enjoy a sort of customary right to promotion to the Bench. Even before they are raised to the judicial station, they occasionally act in lieu of any of the judges, who may happen to be prevented by illness from going the circuit. The malady of a judge, to such an extent of incapacity, is not, however, of very frequent occurrence. A deduction from his salary, to the amount of four hundred pounds, is inflicted as a sort of penalty, in every instance in which he declines attending the assizes, and the expedient has been found peculiarly sanative. It not unfrequently happens that one of the twelve sages,* who has entitles him to employment in all cases, civil and criminal, between the Crown and the subject. Out of a bar consisting of about six hundred, in England, between forty and fifty are Queen's Counsel; so that the distinction, which is seldom conferred except for merit, is an important one, as it virtually bestows professional rank on the recipient. A Queen's Counsel may be employed against the Crown, in the courts of law, on paying a fee of ten guineas, and obtaining permission, which is rarely refused, from the Attorney-General. But the Crown has a prior right to his services, if it require them. What is called a patent of precedency" is sometimes given to Sergeants-at-Law, which places them, according to its date, in possession of all the privileges enjoyed by Queen's Counsel. Mr. Sergeant Wilkins, the ablest advocate now at the English bar, has such a patent. Mr. O'Connell, who was for many years at the head of his profession in Ireland, never was made Counsel to the Crown, owing to his politics being hostile to those of the Lord-Chancellor (Manners), who had the disposal of such honors. Eventually, he received a patent of precedency. In the Ecclesiastical Courts, no barristers are allowed to plead unless they have taken the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, at one of the Universities. In England, politics are seldom regarded now in the disposal of silk-gowns. This may require explanation: a Queen's Counsel wears a silken and an ordinary barrister a stuff gown. The former, on solemn occasions, hides his head in a full-bottomed wig, made of horsehair, and whitened with flour or powdered starch: the latter wears a plain peruke, of the same quality, with two small tails behind. Hence the saying, "The wisdom's in the wig!" There are neither Queen's Counsel, nor Sergeants-at-Law, nor patents of precedency, at the Scottish bar; but they get on very well without them.-M.

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* In Ireland, besides two equity Judges (Lord Chancellor and Master of the Rolls), there are twelve principal Judges, who dispose of criminal and nisi prius cases. In Scotland, there are thirteen Judges, of whom, seven are Lords of the Justiciary or chief criminal Court. In England, there are seven equity, and fifteen principal Judges for criminal cases. In England and Ireland, there are also Judges of the Prerogative and Ecclesiastical Courts. There also are county and other local Judges in every county of the United Kingdom, besides Commissioners of Bankruptcy and Insolvency. The largest salary is the Lord

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lain almost dead during the term, at the sound of the circuittrumpet, starts, as it were into a judicial resurrection, and, preceded by the gorgeous procession of bum-bailiffs, bears his cadaverous attestation through the land, to the miraculous agency of the King's commission.

However, it does upon occasion happen that this restorative, powerful as it is, loses its preternatural operation, and one of the Sergeants is called upon to take the place of any of the ermined dignitaries of the Bench, who does not require the certificate of a physician to satisfy the public of the reality of his venerable ailments. This proximity to the Bench gives a Sergeant considerable weight. In raising Mr. Joy to an office which affords so many honorable anticipations, Mr. Saurin must have been sensible that he added to his personal influence, by the elevation of so unqualified an adherent to the party of which he was the head. Mr. Joy had, besides, a high individual rank. Before his promotion his business was considerable, and it afterward rapidly increased. It was princiChancellor's's-ten thousand pounds sterling, a year, in England. The average salaries of the other principal Judges are about five thousand pounds sterling a year. The County Court Judges receive about one thousand pounds sterling per annum in England and Ireland, and about eight hundred pounds sterling in Scotland. All the appointments are for life. No Judge is removable by the Crown (except the Lord Chancellor, who retires with the Ministry, of whom he is one), but his removal can take place on an address from both Houses of Parliament, after gross misconduct is proven before them. Every Judge, on retiring, after fifteen years' service, or ill-health, has a life-pension of two thirds of his salary, but the Lord Chancellor, however brief his tenure of office, has a pension of five thousand pounds sterling a year, as, having once quitted the Bar, for the Bench, he can not resume his practice in the Courts of Law. But the ex-Chancellors, all of whom are peers, sit in the House of Lords, every Session, hearing appeals from the different law-Courts throughout the whole Empire (Colonies included) and thus render great service, fully the value of their pensions, to the public. The House of Lords is the highest court of judicature in the British Empire, and "the Law Lords," as they are called, chiefly give the decisions-the lay-lords, who are not lawyers, seldom interfering. For the last eighteen years, Lord Brougham, in particular, has devoted his time, energies, and vast knowledge, to the adjudication of Appeals before the House of Lords. It may be remarked, as a curious anomaly, that the Lord Chancellor and any other Judge, whose decisions may be appealed against (if a peer, such as Lord Chief-Justice Campbell, for instance), may hear and vote on such appeals-literally on their own judgments!- M.

pally augmented in Chancery, where pre-audience is of the utmost moment. Lord Manners is disposed to allow too deep a permanence to the earliest impression, and whoever first addresses him has the odds in his favor. The enjoyment of priority swelled the bag of Mr. Joy, which was soon distended into an equality with that of Mr. Bushe.

