It does Mr. Croker great honor that, in his emergencies, his brother barrister and satirist was not forgotten. The honorable Secretary promised a lucrative situation for Mr. Nin the island of Malta. His Irish friends looked forward to the period when he should be enabled, after recruiting his circumstances, to return to Ireland, and to reanimate Kildarestreet club-house, with that vivacious pleasantry of which he was a felicitous master; when, to everybody's astonishment, it was announced that Mr. N. had left the island,* had taken up his residence at Constantinople, and renounced his religion with his hat.

He became a renegade, and invested his brows with a turban. The motives assigned for this proceeding it is not necessary to mention. It is probable that he involved himself a second time by play, and that he had no other resource than the expedient of a conversion, through the painful process of which he heroically went. Having carried some money with him to Constantinople, he at first made a considerable figure. He was dressed in the extreme of Turkish fashion, and was considered to have ingratiated himself by his talents into the favor of some leading members of the Divan. His prosperity at Constantinople, however, was evanescent. His money was soon spent, and he fell into distress. Letters of the most heart rending kind were written to his friends in Dublin, in which he represented himself as in want of the common means of subsistence.

It was in this direful state of destitution that he addressed himself, in the cemeteries of Constantinople, to a person whom he guessed to be a native of these countries, and whom he discovered to be his fellow-citizen. His condition was lamentable

has drawn him, in his political novel of "Conyngsby," as the mean, toadying, and illiberal Digby. It is understood that, though now [1854] in his seventy-fourth year, Mr. Croker is editing the works of Alexander Pope. In his editorial as well as in his critical capacity, Croker avoids anything like a broad view of the subject, but carefully creeps over it, applying himself to the examination of minute details. He is never so happy as when he "breaks a butterfly upon the wheel."-M.

* Barrington says, "At Malta he soon disgraced himself in a manner which for ever excluded him from society.-M."

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beyond the power of description. His dress was at once the emblem of apostacy and of want. It hung in rags about a person which, from a robust magnitude of frame, had shrunk into miserable diminution. He carried starvation in his cheeks; ghastliness and misery overspread his features, and despair stared in his glazed and sunken eye. He did not long survive his calamities.

The conclusion of his story may be briefly told. For a little while he continued to walk through the streets of Constantinople in search of nourishment, and haunted its cemeteries like the dogs to which Christians are compared. He had neither food, roof, nor raiment. At length he took the desperate resolution of relapsing into Christianity; for he indulged in the hope, that, if he could return to his former faith, and effect his escape from Constantinople, although he could not appear in these countries again, yet, on the continent, he might obtain at least the means of life from the friends, who, although they could not forgive his errors, might take compassion upon his distress. He accordingly endeavored to fly from Constantinople, and induced some Englishmen who happened to be there, to furnish money enough to effect his escape. But the plot was discovered. He was pursued, and taken at a small distance from Constantinople; his head was struck off upon the beach of the Bosphorus, and his body thrown into the sea.

THOMAS LEFROY.

THERE is something apparently irreconcilable between the ambition and avidity which are almost inseparable from the propensities of a successful lawyer, and any very genuine enthusiasm in religion. The intense worldliness of his profession must produce upon his character and faculties equally tangible results; and if it has the effect of communicating a minute astuteness to the one, it is not very likely to impart a spirit of lofty abstraction to the other. I can not readily conceive anything more sublunary than the bar. Its occupations allow no respite to the mind, and refuse it all leave to indulge in the aspirations which a high tendency to religion not only genererates, but requires. They will not even permit any native disposition to enthusiasm to branch aloft, but fetter it to the earth, and constrain it to grow down. How can the mind of a lawyer, eddying as it is with such fluctuating interests, receive upon its shifting and troubled surface those noble images which can never be reflected except in the sequestered calm of deep and unruffled thought? He whose spirit carries on a continued commerce with the skies, is not only ill adapted to the ordinary business of society, but is scarcely conscious of it. He can with difficulty perceive what is going on at such a distance below him; and if he should ever divert his eyes from the contemplation of the bright and eternal objects upon which they are habitually fixed, it is but to compassionate those whom he beholds engaged in the pursuit of the idle and fantastic fires that mislead us in our passage through "this valley of tears."

