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forces a passage if he cannot find one. But it is only over argumentative diction that he has acquired this mastery: when he calls in the aid of sentiment and passion to enforce his logic, his phraseology labours, and, if the passage be unpremeditated, frequently falls short of the strength and dignity of the conception. But his deficiency in this respect evidently proceeds from want of practice, not of capacity; nor does the exertion that it costs him to supply appropriate language ever restrain him from illustrating a legal argument by any bold practical figure that may cross his mind.*

Mr. Plunket is a memorable, and I believe, a solitary instance of an eminent barrister whose general reputation has been increased by his parliamentary efforts. His speeches on the Union, in the Irish House of Commons, raised him at once to the first class of parliamentary orators. When he was returned by the University of Dublin (in 1812) to the imperial senate, Curran publicly predicted that his talents would create a similar sensation here: I need not add how completely the prophecy has been fulfilled. It would lead me too far to enter into a minute examination of Mr. Plunket's parliamentary style and manner; in many points I should have to repeat some of the foregoing remarks. I cannot, however, forbear to observe, that his language and views in the House of Commons discover a mind that has thoroughly escaped the noxious influence of his professional habits. He has shewn that it is possible for the same person to be a most subtle and dexterous disputant upon a technical subject, and a statesman-like reasoner upon a comprehensive one. With regard to his political tenets-his opposition to the Union, his connexion with the Whig administration of 1806, and his subsequent exertions in favour of Catholic Emancipation, seem to have placed him on the list of Irish patriots; but his support of popular privileges, where he has supported them, appears to be entirely unconnected with popular sympathies-his patriotism is a conclusion, not a passion. In all questions between the people and the state, it is easy to perceive that he identifies himself with the latter; he never, like Fox and Grattan, flings himself in imagination, into the popular ranks, to march at their head, and in their name, and as one of them, to demand a recognition of their rights. Mr. Plunket has not temperament for this. He studiously keeps aloof from the multitude, and even when their strenuous advocate, lets it be seen that he thinks for them not with them-he never warms into "the man of the people." His most animated appeals in their behalf retain the tone of a just and enlightened aristocrat, gravely and earnestly remonstrating with the

I shall cite a single example: it will also serve as a specimen of the proneness to imagery that prevails in the Irish courts. The question turned upon the right of presentation to a living. Mr. P's clients and their predecessors had been in undisturbed enjoyment of the right for two centuries; the opposite party called upon them to shew their original title. Mr. P. insisted upon the legal presumption, arising from this long possession, that the title had been originally a good one, though the deeds that had created it had been lost, and consequently could not be produced. In commenting upon the necessity and wisdom of such a rule of law, without which few properties of ancient standing could be secure, he observed"Time is the great destroyer of evidence, but he is also the great protector of titles. If he comes with a scythe in one hand to mow down the muniments of our possessions, he holds an hour-glass in the other, from which he incessantly metes out the portions of duration that are to render those muniments no longer necessary."

members of his own body upon the danger and inexpediency of holding out against the immutable and unconquerable instincts of human nature. The only exception that I recollect to these remarks, occurs in his speeches against the Union. There he boldly plunged into first principles; as among other instances when he exclaimed, "I in the most express terms deny the competency of parliament to do this act—I warn you, do not dare to lay your hand on the Constitution. I tell you, that, if circumstanced as you are you pass this act, it will be a nullity, and that no man in Ireland will be bound to obey it. I make the assertion deliberately I repeat it—and I call on any man who hears me to take down my words; you have not been elected for this purpose-you are appointed to make laws, and not legislatures. You are appointed to act under the Constitution, not to alter it; to exercise the functions of legislators, and not to transfer them; and if you do so, your act is a dissolution of the government: you resolve society into its original elements, and no man in the land is bound to obey you." Yet even here, and in some bolder declarations on the same occasion, I am inclined to suspect that Mr. Plunket assumed this indignant tone rather as a member of the assembly whose independence was assailed, than from any impassioned sympathy with the general rights of the body that he represented. Had the question been a popular reform, instead of the extinction of the Irish parliament, he would in all likelihood have been equally vehement in resisting the innovation.

