would suppose to be incidental to his intellectual habits. Looking at him as an advocate, he deserves great enco mium. In industry he is not surpassed by any member of his profession. It was his good fortune, that, soon after he had been called to the bar, Lord Redesdale should have been lord chancellor. That great lawyer introduced a reformation in Irish practice. He substituted great learning, uewearied diligence, and a spirit of scientific discussion, for the flippant apophthegms and irritable self-sufficiency of the late Lord Clare. He entertained an honourable passion for the study, as well as for the profits of his profession, and not satisfied with pronouncing judgments which adjusted the rights of the immediate parties, he disclosed the foundations of his decisions, and opening the deep groundwork of equity, revealed the principles upon which the whole edifice is established. The value of these essays delivered from the Bench was well appreciated by Mr. Lefroy, who, in conjunction with Mr. Schoales, engaged in the reports which bear their names, and which are justly held in so much esteem. Soon after their publication, Mr. Lefroy rose into business, for which he was in every way qualified. He was much favoured by Lord Redesdale, and now enjoys the warm friendship of Lord Manners, for whom he acts as confidential counsel. His great familiarity with cases, and a spirit of peculiar deference to his Lordship, combined with eminent capacity, have secured for him a large portion of the judicial partialities. He is in the fullest practice, and, taking his private and professional income into account, may be well regarded as the wealthiest man at the Irish Bar. His great fortune, however, has not had the effect of impairing in him the spirit of acquisition. He exhibits, indeed, as acute a perception of pecuniary excitement, as any of his less devout brethren of the coif.

Serjeant Lefroy will in all likelihood be shortly raised to the Bench. He has already officiated upon one occasion as a judge of assize, in consequence of the illness of some of the regular judges, and gone the Munster circuit. His opinions and demeanour in this capacity are not undeserving of mention: they have attracted much attention in Ireland, and in England have not escaped observation. Armed with the King's commission, he arrived in Limerick in the midst of those dreadful scenes to which no country in Europe affords a parallel. All the mounds of civil institution appeared to have been carried away by the dark and overwhelming tide, which was running with a tremendous current, and swelling every day into a more portentous magnitude. Social order seemed to be at an end. A wild and furious population, barbarized by a heartless and almost equally savage gentry, had burst through the bonds by which its madness had been hitherto restrained, and rushed into an insurrection in which the animosities of a civil, were blended with the ferocity of a servile war. Revenge and hunger employed their united excitations in working up this formidable insanity. Reckless of the loss of an existence which afforded them no enjoyment, the infuriated victims of the landlord and the tithe-proctor extended to the lives of others the same estimate which they set upon their own, and their appreciation of the value of human breath

was illustrated in the daily assassinations which were devised with the guile, and perpetrated with the fury of an Indian tribe. The whole country smoked with the traces of devastation-blood was shed at noon upon the public way-and crimes even more dreadful than murder made every parent tremble. Such was the situation of the county of Limerick, when the learned Serjeant arrived to administer a remedy for these frightful evils. The calendar presented almost all the possible varieties which guilt could assume, and might be designated as a hideous miscellany of crime. The court-house exhibited an appalling spectacle. A deep and awful, silence hung heavily upon it, and the consciousness that lay upon every man's heart, of the frightful crisis to which the county seemed rapidly advancing, bound up the very breath of the assembly in a fearful hush. The wretched men in the

dock stood before the judicial novice in a heedless certainty of their fate. A desperate independence of their destiny seemed to dilate their broad and expanded chests, and their powerful faces gave a gloomy token of their sullen indifference to death. Their confederates in guilt stood around them with much stronger intimations of anxiety in their looks, and as they eyed their fellow conspirators in the dock, seemed to mutter a vow of vengeance for every hair that should be touched upon their heads. The gentry of the county stood in the galleries with a kind of confession in their aspect, that they had themselves been participant in the production of the crimes which they were collected to punish, but which they knew that they could not repress. In this assembly, so silent that the unsheating of a stiletto might have been heard amidst its hush, the learned Serjeant rose, and called for the piece of parchment in which an indictment had been written. It was duly presented to him by the clerk of the crown. Lifting up the legal scroll, he paused for a moment, and said, "Behold! in this parchment writing, the causes of all the misery with which the Lord has afflicted this unhappy island are expressed. Here is the whole mystery of guilt manifestly revealed. All, all is intimated in the indictment. Unhappy men, you have not the fear of God before your eyes, and you are moved by the instigations of the Devil." This address went beyond all expectation-the wretches in the dock gazed upon their sacred monitor with a scowling stare-the Bar tipped each other the wink-the parsons thought that this was a palpable interference with my Lord the Bishop-the O'Grady's thrust their tongues into their cheeks, and O'Connel cried out "leather!" I have no room to transcribe the rest of this remarkable charge. It corresponded with the specimen already given, and verified the reference to the fabulist. So, indeed, does every charge delivered from the Irish Bench. Each man indulges in his peculiar propensities. Shed blood enough, cries old Renault. Be just, be humane, be merciful, says Bushe. While the learned Serjeant charges a confederacy between Beelzebub and Captain Rock, imputes the atrocities of the South to an immediate diabolical interposition, and lays at the Devil's door all the calamities of Ireland.

