But Mr. Saurin discarded the idea of making a sacrifice of Ireland to Imperial considerations, when the benefits of the Union were pointed I fear, also, that he wants magnanimity, and that his antipathies are influenced, in part, by his domestic recollections. His ancestors were persecuted in France, but his gratitude to the country in which they found a refuge, should have suppressed any inclination to retaliate upon the religion of the majority of its people. I shall not expatiate upon the various incidents which distinguished this period of forensic turmoil. Suffice it to say, that Mr. Saurin obtained verdicts of condemnation. But his high character and his peace of mind were affected by his ignominious success. He grew into an object of national distaste. His own personal dispositions, which are naturally kind and good, were materially deteriorated. Every man at the Bar, with liberal opinions on the Catholic question, was regarded by him with dislike. A single popular sentiment was a disqualification for place. But let me turn from the less favourable points of his character. This censure should be qualified by large commendation. His patronage was confined to his party, but it was honourably exercised. Those whom he advanced were able and honest men. The sources of justice were never vitiated by any unworthy preferences upon his part. Neither did he lavish emolument on his own family. In the list of pensioners the name of Saurin does not often bear attestation to his power. I should add to his other merits, his unaffected modesty. He has always been easy, accessible, and simple. He had none of the "morgue aristocratique," nor the least touch of official superciliousness on his brow. Mr. Saurin, as Attorney-general, may be said to have governed Ireland for fifteen years; but, at the moment when he seemed to have taken the firmest stand upon the height of his authority, he was precipitated to the ground. The Grenvilles joined the minister. It was stipulated that Plunket should be restored to his former office. Mr. Saurin was offered the place of Chief Justice of the King's Bench, which in a fit of splenetic vexation he had the folly to refuse. The new local government did not give him a moment for repentance, and he was thrown at once from the summit of his power. There was not a single intervening circumstance to break his precipitous descent, and he was stunned, if not shattered, in the fall. He might, however, have expected it; he had no political connexions to sustain him. He is married, indeed, to a sister of the Marquis of Thomond; but that alliance was a feeble obstacle to the movement of a great party. His official friends immolated him to exigency; but they would have sacrificed him to convenience. The only man in power, perhaps, who personally lamented his ill usage, was Lord Manners; and even his Lordship was aware, for six months before, of the intended change, and never disclosed it to him in their diurnal walks to the Hall of the Four Courts. This suppression Mr. Saurin afterwards resented; but, upon a declaration from his friend that he was influenced by a regard for his feelings, they were reconciled. He did not choose to warn him, at the banquet, of the sword that he saw suspended over his head. He is now plain Mr. Saurin again, and he bears this reverse with a great deal of apparent, and some real fortitude. When he was first deprived of his office, I watched him in the Hall. The public eye was upon him; and the consciousness of general observation in calamity inflicts peculiar pain. The joyous alacrity of Plunket was less a matter of comment than the resigned demeanour of his fallen rival. Richard was as much gazed at as Bolingbroke. It was said by most of those who saw him, that he looked as cheerful as ever. In fact, be looked more cheerful, and that appeared to me to give evidence of the constraint which he put upon himself. There was a forced hilarity about him he wore an alertness and vivacity, which were not made for his temperament ;-his genuine smile is flexible and easy; but upon this occasion it lingered with a mechanical procrastination upon the lips, which shewed that it did not take its origin at the heart. There was also too ready a proffer of the hand to his old friends, who gave him a warm but a silent squeeze. I thought him a subject for study, and followed him into the Court of Chancery. He discharged his business with more than his accustomed diligence and skill;-but when his part was done, and he bent his head over a huge brief, the pages of which he seemed to turn without a consciousness of their contents, I have heard him heave at intervals a low sigh. When he returned again to the Hall, I have observed him in a moment of professional leisure while he was busied with his own solitary thoughts, and I could perceive a gradual languor stealing over the melancholy mirth which he had been personating before. His figure, too, was bent and depressed, as he walked back to the Court of Chancery; and before he passed through the green curtains which divide it from the Hall, I have seen him pause for an instant, and throw a look at the King's Bench. It was momentary, but too full of expression to be casual, and seemed to unite in its despondency a deep sense of the wrong which he had sustained from his friends, and the more painful injury which he had inflicted upon himself. If Rembrandt were living in our