contemptuous courtesy proposing to his lordship the ceremony of the Ko-tou, he will form a pretty accurate notion of the bearing, the manners, and the hue of Mr. Joy, his Majesty's Solicitor-General for Ireland. He is extremely polite, but his politeness is as Chinese as his look, and appears to be dictated rather by a sense of what he owes to himself than by any deference to the person who has the misfortune to be its object.

And yet with all this assumption of dignity, Mr. Joy is not precisely dignified. He is in a perpetual effort to sustain his consequence, and arms himself against the least invasion upon his title to respect. Of its legitimacy, however, he does not appear to be completely satisfied. He seems a spy upon his own importance, and keeps watch over the sacred treasure with a most earnest and unremitting vigilance. Accordingly, he is for ever busy with himself. There is nothing abstract and meditative in his aspect, nor does his mind ever wander beyond the immediate localities that surround him. There is no speculation in his eye;" an intense consciousness pervades all that he says and does. I never yet saw him lost in revery.

When disengaged from his professional occupations, he stands in the Hall with the same collected manner which he bore in the discharge of his duties to his client, and with his thoughts fastened to the spot. While others are pacing with rapidity along the flags which have worn out so many hopes, Joy remains in stationary stateliness, peering with a sidelong look at the peristrephic panorama that revolves around him. The whole, however, of what is going on is referred to his own individuality; self is the axis of the little world about him, and while he appears scarcely conscious of the presence of a single person in all the crowd by which he is encompassed, he is in reality noting down the slightest glance that may be connected with himself.

There is something so artificial in the demeanor of Mr. Joy, and especially in the authoritativeness which he assumes with the official silk in which he attires his person, that his external appearance gives but little indication of his character. His

dispositions are much more commendable than a disciple of Lavater would be inclined to surmise. I suspect that his hauteur is worn from a conviction that the vulgar are most inclined to reverence the man by whom they are most strenuously despised. Upon a view of Mr. Joy, it would be imagined that he would not prove either a very humane or patient judge;* but it is quite otherwise, and those who have had an opportunity of observing him in a judicial capacity upon circuit, concur in the desire that he should be permanently placed in a situation for which he has already displayed in its transitory occupation so many conspicuous qualities.

*Chief-Baron Joy was a good judge;—sound in his law, impartial in his judgments, and courteous in his demeanor.-M.

CALAMITIES OF THE BAR.

Nor very long after I had been called to the bar, I one day chanced to observe a person standing beside a pillar in the Hall of the Four Courts, the peculiar wretchedness of whose aspect attracted my notice. I was upon my way to the subterranean chamber where the wigs and gowns of lawyers are kept, and was revolving at the moment the dignity and importance of the station to which I had been raised by my enrolment among the members of the Irish bar. I was interrupted in this interesting meditation by the miserable object upon which my eyes had happened to rest; and, without being a dilettante in affliction, I could not help pausing to consider the remarkable specimen of wretchedness that stood before me.

Had the unfortunate man been utterly naked, his condition would not have appeared so pitiable. His raiment served to set his destitution off. A coat, which had once been black, but which appeared to have been steeped in a compound of all rusty hues, hung in rags about him. It was closely pinned at his throat, to conceal the absence of a neckcloth. He was without a vest. A shirt of tattered yellow, which from a time beyond memory had adhered to his withered body, appeared through numerous apertures in his upper garment, and jutted out round that portion of his person where a garb without a name is usually attached. The latter part of his attire, which was conspicuous for a prismatic diversity of color, was fastened with a piece of twine to the extreme button of his upper habiliment, and very incompletely supplied the purpose for which the progenitors of mankind, after their first initiation into knowledge, employed a vegetable veil. Through the inferior regions of

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this imperfect integument, there depended a shred or two of that inner garment, which had been long sacred to nastiness, and which the fingers of the laundress never had profaned. His stockings were compounded of ragged worsted and accumulated mire. They covered a pair of fleshless bones, but did not extend to the feet, the squalid nakedness of which was visible through the shoes that hung soaked with wet about them.

He was dripping with rain, and shivering with cold. His figure was shrunken and diminutive. A few gray locks were wildly scattered upon a small and irregularly-shaped head. Despair and famine sat upon his face, which was of the strong Celtic mould, with its features thrown in disorder, and destitute of all symmetry or proportion, but deriving from the passions, by which they were distorted, an expression of ferocious haggardness. His beard was like that which grows upon the dead. The flesh was of a cadaverous complexion. His gray eyes, although laden with rheum, caught a savageness from the eyelids, which were bordered with a jagged rim of diseased and bloody red. A hideous mouth was lined with a row of shattered ebony, and from the instinct of long hunger had acquired an habitual gape for food. The wretched man was speaking vehemently and incoherently to himself. It was a sort of insane jabbering—a mad soliloquy, in which "my Lord" was frequently repeated.

I turned away with a mingled sentiment of disgust and horror, and, endeavoring to release my recollection from the painful image which so frightful an object had left behind, I proceeded to invest myself in my professional trappings: tied a band with precision about my neck; complained, as is the wont with the junior bar, that my wig had not been duly besprinkled with powder, and that its curls were not developed with sufficient amplitude; set it rectilinearly upon my head; and, after casting a look into the glass, and marking the judicial organ in a certain prominence upon my brow, I readjusted the folds of my gown, and reascended the Hall of the Four Courts in a pleasurable state of unqualified contentedness with myself.

I directed my steps to the Court of Chancery, and, having

no better occupation, I determined to follow the example of certain sagacious aspirants to the office of Commissioner of Bankrupts, and to dedicate the day to an experiment in nodding, which I had seen put into practice with effect. There are a set of juvenile gentlemen who have taken for their motto the words of a Scotch ballad, which, upon a recent motion for an injunction, Lord Eldon* affected not to understand, but which, if he had looked for a moment upon the benches of youthful counsellors before him, while in the act of delivering a judicial aphorism, he would have found interpreted in one of the senses of which they are susceptible, and have discovered a meaning in "We're all a-nodding," of obvious application to the bar. Confident in the flexibility of my neck, and a certain plastic facility of expression, I imagined that I was not without some talent for assentation; and accordingly seated myself in such a place that the eye of my Lord Manners, in seeking refuge from the inquisitorial physiognomy of Mr. Plunket, would probably rest upon me.

The Court began to fill. The young aristocracy of the bar, the sons of Judges, and fifth cousins of members of Parliament, and the whole rising generation of the Kildare-street Club, gradually dropped in. Next appeared, at the inner bar, the more eminent practitioners tottering under their huge bags, upon which many a briefless senior threw a mournful and repining glance. First came Mr. Pennefather,† with his calm

* Lord-Chancellor Eldon, although born close to the Scottish border, affected not to understand the Scotch dialect and pronunciation. He was once hearing appeals, in the House of Lords, and Mr. Clerk, an eminent Edinburgh lawyer (afterward a Judge, and called Lord Eldin), having said, in his broadest accent, "In plain English, my Lords," was interrupted, half-seriously, by Lord Eldon, with "In plain Scotch, I suppose you mean?". -"Nae matter," rejoined Clerk, "in plain common sense, my Lord-and that's the same in all languages-ye 'll ken if you understand it.”—M.

There were two Irish barristers named Pennefather. Edward, the junior, called to the bar in 1796, was inferior to none as a lawyer and an advocate. He had immense practice; and though compelled, by ill-health, occasionally to retire fron labor, attorneys would flock to him with briefs the moment he returned. In this respect he was as fortunate as the late Sir William Follett, of the English bar, and both negatived the commonly-received belief that "when a lawyer leaves his business, his business leaves him." Edward Pennefatlier