THE LORD OF VALLADOLID.*

THE Monarch of Arragon hied to the field,
The flower of his warriors round,

When a stranger knight, with no arms on his shield,
Approach'd from the distant ground:

Far flash'd his blue mail in the sunbeams bright,
As his war-horse career'd the plain,
With foam-cover'd bit and an eye of light,

And nostrils distended, that breathed in their might
Thick smoke round his bridle's chain.

The courtiers were still-not a whisper was heard-
All eyes on the strange knight gazed;
From his horse he alighted-no visage appear'd,
His plume-shaded beaver was raised :
He moved t'ward the presence of majesty,
With the air of a noble graced ;

All were awe-struck and dumb as he slowly drew nigh,
And, lifting his steel-cover'd fingers on high,

His beaver and helmet displaced.

Peranzules, the traitor to Arragon's king—
'Tis he that stands hoary there,

Where the ancient oak, aloft wavering,
Shoots its stately gnarl'd boughs in air:
And his knee to the monarch he lowly bends,
His hand a vile halter bears ;-

Distrusted, alone, unsupported by friends,
On the rock of his courage and truth he depends,
In the wane of his glorious years.

"O king! I once swore to be true to thy cause
With the blood in every vein,

And I tender it now for my breach of the laws,
To wash out the forfeited stain !

O king at thy footstool this worn life I lay,
But thou ne'er canst take from me

That which I more cherish, my honour, away,

Nor blacken a name with foul treachery,

That ne'er hath been treacherous to thee.

"I was bound by my knighthood, by justice, by ties,
More worth than these sinews dry;

More worth than the fast ebbing tide that supplies
This old heart with its pulses high :-

By the law of Castile and my country's command,
When its Queen you divorced from your throne,
She took back the cities I held at your hand-
She took her dominion again o'er the land,
Her forefathers' right and her own.

"I blush for my country!-this insult of thine
To the blood of proud Castile

Might cancel all bonds of my vassals and mine,

All service of homage and steel

But Peranzules no traitor shall shield with his name

Though faithless,—it was to be just!

To his Queen he has acted as duty became,
And now is before thee unsullied in fame,
To pay with his life for his trust."

*See a striking Fragment of Spanish History, page 309 of this work.

The courtiers shrink back from the space where stands
Valladolid's grey lord alone,

Grasping firmly the cord with his clinging hands,
And his black bright eyes flung down ;-

As if o'er the waves of a stormy sea,

He clung for his last inch of life,

To the only stay that on earth he could see,

That would save him from shame-from the agony

Of his bosom's speechless strife.

When the King thus address'd him (unchanged was his mien,
His sight on the ground yet lay :)

"Peranzules an upright judge hast thou been

Of princes in open day

Thou hast justly judged—but let none like thee
E'er presume to cast a crown,

That dare not as boldly the loser see

That dare not uphold his judgment free,

In the shade of the Monarch's frown!"

J.

BRITISH GALLERIES OF ART.NO. IX.

Fonthill.

A WORK of high art deserves to be traced and followed to whithersoever the chances and changes of time may carry it-its biography is worthy of being recorded and read, even when itself, from the perishable nature of the materials which form it, may have passed away from among existing things. We have few volumes more interesting than that would be which should duly trace the history of what once formed the treasures of the Louvre,-hinting, in its progress, at the causes and consequences of the events referred to; and its value and interest would be greater rather than less, now that the principal objects of its notice are again scattered abroad over the face of Europe. It is on this account that I have thought it worth while to give a short notice of the Fonthill Gallery,-although, by the time this paper is before the public, it will no longer exist as such. But the few, the very few works which compose its principal ornaments, will exist, and will even (in imagination) keep their places on the walls where they have once hung, when nothing else belonging to the spot is cared for or remembered. I, for one, could walk up to the bare walls which the objects I am about to notice lately covered, and mark out with a pencil the identical space which each of them occupied. In fact, for me, and for those who have seen and duly appreciated them, there they will continue to hang, till we shall chance to see them in some other place; as the image of a lost friend for ever occupies the spot where we last saw him.

It has been said that the works now forming the Fonthill Gallery are not the same of which it consisted before this singular spot was opened to public inspection. It may, or it may not be so. With this

I shall not concern myself. The true lover of art cares not to whom a fine picture may belong; he, and he alone, is the possessor of it, who is sufficiently impressed with its beauties to be able to enjoy the memory of them; and he sees no difference in those beauties, whether