Whose resistless eloquence Wielded at will our fierce Democratic, It is even so; but here is no moral shadow, no intellectual invalid, although a pale patient of many distempers. There is languid severity and sick contempt on his relaxed but still masculine mouth; painful disgust, impatient condescension twitching his fretful colourless cheek and irritable nostril; but in his eye the triumphant consciousness of great things achieved and things far greater still achievable, brightens the dull pallor and disdainful repulsiveness of his first aspect, and you feel that, could you think those great things also good things, (as many thousand good men do,) you would forgive him splenetic lip and supercilious brow, and for its sake render him the due meed of almost unmixed admiration and sympathy. Alas! we fear these great things were not good things; and again alas! we fear the Chancellor now knows they are not. But we all remember Lord Brougham engaged in things that were neither great nor good, when With pride, and wit, and rage, and rancour keen'd, chewing the sour cinders of opposition for opposition's sake, nay battening on the very garbage and draff of indiscriminate invective. It is possible he may have then thought this the wholesome diet of a natural desire and appetite of virtue, but consequent impotence has long since taught him that it was but the vicious pampering of his ambition's unhealthy longings. Who sees him now at his crude surfeits, his unhealthy debauches of virulence, Where now are his excitements of liberalism? What has he done now with his coals and chalk of pining freedom? Under what bolster of the woolsack has he hidden his ballot-sick song book? We are men of our old stature again; and, although Westminster Hall were hung with the wigs of apostate radicals from gable to gable, we could walk it till the end of Term without losing one inch of our conscious integrity. Let us leave the gloomy grandeurs of Palace Yard, and cross Saint James's Park to Regent-street. This broad stair, basing the great granite pillar, is well conceived. You are prepared to expect something magnificent beyond an approach so noble. Walk up the gradual ascent and step out on the platform of Waterloo-place-is your eye filled to its complete satisfaction? No; the paint and stucco offend it after the living stone of walls that have stood till their bulk is natural rock again. The split plaster pilasters and the garret windows peeping out of sculptured pediments are poor pride after the rough masonry of the guards. We will leave Waterloo-place also, and go look at the improvements on Charing Cross. Oil paint again, and tawdry attics, and Agrigentan columns of lath and plaster. Where are the Mews, and what is that staring edifice like the governor of Trincomalie's bungaloo? The Golden Cross Inn, as we live, drawing itself up cheek by jowl with the Percy's palace. The Northumbrian Lion growls to the four quarters of heaven, and stiffens his tail as if he would snap their chimney pots off all the brick stacks in the Strand. They were or are going to build, (or may be in building for ought we know) some other dislocated abortion of vile taste here for a National Gallery-of yellow stone, with pot-metal pillars, very likely, and a dome like a bee's cap. And this is to hide Saint Martin's, and more than make amends for the lost portico. "Oh, soul of Sir John Cheek!" Was Sir John Cheek an architect? We protest we cannot tell, but he was a great Grecian in his day, That would have made Quinctilian stare and gasp as we do at the architectural taste of the nineteenth century in London. How soon the darkness has set in: here are a dozen grand glass lamps with gilded sockets blazing already in the Lowther Arcade. This is really a very beautiful alley, and, notwithstanding all our sneers, got up with taste and judgment; and at this hour, even in the dull month of November, a pleasant spot for a man hav ing business in the east to pass through. But what are we thinking of, lingering here listening to those fellows with the harp and fiddles, when we must dine in our hall among the shepherds at five o'clock? Pray, Sir, of which Inn of Court are you a member-you are aware, Sir, of the distich, The Inner for the rich, the middle for the poor, Forgive us for interrupting you, Sir: VOL. III. continue. Let them (if mutual intercourse between the countries be pleaded as their object) send their law students half their time to our King's Inns in Henrietta-street, or send but an equal number hither in return for ours; for we ask no profit, only a fair stage and no favour, and we will be satisfied, nay, delighted to see their honest faces among us, and to entertain them as well as our poverty will permit. True, London is a better school of law