sity, though not dismayed at its approach let him at the last, in confident resignation commit himself to God's protection, and the Lord will "set him in safety from him that puffeth at him, and for the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy," will he arise.

The grace of Crewe which passeth, &c.

THE BETROTHED OF ROBERT EMMETT.*

OH! never call my heart thine own!

It must not, oh! it cannot be !

The look, the love, the spirit flown,
Are ever seen by me!

I cannot weep, as others weep,
O'er idle pleasures gone;
I cannot sleep as others sleep,
And dream of my fond home.

The tear may dwindle 'neath the smile,

The sigh may pass away;

The dark ning wave may lift awhile
The lonely castaway!

But oh! what prayer can ever bid

The setting sun return?

What earthly kindness ever soothe

The griefs that inward burn?

The sea-bird from his lonely cliff,
Mute, melancholy, shy,

That looks o'er yon bright wave and skiff,
Is far more blest than I!

He views the ocean sparkling round,

He sees the passer by;

But oh! its strife, its joyous sound,
Can never reach so high.

The turf that wraps his silent head,
The flow'rets o'er his grave,
They tell me oft how Freedom bled
To bloom above the brave;

And oft his form descends to me
In the dead hour of night,

Unveiling immortality

With all its wing'd light.

Oh! then, forgive, forgive the word,
In gentle firmness spoken;
Oh love! but never strike the chord
If its sweet strain be broken;
Oh, never strike! there is a tone
That mars thine earthly will!
The spirit of a loved one flown,

It hovers round me still!

E.

* The circumstances of the betrothed of Robert Emmett, saying, that "her heart was buried with him," when solicited by another, are too well known.

TABLE-TALK ABROAD.-NO. IV.

The Bar.-The Court of Exchequer.

I AM vexed that Mr. Brougham should have forestalled me; but it really seems, that in all that regards neglect, corruption, irregularity, or abuse in our institutions, he is determined to be beforehand with all the world. Yet was there not something cruel in placing so prominently and pointing out to observation the peculiar features of the Exchequer Court?-it had many claims, if not to respect, at least to mercy, in its very age, its feebleness, and retired character! Brougham's nature seems, however, insensible to the soft touch of pity where the public interest and his public duty are concerned; yet, for the sake of humanity, we will be disposed to believe that the "Quousque tandem abutêre patientiâ nostrâ" was not entered upon without some feeling of sorrow, if not of remorse; and that he was necessitated to stimulate the leader of that tandem, while it shied and started ere it would consent to be so ruthlessly driven over "the fair humanities" of the Exchequer. It would have better come from any other man than its own Serjeant at Arms; there was much to induce him to stay his arm, in reflecting that it was raised against the very source from which office-fees and honour were derived; but the mischief is now done, and if he felt no compunction on the subject, commiseration can scarcely be expected from others; the sanctum has been profaned by its own immediate guardian; and it is now lawful for laymen to enter and observe it. Of all the Courts of Christendom, not excepting the "Sancta Rota Romana," that of My Lords of the Council, a meeting of Bankruptcy Commissioners, or a Military Court Martial, none was ever so lazy, inactive, and quiet, as that of the Revenue. What a delightful retreat was it for a business-hating lawyer, desirous of passing his latter days in tranquillity and peace! Notwithstanding its nominal avocations, as a tribunal of revenue, equity, and law, comprehending within its jurisdiction a larger variety of subjects than either that of Chancery, the King's Bench, or Common Pleas,-its judges were, in reality, employed but in the pleasing pastime of teaching the sheriffs to count hob-nails-of congratulating a new, or according his congé to an old mayor-examining the scores of tallies, or pricking prettily for sheriffs once in every year. It was all small-talk and boy's play; the flirtations of Themis without her frowns, save when, with the fear of Hume or Williams before their eyes, they assented to the giving of a decree once in a way, (and a fearful long way it was,) and then the parchment-visaged goddess of the Law raised herself to the task with as much sound and fury as if she had been in the act of moving her venerable parents Cœlum and Terra themselves. Except when on a similarly rare and momentous occasion the deity asserted her ill-contested rights, the Exchequer might have been fitly deemed the very temple of Vacuna; the lounge of listlessness and ennui; with as little of the vis agendi in its composition as in the Clerks of the Treasury, a Chancery Commission, or a Colonial Secretary. It could not but remind us, however, of happier days and better things; ere litigiousness and crime were rife in the land; when vacations were answerable to the name; when Pleas and Terms, brief as they were, were extended even then farther than was necessary; when the purse of gold hung intact by