Mr. Plunket's general reading is said to be limited; and if we may judge from the rareness of his allusions to the great writers of ancient and modern times, the opinion is not unfounded. When he was about to appear in the British parliament in 1812, it was whispered among his friends that he prepared himself with information on the general state of European politics from the most ordinary sources: he wanted facts, and he took the shortest and easiest method of collecting them. I have understood that up to a recent period, he frequently employed his leisure hours upon some elementary treatise of pure mathematics. If the fact be so, it affords a striking proof of the vigour of a mind which could find a relaxation in such a pursuit.

I have already glanced at a resemblance between Mr. Plunket and the late Sir Samuel Romilly. If I were to pursue the comparison into the private characters of the two men, the points of similarity would multiply, and in no particular more strikingly than in the softness and intensity of their domestic affections. But this is sacred ground: yet I cannot forbear to mention that it fell to my lot (when last in Ireland) sitting as a public auditor in the gallery of the Court of Chancery, to witness a burst of sensibility, which, coming from such a man as Mr. Plunket, and in such a place, sent an electric thrill of sympathy and respect through the breasts of the audience. An aged lady, on the day after her husband's death, had signed a paper resigning her right to a portion of property to which she became entitled by his decease, and the question was, whether her mind at the time was perfectly calm and collected. Mr. Plunket insisted that it was not in human nature that she could be so at such a crisis:-" She had received a blow such as stuns the strongest minds; after a union of half a century, of uninterrupted affection, to find the husband, the friend, the daily companion, suddenly called away for ever!" He was proceeding to describe VOL. IV. No. 20.-1822.

Q

the first anguish and perturbation of spirit that must befal the survivor of such a relation, when he suddenly recognized in the picture all that he had himself a little while before endured. The recollection quite subdued him-he faltered, and became inarticulate even to sobbing. I cannnot describe the effect produced throughout the Court.

I have thus attempted to present a sketch of this eminent Irishman, in matters of intellect unquestionably the most eminent that now exists. If I intended it to be any thing but a hasty sketch, I should feel that I have been unjust to him: some of his powers-his wit and irony, for example, in both of which he excels, and his cutting and relentless sarcasm where vice and folly are to be exposed-have been altogether unnoticed; but his is the "versatile ingenium," and in offering the result of my observations upon it, I have been compelled to select rather what I could best describe, than what I most admired; and even if I had succeeded in a delineation of all the powers that raise Mr. Plunket above ordinary men, I should have had to add, that our admiration of him is not limited by what we actually witness. We speculate upon his great attributes of intellect, and ask, "what might they not have achieved, had his destiny placed him in the situation most favourable to their perfect developement? If, instead of wasting them upon questions of transitory interest, he had dedicated them solely to the purposes of general science-to metaphysics, mathematics, legislation, morals, or (what is but spoken science) to that best and rarest kind of eloquence which awakes the passions only that they may listen to the voice of truth-to what a height and permanence of fame might they not have raised him?" These reflections perpetually force themselves upon Mr. Plunket's admirers: we lament to see the vigour of such a mind squandered upon a profession and a province. We are incessantly reminded, that, high and successful as his career has been, his opportunities have been far beneath his resources, and thus, judging him rather by what he could do, than what he has done, we are disposed to speak of him in terms of encomium which no records of his genius will remain to justify.*

TO THE HARVEST MOON.

AGAIN thou reignest in thy golden hall
Rejoicing in thy sway, fair Queen of night!
The ruddy reapers hail thee with delight;
Their's is the harvest, their's the joyous call
For tasks well ended in the season's fall!

Sweet orb! thou smilest from thy starry height,
But whilst on them thy beams are shining bright,
To me thou com'st o'ershadow'd with a pall;
To me alone the year hath fruitless flown.

Earth hath fulfill'd her trust through all her lands;
The good man gathereth now where he had sown;
And the great Master in his Vineyard stands :
While I, as if my task were all unknown,
Come to his gates, alas! with empty hands.

R.

*Since the above was written Mr. Plunket has become once more Attorney General for Ireland.

CAPRICE.

LOVE is a bird of summer skies;

From cold and from winter he soon departs: He basks in the beam of good-humour'd' eyes, And delights in the warmth of open hearts: But where he has once found chill and rain, He seldom returns to that bower again. Harriet's brow was passing fair,

And Love, in the shape of a mortal sprite, Came to bask in the sunshine there,

And plume his soft wings for delight: But a wintry cloud would oft come o'er, And then, for a time,

Without reason or rhyme,

The sun would shine no more:
But chills and clouds the sky deform,
Cold and dark as December's storm.

