mind stored with every classic treasure, and inspired with every sublime perception, rivaled the peasant's mirth, and wore familiarly the peasant's merriment. Nor was this idle jocularity without its value. Often afterward, in his professional circuit, the hearer, who stood entranced at an eloquence that seemed to flow from the very fount of inspiration, would see him suddenly, with some village witness, assume the vulgar air, and attitude, and accent, until his familiarity whee dled the confession which his ingenuity never could have extorted. Various were the anecdotes with which Mr. Curran used to exemplify the annals of Mullaghmore and the history of Bob Lyons. But many of them owed half their value to their local interest, and many of them were of a nature more suited to the table than the press. To me, who from my infancy had been familiar with all the localities of the scene, he delighted to repeat them; and as he sported in the retrospect of days so long gone by, the very spirit of the poet's veteran revived within him: he lived over again the pleasures he was describing.

In one of these excursions, a very singular circumstance had almost rendered this the termination of his biography. He was on a temporary visit to the neighboring town of Sligo, and was one morning standing at his bed-room window, which overlooked the street, occupied, as he told me, in arranging his portmanteau, when he was stunned by the report of a blunderbuss in the very chamber with him, and the panes above his head were all shivered into atoms. He looked suddenly around in the greatest consternation. The room was full of smoke, the blunderbuss on the floor just discharged, the door closed, and no human being but himself discoverable in the apartment! If this had happened in his rural retreat, it could readily have been reconciled through the medium of some offended spirit of the village mythology; but, as it was, he was in a populous town, in a civilized family, among Christian doctrines, where the fairies had no power, and their gambols no currency; and, to crown all, a poor cobbler, into

whose stall on the opposite side of the street the slugs had penetrated, hinted in no very equivocal terms that the whole affair was a conspiracy against his life. It was by no means a pleasant addition to the chances of assassination to be loudly declaimed against by a crazed mechanic as an assassin himself. Day after day passed away without any solution of the mystery; when one evening, as the servants of the family were conversing round the fire on so miraculous an escape, a little urchin, not ten years old, was heard so to wonder how such an aim was missed, that a universal suspicion. was immediately excited. He was alternately flogged and coaxed into a confession, which disclosed as much precocious and malignant premeditation as perhaps ever marked the annals of juvenile depravity. This little miscreant had received a box on the ear from Mr. Curran for some alleged misconduct a few days before; the Moor's blow did not sink into a mind more furious for revenge, or more predisposed by nature for such deadly impressions. He was in the bed-room by mere chance when Mr. Curran entered; he immediately hid himself in the curtains till he observed him too busy with his portmanteau for observation; he then leveled at him the old blunderbuss, which lay charged in the corner, the stiffness of whose trigger, too strong for his infant fingers, alone prevented the aim which he confessed he had taken, and which had so nearly terminated the occupations of the cobbler. The door was ajar, and, mid the smoke and terror, he easily slipped out without discovery. I had the story verbatim a few months ago from Mr. Curran's lips, whose impressions on the subject it was no wonder that forty years had not obliterated.

From this period he began rapidly to rise in professional estimation. There was no cause in the metropolis of any interest in which he was not concerned, nor was there a county in the provinces which at some time or other he did not visit on a special retainer. It was an object almost with every one to preoccupy so successful or so dangerous an advocate; for, if he failed in inducing a jury to sympathize with his client, he

at all events left a picture of his adversary behind him which survived and embittered the advantages of victory. Nor was his eloquence his only weapon; at cross-examination, the most difficult and by far the most hazardous part of a barrister's profession, he was quite inimitable. There was no plan which he did not detect, no web which he did not disentangle; and the unfortunate wretch, who commenced with all the confidence of preconcerted perjury, never failed to retreat before him in all the confusion of exposure. Indeed, it was almost impos-> sible for the guilty to offer a successful resistance. He argued, he cajoled, he ridiculed, he mimicked, he played off the various artillery of his talent upon the witness; he would affect earnestness upon trifles, and levity upon subjects of the most serious import, until at length he succeeded in creating a security that was fatal, or a sullenness that produced all the consequences of prevarication. No matter how unfair the topic, he never failed to avail himself of it; acting upon the principle that, in law as well as in war, every stratagem was admissible. If he was hard pressed, there was no peculiarity of person, no singularity of name, no eccentricity of profession at which he would not grasp, trying to confound the self-possession of the witness by the, no matter how excited, ridicule of the audience. To a witness of the name of Halfpenny he once began: "Halfpenny, I see you're a rap, and for that reason shall be nailed to the counter." Halfpenny is sterling," exclaimed the opposite counsel. "No, no," said he, “he's exactly like his own conscience-only copper washed." This phrase alluded to an expression previously used on the trial.