the highway side; before England became the abode of guilt and manufactures; of an age when every "rood of ground maintained its man," and ere nabobs and plantation proprietors, East India pursers, pugilists, and blacking manufacturers, possessed the soil, and consigned the industrious and moral tenant of the humble farm to the parish and the workhouse; ere the bold yeoman was fain to quit his team for the weaver's stool; and ere such things as crim. cons. and libel, Crockfords and suicides, a standing army or a standing debt, were heard or dreamt of. But the schoolmaster is abroad flourishing his birch; all things, however venerable or long constituted, are doomed to feel the scourge, as the modern Busbies urge on the march of intellect by the unsparing rod. We have a Chester for the church, a Wellington for the army, a Lee for Doctors' Commons, a Hunt for the city, and a Hume for all things-so verily, my Lords the Barons, ye must not complain if Brougham has invaded your privacy, and intrenched at length, and in the fulness of time, upon your long repose. Of that repose all in the Exchequer was redolent, all there was peculiarly significant of comfort: the large and blazing fire in the quondam bedchamber of our good Queen Bess; the dim, religious, and softened light, which through the pictured panes shed its mild lustre on the wig and coif; the nicely matted floor preventing some ruder tread startling the Barons from their pleasing reveries; the well-baised doors that moved on their oiled hinges gently as Carlisle's Dean in opening his discourse -Master Simeon in addressing a solicitor-Lord Goderich in giving an explanation—or Mr. Smirke, of St. James's-street, in handing a dowager to her carriage. All material and human were there in keeping, from the mild and placid visage of Sir Archibald Macdonald to the contented traits of William Bowyer the clerk in court the gouty immobility of old Hutton Wood-the easy, luxurious, and West India indolence of Henry Martin-and the centuries of years (I know not truly how many) of Maseres. It was all the very dolcissimo far niente of the law, as if law were yet young and gentle and while their unhappier brethren, in less easy stations, were sacrificing health and time in the wearisome discharge of their arduous and never-ending duties, the Barons were joking life away merrily, yet slowly, for it was with them 'a babbling of green fields,' and little else. The whole thing was a collection of whims and oddities, of fun and contradiction-a strange admixture of Phil. Dauncey and wit-Clarke and courtesy-carved beams and chequered cushions-cursitors, secondaries, foreign apposers, Macaba, chat, good living, and gout. In the outer court (the Court of Common Law) the Barons were undoubtedly somewhat genés; they were there too much exposed in the full eye o' the sun;' too prominent to the broad stare of vulgar man; too open for their modest and retired natures to notice and remark; but that seldom endured long; and when, after a peevish ten minutes' stay, they might safely waddle to their interior den, it was delightful to see the extrajudicial empressement with which they hied them on their way rejoicing, blithe and content as Sylvester the Recorder at the sound of the dinner-bellHume, when he can once get a sly hit at the impatient Secretary at War, or Sugden on his return for and from Weymouth. There were they, to use the recent elegant expression of a certain Duchess,' nice and snug as a bug in a rug.' It was their masonic-lodge, unknown to

6

and unentered by any but the initiated; and even some, and not few, of the very craft themselves, were ignorant of its existence. I would wager Lord Ellenborough's patience against Lord Westmoreland's wisdom, or Lord King's gravity, that many a lawyer has passed onwards from his articles to his latest latitat, without having ever accidentally threaded its labyrinths or even entered its precincts. But it is time to have done with these things, and revenir à nos moutons; only let us hope, for the sake of all good and grateful recollections, all happier associations, that in the march of intellect and the rage of modern improvement, that one room may be haply spared; let Sir William Knighton, or whoever else it may concern, or it may turn out to be, erect as ugly, and unsightly palaces as ill taste can contrive; let the Board of Works (works indeed) provide new streets, new churches, new parks, and new taxes, if it will, but in the name of all our generous sympathies, our noble reminiscences, let them not doom that room to destruction. It was, as I have said, the very bedchamber of our virgin Queen, and yet remains nearly what it was in her day-her initials are on the mantelpiece and in the windows; there happy and high designs were formed for England's glory, and there at times has patriotism vanquished in her woman's breast the dictates of female passion and female pride; and there too, it may be, have honour, faith, and charity been made the sacrifice to female jealousy. Of other scenes there we care not to hint. It is a memorial we may fitly cherish and preserve, if it only serve at times to raise the question with ourselves, whether improved as we are in good and ill, we have become happier as a people than we were in less brilliant and less deceitful times. But moralizing or morals have nothing to do with law; so on to our say:-:

Baron Graham was the last survivor of a gone-by race;-if he were ill-calculated in his character of a lawyer to raise our opinion of former times, as a man and as a gentleman he would have done honour to any; and of the world's opinion of his ability as a jurisconsult, perhaps he cared the less, as his own was diametrically in opposition to it. Dressed with peculiar nicety, and with a degree of care and attention that nothing but the leisure of the Exchequer might have permitted, with a remarkably tall, erect, and spare form and figure, he particularly attracted notice as he sate head and shoulders above his compeers, and, as Jekyll observed, was certainly much looked up to as a Judge.' If he had any fault, it was that of the love of talking-whether it were law, physic, or divinity; at the Exchequer, Old Bailey, or even in the House of Lords, he would rattle on and tell his tale, if not 'too wisely,' yet sufficiently well, and when he did there enter on discourse, he would converse with so little regard to time or business as often to annoy his graver colleague Sir Archibald, put old Thomson into a right judgelike pet, and induce Sir Beaumont Hotham to throw himself back on his seat in all the hopelessness of utter despair. Fearfully as ruthlessly would he then derange the methodical pleadings of Plumer, or the wellarranged argument of Leach, by question, and remark, and suggestion, which, if troublesome and untimely in themselves, were yet made with so good a grace, and in so gentlemanly a manner, that it was scarcely possible for testiness itself not to be appeased. Plumer, too, was mild and kindly and patient, and he took it all in good part; but it was scarcely the same with Leach-he was not of such dulcet nature then,

and would chafe confoundedly at being interrupted, and, to evince his displeasure, would, as he resumed his observations, just follow up the key-word at which he had left off when unhappily addressed by his vocative lordship.-Dauncey was still worse; he was absolutely peevish, and would twist and twine his features and his brief when broken in upon; but, with all this, he had no rancour in his composition, and was soon soothed into a smile by the abundant and well-proffered apologies of the good-tempered Baron. As to Martin, it was quite another thing again-to him it was all nuts-he was a lazy being, and loved chat-if bred to the Law, it was not bread to him, for he assumed the patronage of a case from excess of leisure, from the very weariness of idleness, and from the want of any thing better to do with him labour, when assumed, was adopted to disperse the biliousness attendant on the enjoyment of one of his own West India turtles, or the threatened attack of gout and handsomely (to use a fancy phrase) would he come to the set-to with his chief-question here, answer there-observation on this side, explanation on that-a jest on one part, a joke on the other-conversation, cachinnation, and botheration, (as poor Nolan would have said,) until Plumer would carefully tie up his bundle of briefs, knowing the interminability of such scenes-Leach would hurry off from talk in Chancery to the Court, properly so called; while Dauncey (after just tearing ten or twelve motion papers into pieces) would unceremoniously as actively leap the bar, and running down to the Hall below swear right heartily at Barons-sugar-cane proprietorsthe Court of Exchequer,-Law-small-talk-all, and Mr. Baron Graham. The Baron was rather early in life elevated to the seat of justice and, as he had not distinguished himself at the Bar, his rise was imputed to the interest of a high personage, into whose good graces he had, although a Scotchman and a lawyer, contrived to creep. I know not whether the venerable judge had ever shared the convivialities of his Patron's younger days: but as they were the "rough brake which virtue must" have gone through at the epoch to attain distinction, it is presumable he did, and in no small degree. If so, right many a merry tale of the olden time must he possess; and if his predilection for converse has not been affected by infirmities and age it would be yet worth while to listen to his reminiscences. If I remember well, when the Berkeley Peerage was brought before the House of Lords, and a question of equal intricacy and importance was submitted to the decision of the judges of the land, Baron Graham differed in opinion from all his brethren, and his sentiments were favourable to the person who was finally foreclosed of the title. He is, however, an upright man, and has ever been greatly respected, and now enjoys that "otium cum dignitate," which a weight of years long since required.

Baron Thomson was extremely well versed in law, and a very veteran dandy in his costume; but he possessed a voice so extremely rauque and disagreeable that he was listened to with pain, and the merits of his judgments were, in the pronouncing, greatly marred by his delivery; he was sparing of words as his first named colleague was profuse-diminutive in stature as that of the other was prolonged-and they appeared the giant and the dwarf of the Exchequer Court.

Sir Thomas Manners Sutton was about the period of Mr. Pitt's decease nominated to the Bench: but his stay was short, and nothing of