That great advocate found in Mr. Joy a dangerous competitor. The latter was generally supposed to be more profoundly read, and the abstract principles of equity were traced by sagacious solicitors in the folds and furrows of his brow. The eloquence of Bushe was little appreciated by men who thought, that because they had been delighted they ought not to have been convinced. Joy had a more logical aspect in the eyes of those who conceive that genius affords primá facie evidence against knowledge, and grew into a gradual preference at the Chancery bar. It was no light recommendation to him that he was the protége of Saurin, who could not bring himself to forgive the liberalism of his colleague, and was not unwilling to assist the prosperous competition of his more Protestant élève. His strenuous protection gave strong reasons to Bushe to tremble at Joy's pretensions to the highest seat upon the Bench. Bushe had himself declined the office of a puisne judge,* in the just expectation of attaining to that, which he at present occupies in a manner so useful to the country and so creditable to himself. But he was doomed to the endurance of a long interval of suspense before his present fortunate, and I may even call it accidental, elevation. He had already been sufficiently annoyed by the perverse longevity of Lord Norbury,t and the no less vexatious hesitations of Lord Downes, who tortured him for years with the

* In England and Ireland, the Chief Justices who preside over the Courts of Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer, are familiarly called chiefs. The judges under them are called puisne (pronounced puny) from a French adjective signifying younger and inferior.-M.

Lord Norbury (the subject of a subsequent sketch), who was Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas in Ireland, was seventy-eight years old in 1825 when this was written, and had then been twenty-three years on the Bench.-M.

William Downes, called to the Irish bar in 1766, was made a Judge in 1792. During Emmett's insurrection in 1803, Lord Kilwarden was murdered by the

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judicial coquetry of affected resignation. But the appearance of another candidate for the object of his protracted aspirations, had well nigh broken his spirit, and reduced him to despair.

It was at one time quite notorious, that if a vacancy had occurred in the Chief-Justiceship of the King's Bench, Saurin would have exercised his influence in behalf of his favorite ; and it was almost equally certain that his influence would have prevailed. In the general notion, Joy was soon to preside in the room of Downes, and his own demeanor tended not a little to confirm it. The auspices of success were assembled in his aspect, as conspicuously as the omens of disaster were collected in the bearing of Mr. Bushe. The latter exhibited all the most painful symptoms of the malady of procrastinated hope. The natural buoyancy of his spirit sunk under the oppressive and accumulated solicitude that weighed upon him. Conscious of the power of our emotions, and of the readiness with which they break into external results, he was ever on his guard against them. He well knew how speedily misfortune is detected by the vulgar and heartless crowd we call the world, and made every effort to rescue himself from their ignominious commiseration. To escape from a sentiment which is so closely connected with contempt, he wrought himself at moments into a wild and feverish hilarity; but the care that consumes the heart manifested itself, in spite of all his efforts to conceal it. His bursts of high-wrought joyousness were speedily followed by the depression which usually succeeds to an unnatural inemob, who mistook him for Lord Carleton, the Judge who presided at the trial and condemnation of Henry and John Sheares, in 1798. Downes was appointed to succeed Lord Kilwarden, as Chief Justice of the King's Bench. He was raised to the peerage, as Baron Downes (with remainder, on default of lawful male issue, to his cousin, the gallant Sir Ulysses de Burgh, the present peer), on his relinquishing the ermine in March, 1822. He died, at a very advanced age, in March, 1825. Lord Downes was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin. He was a large, unwieldy man, and Curran described him as a hunian quagmire," '—on the bench, he was tremulous as if he were composed of calves'feet jelly. He was at once solemn and ponderous. He had never been married, and his rigid moral conduct caused him to be designated the "virgin judge." Withal, he was patient, a good listener, a pains-taking man, and had a competent share of legal knowledge.

-M.

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briation of the mind; his eyes used to be fixed in a heavy and abstracted glare; his face was suffused with a murky and unwholesome red- melancholy seemed to "bake his blood." He was vacant when disengaged, and impatient when occupied, and every external circumstance about him attested the workings of solicitude that were going on within. truly distressing to see this eloquent, high-minded, and generous man, dying of the ague of expectation, and alternately shivering with wretched disappointment, and inflamed with miserable hope.

It was

Joy, on the other hand, displayed all the characteristics of prosperity, and would have been set down by the most casual observer as a peculiarly successful man. An air of good fortune was spread around him: it breathed from his face, and was diffused over all that he said and did. His eyes twinkled with the pride of authority. His brow assumed by anticipation the solemnity of the judicial cast; he seemed to rehearse the part of Chief Justice, and to be already half seated on the highest place upon the Bench. But suddenly it was plucked from beneath him. Lord Wellesley arrived*-Saurin was precipitated from his office. In a paroxysm of distempered magnanimity he disdained to accept the first judicial station; and Bushe, to his own astonishment, grasped in permanence and security that object of half his life, which had appeared so long to fly from his pursuit, and, just before the instant of its attainment, seemed, like a phantasm, to have receded from his reach for ever. Bushe is now Chief-Justice of the King's Bench [1823]; and that he may long continue to preside

* As Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. After the visit of George IV., when the Catholics showed a superabundance of "loyalty," it was resolved to favor them with a more liberal ruler than the late Earl Talbot, who was a decided partisan of "Protestant Ascendency in Church and State." The Marquis Wellesley was sent over-partly because he was liberal and friendly to the Catholic claims, and partly because he was poor, and the twenty thousand pounds sterling a year salary was an object to him. At the same time, Mr. Saurin, the virtual and intolerant ruler of the country, was dismissed, to be succeeded by Plunket, the eloquent advocate of Emancipation.-Lord Wellesley in Ireland forms the subject of a lively sketch, in this volume, entitled "The Dublin Tabinet Ball."-M.