times, he should paint a portrait of Saurin his countenance and deportment would afford an appropriate subject to the shadowy pencil of that great artist. There should be no gradual melting of colours into each other-there should be no softness of touch, and no nice variety of hue; there should be no sky— no flowers--no drapery-no marble: but a grave and sober minded man should stand upon the canvass, with the greater proportion of his figure in opacity and shadow, and with a strong line of light breaking through a monastic window upon his corrugated brow. His countenance is less serene than tranquil; it has much deliberate consideration, but little depth or wisdom; its whole expression is peculiarly quiet and subdued. His eye is black and wily, and glitters under the mass of a rugged and shaggy eye-brow. There is a certain sweetness in its glance, somewhat at variance with the general indications of character which are conveyed in his look. His forehead is thoughtful, but neither bold nor lofty. It is furrowed by long study and recent care. There is a want of intellectual elevation in his aspect, but he has a cautious shrewdness and a discriminating perspicacity. With much affability and good-nature about the mouth; in the play of its minuter expression, a sedate and permanent vindictiveness may readily be found. His features are broad and deeply founded, but they are not blunt; without being destitute of proportion, they are not finished with delicacy or point. His dress is like his manners, perfectly plain, and remarkable for its neat propriety. He is wholly free from vulgarity, and quite denuded of accomplishment. He is of the middle size, and his frame, like his mind, is compact and well knit together. There is an intimation of slowness and suspicion in his movements, and the spirit of caution seems to regulate his gait. He has nothing of the Catilinarian walk, and it might be readily conjectured that he was not destined for a conspirator. His whole demeanour bespeaks neither dignity nor meanness. There is no fraud about him; but there is a disguise of his emotions which borders upon guile. His passions are violent, and are rather covered than suppressed: they have little effect upon his exterior-the iron stove scarcely glows with the intensity of its internal fire. He looks altogether a worldly and sagacious man— sly, cunning, and considerate--not ungenerous, but by no means exalted-with some sentiment, and no sensibility: kind in his impulses, and warped by involuntary prejudice: gifted with the power of dissembling his own feelings, rather than of assuming the character of other men: more acute than comprehensive, and subtle than refined: a man of point and of detail: no adventurer, either in conduct or speculation : a lover of usage, and an enemy to innovation: perfectly simple and unaffected: one who can bear adversity well and prosperity still better: a little downcast in ill-fortune, and not at all supercilious in success : something of a republican by nature, but fashioned by circumstances into a tory: moral, but not pious: decent, but not devout: honourable, but not chivalrous: affectionate, but not tender: a man who could go far to serve a friend, and a good way to hurt a foe: and, take him for all in all, an useful and estimable member of society. I have mentioned his French origin, and it is legibly expressed in his lineaments and hue. In other countries, one national physiognomy prevails through the mass of the people. In every district and in every class we meet with a single character of face. But in Ireland, the imperfect grafting of colonization is easily perceived, in the great variety of countenance which is every where to be found: the notches are easily discerned upon the original stock. The Dane of Kildare is known by his erect form, his sanded complexion, his blue and independent eye, and the fairness of his rich and flowing hair. The Spaniard in the west, shews among the dominions of Mr. Martin, his swarthy features and his black Andalusian eye. A Presbyterian church in the north, exhibits a quadrangular breadth of jaw-bone, and a shrewd sagacity of look in its calculating and moral congregation, which the best Baillie in Glasgow would not disown. Upon the southern mountain and in the morass, the wild and haggard face of the aboriginal Irishman is thrust upon the traveller, through the aperture in his habitation of mud which pays the double debt of a chimney and a door. His red and strongly curled hair, his angry and courageous eye, his short and blunted features, thrown at hazard into his countenance, and that fantastic compound of intrepidity and cunning, of daring and of treachery, of generosity and of falsehood, of fierceness and of humour, and of absurdity and genius, which is conveyed in his expression, is not inappropriately discovered in the midst of crags and bogs, and through the medium of smoke. When he descends into the city, this barbarian of art, (for he has been made so by the landlord and the law-nature never intended him to be so,) presents a singular contrast to the high forehead, the regular features, and the pure complexion of the English settler. To revert to Mr. Saurin, (from whom I ought not, perhaps, to have deviated so far), there is still greater distinctness, as should be the case, from their proximity to their source, in the descendants from the French Protestants who obtained an