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To Lundy Foot, the celebrated tobacconist, once hesitating on the table: "Lundy, Lundy-that's a poser-a devil of a pinch." This gentleman applied to Curran for a motto when he first established his carriage. "Give me one," my dear Curran," said he, "of a serious cast, because I am afraid the people will laugh at a tobacconist setting up a carriage, and, for the scholarship's sake, let it be in Latin." "I have just hit on it,” said Curran ; "it is only two words, and it will at once

explain your profession, your elevation, and your contempt for their ridicule, and it has the advantage of being in two languages, Latin or English, just as the reader chooses. Put up 'Quid rides' upon your carriage."

Inquiring his master's age from a horse-jockey's servant, he found it almost impossible to extract an answer. "Come, come, friend, has he not lost his teeth?" "Do you think," retorted the fellow, "that I know his age, as he does his horse's, by the mark of mouth?" The laugh was against Curran, but he instantly recovered : "You were very right not to try, friend, for you know your master's a great bite."

Having one day a violent argument with a country schoolmaster on some classical subject, the pedagogue, who had the worst of it, said, in a towering passion, that he would lose no more time, and must go back to his scholars. "Do, my dear doctor," said Curran, "but don't indorse my sins upon their backs."

Curran was told that a very stingy and slovenly barrister had started for the Continent with a shirt and a guinea: "He'll not change either till he comes back," said he.

It was well known that Curran entertained a dislike and a contempt for Downes. "Bushe," said he, came up to me one day with a very knowing look, and said, 'Do you know, Curran, I have just left the pleasantest fellow I ever met?' 'Indeed! who is he?' "The chief justice,' was the answer. My reply was compendious and witty. I looked into his eye, and said 'hum.' It required all his oil to keep his countenance smooth."

A very stupid foreman once asked a judge how they were to ignore a bill. "Why, sir," said Curran, "when you mean to find a true one, just write Ignoramus for self and fellows on the back of it."

A gentleman just called to the bar took up a pauper case. It was remarked upon. "The man's right," said Curran ; "a barber begins on a beggar, that when he arrives at the dignity he may know how to shave a duchess.”

He was just rising to cross-examine a witness before a judge who could not comprehend any jest that was not written in black letter. Before he said a single word, the witness began to laugh. "What are you laughing at, friend—what are you laughing at? Let me tell you that a laugh without a joke is like is like-" “Like what, Mr. Curran?” asked the judge, imagining he was nonplused. "Just exactly, my lord, like a contingent remainder without any particular estate to support it." I am afraid that none but my legal readers will understand the admirable felicity of the similitude, but it was quite to his lordship's fancy, and rivaled with him all "the wit that Rabelais ever scattered."

Examining a country squire who disputed a collier's bill: "Did he not give you the coals, friend?" 'He did, sir, but"But what? On your oath, wasn't your payment slack?” It was thus that, in some way or other, he contrived to throw the witnesses off their center, and he took care they seldom should recover it. "My lard, my lard!" vociferated a peasant witness, writhing under this mental excruciation, "I can't answer yon little gentleman, he's putting me in such a doldrum." "A doldrum! Mr. Curran, what does he mean by a doldrum!" exclaimed Lord Avonmore. "O! my lord, it's a very common complaint with persons of this description: it's merely a confusion of the head arising from a corruption of the heart."

To the bench he was at times quite as unceremonious; and if he thought himself reflected on or interfered with, had instant recourse either to ridicule or invective. There is a celebrated reply in circulation of Mr. Dunning to a remark of Lord Mansfield, who curtly exclaimed at one of his legal positions, "O! if that be law, Mr. Dunning, I may burn my lawbooks!" Better read them, my lord," was the sarcastic and appropriate rejoinder. In a different spirit, but with similar effect, was Mr. Curran's retort upon an Irish judge, quite as remarkable for his good humor and raillery as for his legal researches. He was addressing a jury on one of the state trials