To such a man, the ordinary ends of human desire must ap

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pear to be utterly preposterous and inane. The reputation which Romilly has left behind must sound as idle in his ears as the wind that shakes the thistle upon his grave. An ardent religionist must shrink from those offices which a lawyer would designate as the duties, and which are among the necessary incidents, of his profession. To play for a little of that worthless dross, which is but a modification of the same material upon which he must at last lie low, all the multiform variety of personation which it is the business of a lawyer to assume― to barter his anger and his tears-to put in mirth or sorrow, as it suits the purpose of every man who can purchase the mercenary joke or the stipendiary lamentation-these appear to be offices for which an enthusiastic Christian is not eminently qualified. Still less would he be disposed to misquote and to misrecite to warp the facts, and to throw dust into the eyes of justice to enter into an artificial sympathy with baseness -to make prostitutes of his faculties, and surrender them in such an uncompromising subserviency to the passions of his client, as to make them the indiscriminate utensils of depravity.

How fallacious is all speculation when unillustrated by example, and how rapidly these misty conjectures disappear, before the warm and conspicuous piety of the learned gentleman whose name is prefixed to this number of the "Sketches of the Irish Bar." This eminent practitioner, who has rivals in capacity, but is without a competitor in religion, refutes all this injurious surmise; and in answer to mere inference and theory, the sainted fraternity among whom he plays so remarkable a part, and who with emulative admiration behold him uniting in his person the good things of the Old Testament, with the less earthly benedictions of the New, may triumphantly appeal to the virtues and to the opulence of Mr. Sergeant LEFROY.

The person who has accomplished this exemplary reconcili ation between characters so opposite in appearance as a devoted follower of the gospel and a wily disputant at the bar, stands in great prominence in the Four Courts, but is still more noted among "the saints" in Dublin, and I think may be VOL. I.-10

accounted their leader. These are an influential and rapidlyincreasing body, which is not wholly separated from the church, but is appended to it by a very loose and slender tie. They may be designated as the Jansenists of the establishment; for in their doctrines of grace and of election they border very closely upon the professors of the Port-Royal. For men who hold in such indifference the pleasures of the world, they are singularly surrounded with its fugacious enjoyments. Encom passed with innocuous luxuries and innocent voluptuousness they felicitously contrast their external wealth with that mortification of the spirit of which they make so lavish a profession, and of which none but an irreclaimable skeptic could entertain a doubt.

At the bar they are to be found in considerable strength, and are distinguished among their brethren for their zeal in the advancement of the interests of religion and their own. They are, in general, sedulous and well-informed-competent to the discharge of ordinary business, and free of all ambition of display- —a little uncandid in their practice, and careless of the means by which success is to be attained-pursuivants of authority and followers of the great-gentlemanlike in their demeanor, but not without that touch of arrogance toward their inferiors which is an almost uniform attendant upon an overanxious deference to power-strong adherents to abstract principles of propriety, and vehement inculcators of the eternal rules of right, but at the same time not prodigally prone to any Samaritan sensibilities— amiable in their homes, and somewhat selfish out of them-fluent reciters of the Scripturesconspicuously decent in their manners, and entirely regardless of the apple-wenches in the Hall.

The great prototype of this meritorious fraternity is Mr. Sergeant Lefroy. It would do good to the heart of the learned member for Galway to visit his stables on a Sunday. The generous animals who inhabit these exemplary tenements, participate in his relaxations, and fulfil with scriptural exactness the sacred injunction of repose. Smooth as their benevolent master, they stand in their stalls amid all the luxury of grain, and, from their sobriety and sleekness, might readily be recog