It chanced in one of these winter showers,,
As a cloud pass'd by,

No one knew why,

And frighten'd poor Love from his garden of flowers;

He wander'd in sadness, away, away,

Till he came to a bower that stood hard by;

Here all was a sunny summer's day,

And never a cloud came over that eye;

But, morning and night,

It beam'd ever bright,

With spirit, and joy, and courtesy.

He laid himself down-the hours flew o'er,
He thought of the spot he had left no more,
For all was here

Without shadow, or fear,

And each moment was sweet as the one before.
Some friend of poor Harriet, passing that way,
Saw Love in the garden, and told the maid,
That, not long ago, she had seen him lay

Reclin'd in the bower of Adelaide.

No matter," said she, "let him wander awhile, 1 can, when I please, bring him back by a smile." But ladies who trust so much to their power,

To recover the hearts their caprice has lost, Will prove, in many a bitter hour,

The danger of playing with Love, to their cost.

Many a day and week pass'd by,

And Harriet, though she would not tell

That she loved the wanderer much and well,
Drew many a secret sigh;

And she managed to get it convey'd to the swain
By some kind friend, in a roundabout way,
That, if he thought proper to seek her again,
The weather in future might be more gay.

Love declined with a smile-" I thank you, my dear,

I am perfectly happy and free from care;

I never saw other than summer here,
And why run the risk of a winter there?"

J. E..

ADVANTAGES OF HAVING NO HEAD.

The very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent-no more.

SHAKSPEARE.

I HATE the man who can never see more than one side of a question— who has but a single idea, and that perhaps a wrong one.-No, I adopt an impression zealously, perhaps erroneously, but I forget not the "audi alteram partem." I can plead my own cause, but I have not given myself a retaining fee; I am therefore open to conviction, and forward to acknowledge all that may be reasonably claimed by my opponents. Candour and liberality are my motto, in the spirit of which I begin with confessing, that there are occasions when that bulbous excrescence termed a head may be deemed a handy appendage. As a peg to hang hats on-as a barber's block for supporting wigs, or a milliner's for showing off bonnets-as a target for shooting at when rendered conspicuous by a shining helmet-as a snuff-box or a chatterbox-as a machine for stretching nightcaps, or fitting into a guillotine, or for shaking when we have nothing to say: in all these capacities it is indisputably a most useful piece of household furniture. Yet, as far as my own experience goes, its inconveniences so fearfully predominate over its accommodations, that if I could not have been born a column without any capital, made compact and comfortable by an ante-natal decollation, I would at least have chosen to draw my first breath among

"The Anthropophagi and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders"

that by carrying mine adversary in this manner, locked up as it were in mine own chest, I might keep him in as good subjection as St. Patrick did when he swam across the Liffey, and be the better enabled to stomach whatever miseries he might entail upon me.

Away with the hackneyed boast so pompously put forth by simpletons who have no pretensions to the distinction they claim for the race-that man only has a reasoning head. Tant pis pour lui. If he possess this fine privilege he treats it as worldlings sometimes do their fine clothes -he values it so highly that he has not the heart to use it, or shew it in his conduct. His reason lies in the wardrobe of his brain till it becomes moth-eaten, or if he exert it at all, it is that it may commit a moral suicide and try to get rid of itself. Never so happy as when he can escape from this blessing, he dozes away as much of it as he can in sleep or blows out his highly vaunted brains every evening with a bottle of port wine-or tells you, with a paviour's sigh, that the happiest man is the laughing lunatic who finds his straw-crown and jointstool throne a most delightful exchange for all the vanity and vexation of irrational reason. Now, if a man could but leave off at his neckmake his shoulders the ultima Thule of his figure-convert himself into a pollard, all this would be accomplished at once. He would not belong to either the family of the Longheads or the Wrongheads; he would be neither headstrong nor headlong; he could not be over head and ears in debt or in love; head-ach, and face-ach, and toothach, and ear-ach, would be to him as gorgons and griffins, and harpies -imaginary horrors; ophthalmick medicines he needs not; he neither runs his head into danger nor against a wall, and whether corn be high or low-rents paid or unpaid-the five per cents. reduced to four, or

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