The Press. — London, England, 1855-02-17 00:00:00

Xittraturt. lActolics, Legal and Political. By the late Right Hon. Richard Lalor Sheil. Edited, with Notes, by W. Savage, Esq. London : Hurst and Blacked. Tax long struggle to obtain the passing of the bill of 1829 stands, in most of its character istics, quite alone in the annals of popular effort. A great party in England, still bearing the name of those who, from the time of Charles 11., had been foremost in imposing disabilities Upon Romanists, found itself to all appearance permanently excluded from office. The people of England, properly so called, exhibited no desire for the return of the “ great Whig families " to power, and the "Principles of Lord Somers," and the chances of office of the house of Russell, seemed des tined to slumber together. Not even in Ire land could any considerable assistance be ob tained in the sacra fames for place. The gentle liberalism of the Ponsonbys and Charlemonts was scarce sufficient to excite a passing cheer from the great body of the Romanists who had ceased to look to France for an invasion, and placed their hopes on obtaining political power by other means than the point of the pike. In this extremity it became necessary for the so-called Whigs to create a new stock, and nothing offered at once so useful and so oppor tune as the Roman Catholic claims. The granting of these after the act of 1793, which gave Roman Catholics the franchise, was only a question of time, for it is one of the qualities of our Constitution that a party hungry for office will always be found to conform to the wishes of any who can vote. The machi nery of a Whig alliance with theparti pretrs in Ireland was ready to hand. A peasantry (for Romish yeomanry there was none), whom al most every page of the book before us shows to have been in the last degree ferocious and illiterate, had found lay tribunes partaking of their passions, hopes, and emotions as fully as of their origin and blood. With these was roan concluded an offensive and defensive treaty, which even yet survives, and of which the compacts of Lichfield-house and Chesham place were but the more scandalous renewals and published consequences. Of the Irish Romanist demagogues Mr. Sheil was one of the most remarkable. His education, partly ecclesiastical, gave him sym pathies with the Romish priesthood which they cordially acknowledged. His personal ambition and envious temperament made him leader in the guerilla warfare against autho ' to-day against a orrow against a 'le co n stituen :nouncing the unscru and Peculiar :r. Sheil went unemployed coun client; but he needed by his *rite readably, from 1803 to the the greatest The public of the smallest rhich the in people " was What colour A a ball, what of a recruiting had stoned a Orange oppressor " in the pound, A subje • aggregate meeting of " the Catholics of Ireland," could not be made interesting on this side the Channel without considerable art, and this Mr. Sheil displayed to good account in the " Sketches" before us at a time when the broadsheets of the Common. wealth were being caricatured by a more modern series of " Strange and Terrible Newes "from Irelande." Amongst the multitude of aspirants for profit or distinction which the tumult of Irish agitation threw up to the surface, Shell stood alone as possessing a power consider ably beyond vulgar abuse and reckless accu• a leader in the guerilla warfare ag rity in Ireland that was waged to-c lord lieutenant and to-morrow churchwarden, now contesting the cies of the kingdom, and now der appointment of a gauger. Flipp pulous, and endowed with great powers of extravagant oratory, MI far•ahead of the crowd of unemj sellors who took the mob for a cliff had one further quality greatly ;le party at that period. He could , iirr stud such power at the period, fron rise of " 'Young Ireland," was lateessity of the agitators. England had little sympathy with tif provincial squabbles upon w] Vlignation of " seven millions of o often Witheringly poured out. it deputy-lieutenant's lady wore at tune was played by the fifer of party, what Protestant urchin I priest's geese, or what " Orange had put his reverence's pig in though subjects of an " aggregate .• •• P Y 1 THE PRESS. sation. His sarcasm, though bitter even to malignity, compared favourably with the libellous ribaldry of O'Connell and his imme diate imitators ' • and there was something to be remarked in those sparkling flashes which occasionally lit up the lowering and roaring storm of the billinsgate of his compatriots, of whom it might be said, in another sense from that in which it was applied to the orators of antiquity, quanto niagis culniirareinini 8i audisse tis ipsos! But it would be difficult to find a book in which so little logical argument is contained as in the speeches of Richard Lalor Sheil. His best efforts were of that kind termed conventionally Irish, in an eminent degree. His so-called reply to Lord Lynd hurst, for instance, where his lordship spoke of the boast of the Irish Celt, that they are "aliens in blood, aliens in language, and aliens " in religion," consisted solely of an account of the services rendered by the Irish to the imperial power of England, illustrated by Waterloo, as though one should argue the identity of blood from the identity of bravery of the Highlanders and the Zouaves. But Shell had an advantage rare amongst his rivals. When power came by Whig corrup tion within the reach of the Roman Catholics of Ireland, he was fit for place. He had not committed himself to violent doc trines. He had not pledged himself deeply to any of the chimeras by which the Irish mob was kept in motion, and he was by his education and manners fit to accept such goods as "the gods provided." He thus settled into a quiet placeman, and served himself instead of the priests for the remainder of his career, finding sufficient workday common sense to attend to the affairs of Greenwich Hospital, and oversee (nut without the "Doi Gratia" accident) the new die for the Mint. On the whole, however, Sheil was in learning, ability, and consistency, the most respectable of the " agitators," nor was the fortune that made him so that fortune which, testi Tom Moore, " sheds Her brightest halo round the weakest heads." The contents of these two volumes were contributed to the New Monthly Magazine at intervals from 1822 to 1829. and 'having been republished in America without the authority of Mr. Colburn, and included with others not written by Mr. Sheil, the present collection was thought necessary. Of this necessity there may be two opinions. The " Sketches " of the Irish Bar," which, the editor informs us, " were read as well for their