than Dublin, and why? Because in a London pleader's office are brought together under the student's eye a class of cases which must be sought for, some in the study of the Irish barrister, some in the office of the Irish attorney; or, in other words, because the legal business of London admits, from its immense extent, of a more perfect classification, and consequently of a more ready access to the branch desired, than that of Dublin. But the offices of two or three pleaders are sufficient for the Irish demand of tuition, and who will venture to assert that, were the demand transferred, the supply would not follow-that did twenty students a year, each with his fee of a hundred guineas, offer themselves to a special pleader in Henriettastreet, there would not be some Chitty ready to gather the scattered materials of his profession, and set them drawing declarations within a week? Still it is the duty of the student to frequent the best school; and it must be long ere Henrietta-street can rival Inner Temple-lane. To Inner Temple-lane then, let him go, in the mean time; but let it be a private speculation, a journey undertaken at will, like the medical student's to Edinburgh or Paris; let him have the use of the Inns of Court while he is there, if he choose to keep terms, while so employed; but do not make it obligatory on the Irish F gentleman to spend among you five hundred pounds on fat coachmen and innkeepers, already too rich, before he can have the privilege of taking his fee from an impoverished litigant at home. Do you plead the necessity of making the profession expensive, that it may be select? The money is a useful restriction on an Irishman's forensic propensities; but let the aspirant for honours at the Irish bar contribute those expenses to the prosperity of his future clients, not to the establishment of an artificial and unnatural class in another part of the empire; so shall his briefs abound, and his attorney's costs be paid, without an execution. After all, the majority of the Irish law students would be little obliged to us were our representations of any effect. They delight too much in the King's Theatre and Drury-lane to con template with resignation their chance of being confined to the shabby saloon of Hawkins's-street Theatre. Offley's has greater charms for them than the Royal Shades; and the Knights of Tara, with all Sir Jonah's romance, were never fit to boil the kettle for the KNIGHTS OF MALT. Ah, brother B., hold you a chapter to-night? Has the cask been brought from the Customhouse? Has the Kerry piper got his drone in order?-any egg-flip, eh? Ha, Sir Syphon, shall we not suck, shall we not inhale? Yes, Sir, we shall rejoice in mustachios of froth, if there be eggs in hens, though Sir John Fallstaff hath said, • no pullet sperm in my brewage.' But there go the three taps-all hands to grace, ahoy! God bless the king, the church, and this honourable society. Amen.' "Dinner on the table, Sir." TRIUMPHANT LOVE. "I hoped not at the first-how durst I hope? And meet my eyes, where they were sure to be; I marked the bursting struggle not to sigh, And through her lips' unwilling, quivering motion, In short, the passion that so long had slept Now boiled, like Etna, forth, and with a force That hurled distinction downward in its course, Hath raised me'-hold your squalling tongue, you fool you! Our story's at a stand until you stop her!" "Yes, Henry, but she's crying for her supper A sixpence"" Not one left"-" "Twas what I dreaded- : THE LITERARY LADY. AN EPISTLE FROM ONE MARRIED MAN TO ANOTHER. TRANSLATED FROM SCHILLER. Why does my friend thus bitterly lament? To seek elsewhere the love which he denies ? My friend, I see thee sadly weep and moan, Unto the olive-mantled Appenine, Or muddy Seine, whence fashions' forms are brought, At every stall my wife is cheaply bought. On dusty diligence when mounted high, The school boy scans her with presumptuous eye. A man from Leipsic-damn him-came to trace, And those fair features to the crowd displays, Thy wife is still thy wife, tho' lost to fame, In public, whispers pass from ear to ear. Thrice happy man! in whom the public see While I unhappy! by a female wit, Ere day break, footmen at our door are seen; She sleeps so soft-to wake her were a sin, Now open-glancing, o'er the last Review, The Furies in the place of Loves are there, Of every fool, born letters to disgrace, At table, friend, my sorest grief begins, Spring comes, and o'er the mountain and the mead With joy inspires her-its praises forth to pour ? What crowds are setting off to Pyrmont now! That Carlsbad is delicious all avow! Away she goes, and in that motley set Where Doctors' canes and Marshalls' batons met, Jog on together in celebrity, As oddly grouped as Charon's freight may be. |