WHEN the late Mr. Campbell undertook the editorship of "Colburn's New Monthly Magazine," he succeeded in persuading Mr. Curran, who had been lately called to the Irish bar, and whose life of his father had given him high literary distinction, to contribute to the Magazine occasional papers on subjects connected with Ireland.

In a wish to comply with Mr. Campbell's request originated a series of papers, entitled "Sketches of the Irish Bar," which acquired immediate popularity, and gave a very high character to the publication in which they appeared. Professional occupation soon interfered with Mr. Curran's power of regularly continuing the series, and his friend Mr. Sheil wrote and published in the same magazine several sketches drawn up on pretty much the same plan with those written by Curran. It was natural that readers should suppose all to have been by the same writer;-the same tone of politics prevailed throughout;-a slender thread of fiction, often forgotten or disregarded by the writers, connected the several papers into what would seem to be a series. An Englishman visiting Ireland, is supposed to attend every now and then the law courts in Dublin or in the provinces, and to record the impressions made on him by the leading counsel in the cases he listens to. We believe that both writers occasionally make use of this convenient mask. Such peculiarities of character as distinguish the various classes of society in Ireland are intro. duced with great skill. The crowds that throng the courts in Dublin form a part of the picture, without which all the rest would be imperfect. Perhaps Dublin presents more of this class of excitable idlers than any other city in the world. A clever volume of essays, originally published in the "Examiner," in the year 1818,* describes the barristers at that time engaged in successful practice in the courts of Westminster, and gives an account in many respects calculated to

gratify and amuse, if not to instruct, its readers by its exhibitions. But in no respect whatever is it to be compared with the "Sketches of the Irish Bar." We have the men. the prac tising barristers not inaccurately nor injudiciously portrayed; but there is a total absence of the interest which in the volumes before us is never absent, and which arises from the perfect picturing of every surrounding circumstance you always have scenic, often even stage effect. Lockhart's descriptions of Scottish advocates in his "Peter's Letters," and Lord Cockburn's, in his "Life of Jeffrey," make some approach to this power, which both the Irish writers possess in nearly equal degree. It is probable that the contrasts between barbarism and civilisation which Ireland still presents and presented yet more obtrusively at the time these sketches were written, now more than thirty years ago—have created this distinction between the volumes before us and those to which we have referred. In England the barrister is, or seeks to be, the mere logician. He is in a land where, if his audience are swayed by prejudices — and in no country are there prejudices more unreasonable and more ineradicable-he must assume their existence as a thing equally indisputable with the fact, that the grass is green, and that the rose is red. The movements of his argument are within a limited circle - his eloquence is necessarily confined within a meagre and wretched dialect, where any effort to disturb habitual associations would be resented in the same spirit in which those who forgot everything else in Burke used to remember a false quantity in his pronunciation of a Latin sentence. We believe that then and now in Ireland legal principles were as perfectly known, and that adjudications were as just in Ireland as in England; while in Ireland one great advantage existed the Irish barrister avoided, as far as he at all could, what Bushe calls, "the absurd mystery of the style."

In the "Sketches of the Irish Bar ". we now speak of Mr. Sheil's as well as Mr. Curran's sketches - the characters of some eighteen or twenty practising barristers are given. Of these there is no one of whom there do not remain recorded law arguments; and what is remarkable in all and each is, that the style is always so perfectly lucid and intelligible, so little veiled in the language of technicalities, that a judgment of Plunket's, for instance, or a law-argument of Saurin's, is as perfectly intelligible to any educated man, who reads it with fair application of his mind, as if it were a speech in parliament, or a leader in the Times. In actual reasoning, we should not think of making a higher claim for the Irish barrister than for his Scottish or English brother; but we think it undeniable, that in the power of exposition he is greatly superior. He does not disdain to render himself intelligible to those who have not been educated in technical language; and he seems, at least, to refer to higher principles of general truth than the English expositor of the laws; while, in common with the Englishman, he has a language which is much more manageable than the dialect consecrated to Scottish law. But the discussion is one which we will not now pursue. This book is more interesting than either the Scottish or English books, with which it is most naturally to be compared. And it is, after all, little matter whether this arises from the author of the book being a cleverer fellow than the authors of the books we have mentioned, or from his having the good fortune of having a better subject. Both causes have, we think, contributed to the effect.

An American publisher has reprinted "The Sketches of the Irish Bar" so carelessly, as even to preserve the most obvious misprints of the original publication so ignorantly as to ascribe the papers all to the same person. This mistake might have been pardoned, but not so as to the next, for there was such an absence of good faith in the transaction that, as we learn from the editor of Sheil's "Sketches Legal and Political," he has had the assurance to pretend, in his preface, that "his compilation was undertaken with the approbation and authority of Mr. Sheil himself."

This circumstance rendered it desirable to have the papers reprinted, and made it necessary that in every reprint their several papers should be assigned to the respective authors, as the partnership of Mr. Curran and Mr. Sheil, in what was in no true sense a connected work, was but an apparent one. It is probable that neither author saw the productions of the other till their appearance in the Magazine. In a former number of this journal some account has been given of "Sheil's Sketches," by a fellow-labourer of ours. In this we shall confine our observations to Mr. Curran's, referring to Mr. Sheil's only when they are, in some way, illustrative of matters brought before us in the book which is the proper subject of our notice.

The general interests of truth would alone render it fitting that the kind of mystery connected with any publication in which an author's name is concealed, should, when the motives for such concealment have passed away, be perfectly removed, so as to leave no doubt whatever on the subject. In the case of joint authorship, there may occasionally be a difficulty arising from the authors themselves being unable to distinguish their respective parts. Here no such difficulty exists, and here there is a peculiar necessity almost for the separation of the writings of Mr. Curran and Mr. Sheil. In the original conformation of Mr. Sheil's mind, and that of his friend, are very strong points of difference. With a mind exceedingly fertile in every description of illustration; with a quickness of wit which often, very often, reminds us of what is recorded of his father; with imagery rapidly presenting itself and finding instant expression in words of singular felicity, there is throughout Curran's writings great sobriety of thought, continual reference to elementary principles of government and of society, as though it had been the subject with him of habitual thought and study, and not, as it too often appears in the works of his coadjutor, as if a proposition of Montesquieu or Locke was snatched up at the moment for some mere party purpose. Actual distrust, indeed, is often created, of what the essayist most wishes to press upon his readers, by his representing some poor sophism as if it were not alone his own inference, in which he might be, without offence to any one, either wrong or