fidelity as " portraitures as for the spirit and elegance " with which they were written," were, for the most part, either caricatures intended to convey local envy and political malice or ridiculous flattery of some Roman Catholic barristers, now, with one exception (if O'Loghlen is, indeed, an exception), utterly forgotten. As to the elegance of these " Sketches," probably it is true in criticism that " every eye " forms its own beauty," for the phrases " the " bench was withdrawn from Mr. Joy while " he was almost in the attitude of seating him " self upon it ;" and Judge Fletcher was " a " man of uncommonly vigorous and brawny " mind ;" and " the lurid looks and baleful " countenances of the Protestant conquerors ;" and "the rugged and hirsute embrace" of Trinity College, Dublin, with hundreds of phrases similar, we can haraly take, on Mr . Savage's authority, for " elegance." The interest of sketches of the bar of any country is in itself ephemeral, and Mr. Sheil's sketches derive so much of it as they poisess rather from anecdotes and illustrations, with which mere professional traits have little to do. The notice of Lord Norbury, for instance, is a collection of the exaggerated narratives in which the good story-tellers of the Irish metro polis were in the habit of indulging ; but the following sketch of the haphazard administra tion of justice in Nisi Prius trials gives a fair specimen of Mr. Sheil's word-painting. The passage purports to be descriptive of " Lord Norbury 's monologue, commonly called "a charge " usually began by pronouncing theloftiest encomiums upon the party in the action against whom he intended to advise the jury to give their verdict. For this the audience were well prepared; and accordingly, after he hid stated that the defendant was one of the most honourable men alive, and that he knew his father and loved him, he aud• SATURDAY, denly came with a most singular emphasis, which he ac companied with a strange shake of his wig, to the fatal " but," which made the sudienoe who were iu expectation of it burst into a fit of laughter, while he proceeded to charge, as he almost invariably did, in the plaintiffs favour. He then entered more deeply, as humid, into the case, and, flinging his judicial robe half aside, and some times casting off his wig, started from his seat, and threw off a wild harangue, in which neither law, argument, nor method could be discovered. It generally consisted of narratives connected with the history of his early life which it was impossible to associate with the subject, of jests from Joe Miller, nixed with jokes of his own manu facture, and of sarcastic allusions to any of the counsel who had endeavoured to check him during the trial. He was exceedingly fond of quotations from Milton and Shakspeare, which, however out of place, were very well delivered, and evinced an excellent enunciation. At the conclusion of his charge he made some effort to call the attention of the jury to any leading incident which par ticularly struck him, but what he meant it was not very easy to conjecture, and when he sat down the whole per formance exhibited a mind which resembled a whirlpool of mad, in which law, facts, arguments, and evidence were lost in unfathomable confusion. In the same sketch we have some idea given of the kind of debates which sometimes hap pened in the Parliament of Ireland, and Lord Norbury is exhibited as " a hired bravo," from the violence of the language in which he was accustomed to indulge. We fear, however, that the popular had little superiority in lan guage over the Government side of that as sembly, as the " ever-glorious Grattan," when, in debate on the " Declaratory Act" of 1782, Mr. Flood endeavoured to keep the great patriot to his own principles, attacked the latter gentleman (whose profile was imperfect) as "an obscene bird with cadaverous aspect " and broken beak." This was probably a portion of that eloquence which " Demos thenes wanted," and with which Grattan was " endued." The notice of a man of great attainments and of unsullied integrity, but guilty of being a hereditary Protestant—the Right Hon. William Saurin—is an average specimen of the misre presentation and disparagement in which the Irish peasant tribunes were in the habit of in dulging. Like a certain pariah class, it is amusing to see how prone they are to charge plebeian origin." However far removed, when "these sketches were written, from the society in which Mr. Saurin lived, Mr. Sheil could not have been ignorant that his first line respect ing the great lawyer was a simple invention. " Mr. Saurin," he says, "is the son of a Pres " byterian clergyman, who followed the duties " of his pious but humble calling in the north "of Ireland." Mr. Saurin's grandfather, Louis Saurin, D.D., Precentor of Christ's Church, Dublin, and Dean of Ardagh, was brother of the famous Jacques Sauna, the Huguenot, and of Marc Antoine Saurin, Gentleman of the Bedchamber to George I. Dr. Louis Saurin's son William became Vicar of Belfast, and was father of the Attorney-General whom Mr. Sheil " sketches," and also of the Bishop of Dromore. Such an inquiry is only of value from the fact that one of the commonest expedients of the Romanist party in Ireland has been the deliberate misrepresentation of the rank and origin of their opponents, not the least consis tent, feared, and effective of whom was the Right Hon. William Sarnia. The article entitled "The Catholic Bar" betrays the usual amount, either of want of knowledge of the value of Irish authorities, or the actual citation of incredible witnesses The impartiality and independence of the Romish judges foisted on the bench by James 11., Mr. Sheil proves by James's hrother•in-law and Viceroy, Lawrence Hyde, who, though he took fright at the King's final insanity in favour of the Jesuits, would have willingly gone any length in Ireland, where matters were sup posed to be safer than at home. Any reader of constitutional history will admire the audacity, or ignorance, or both, of him who wrote what follows of the pious and fearless Archbishop King, the author of the "State of the Irish Protestants," and relying, for the Archbishop's refutation, on the book of Bishop Leslie, who followed James into exile, and professed Papacy at St. Ger mains : --- • In the reign of James 11., Roman Catholic barristers were raised to office; and, as the time appears to be at hand when they will be rendered eligible by law to hold places of distinction and of trust, it is worth our while to examine in what way they conducted themselvea when, in the short interval of their political prosperity, Roman Catholics were invested with authority. Doctor King B oys that , "no