asylum in Ireland. The Huguenot is stamped upon them; I can read in their faces not only the relics of their country, but of their religion. They are not only Frenchmen in colour, but Calvinists in expression. They are serious, grave, and almost sombre, and have even a shade of fanaticism diffused over the worldliness by which they are practically characterised. Mr. Saurin is no fanatic; on the contrary, I believe that his only test of the true religion, is the law of the land. He does not belong to the "Saint party," nor is he known by the sanctimonious avidity by which that pious and rapacious body is distinguished at the Irish Bar. Still there is a touch of John Calvin upon him, and he looks the fac-simile of an old Protestant professor of logic whom I remember to have seen in one of the colleges at Nismes. In I have enlarged upon the figure and aspect of this eminent Barrister, because they intimate much of his mind. In his capacity as an advocate in a court of equity, he deserves great encomium. He is not a great case-lawyer. He is not like Serjeant Lefroy, an ambulatory index of discordant names; he is stored with knowledge: principle is not merely deposited in his memory, but inlaid and tesselated in his mind it enters into his habitual thinking. No man is better versed in the art of putting facts: he brings with a peculiar felicity and skill the favourable parts of his client's case into prominence, and shews still greater acuteness in suppressing or glossing over whatever may be prejudicial to his interests. He invests the most hopeless, and I will even add, the most dishonest cause, with a most deceitful plausibility -and the total absence of all effort, and the ease and apparent sincerity of his manner, give him at times a superiority even to Plunket himself, who, by the energy into which he is hurried at moments by his more ardent and eloquent temperament, creates a suspicion that it must be a bad cause which requires so much display of power. hearing the latter, you are perpetually thinking of him and his faculties; in hearing Saurin, you remember nothing but the cause-he disappears in the facts. Saurin also shews singular tact in the management of the Court. The Lord Chancellor is actually bewildered by Plunket: it his from his Lordship's premises that he argues against him; he entangles him in a net of sophistry wrought out of his own suggestion. This is not very agreeable to human vanity, and Chancellors are men. Saurin, on the other hand, accommodates himself to every view of the Court. He gently and insensibly conducts his Lordship to a conclusion-Plunket precipitates him into it at once. But Lord Manners struggles hard upon the brink, and often escapes from his grasp. In this facility of adaptation to the previous opinions and character of the judge whom he addresses, I consider Saurin as perhaps the most useful advocate in the Court of Chancery-at the same time, in reach of thought, variety of attribute, versatility of resource, and power of diction, he is far inferior to his distinguished successor in office. But Plunket is a senator and a statesman, and Saurin is a lawyer-not a mere one indeed; but the legal faculty is greatly predo minant in his mind. His leisure has never been dedicated to the acquisition of scientific knowledge, nor has he sought a relaxation from his severer occupations in the softness of the politer arts. His earliest tastes and predilections were always in coincidence with his profession. Free from all literary addiction, he not only did not listen to, but never heard the solicitations of the Muse. Men with the strongest passion for higher and more elegant enjoyments have frequently repressed that tendency, from a fear that it might lead them from the pursuit of more substantial objects. But it was not necessary that Mr. Saurin should stop his ears against the voice of the syren--he was born deaf to her enchantments. I believe that this was a sort of good fortune in his nature. Literary accomplishments are often of prejudice, and very seldom of any utility at the Bar. The profession itself may occasionally afford a respite from its more rigid avocations, and invite of its own accord to a temporary deviation from its more dreary pursuits. There are moments in which a familiarity with the great models of eloquerce and of high thinking may be converted into use. But a lawyer like Mr. Saurin will think, and wisely perhaps, that the acquisition of the embellishing faculties is seldom attended with a sufficiently frequent opportunity for their display, to compensate for the dangers of the deviation which they require from the straight-forward road to professional eminence, and will pursue his progress, like the American traveller, who, in journeying through his vast prairies, passes, without regard, the fertile landscapes which occasionally lie adjacent to his way, and never turns from his track for the sake of the rich fruits and the refreshing springs of those romantic recesses, which, however delicious they may appear, may bewilder him in a wilderness of sweets, and lead him for ever astray from the final object of his destination. ON AN AMETHYST, PRESENTED BY LELIA. O! beauteous are the angel-forms that rise, As meteors are this lucid gem's sweet beams.- Or love the meteor-light, so quickly fled ? All are illusive!—and art thou like them, Pure, smiling, radiant Lelia ?—no; thou art the gem! C. L. |