plicity, but united with elegance; a lucid arrangement and unbroken connexion of all the facts; the constant introduction of the most picturesque expressions, but never as ornaments; these, the great qualities of narrative, accomplish its great end and purpose; they place story and the scene before the hearer, or the reader, as if he witnessed the reality. It is unnecessary to add that the temperate, and chaste, and even subdued tone of the whole is unvaried and unbroken; but such praise belongs to every part of this great speaker's oratory. Whether he declaims or argues, moves the feelings or resorts to ridicule and sarcasm, deals in persuasion or invective, he never is, for an instant, extravagant. We have not the condensed and vigorous demonstration of Plunket; we have not those marvellous figures, sparingly introduced, but whensoever used, of an application to the argument absolutely magical;* but we have an equal display of chastened abstinence, of absolute freedom from all the vices of the Irish school, with, perhaps, a more winning grace of diction; and all who have witnessed it agree in ascribing the greatest power to a manner that none could resist. The utmost that partial criticism could do to find a fault was to praise the suavity of the orator at the

Let no one hastily suppose that this is an exaggerated description of Lord Plunket's extraordinary eloquence. Where shall be found such figures as those which follow-each raising a living image before the mind, yet each embodying not merely a principle, but the very argument in hand-each leaving that very argument literally translated into figure? The first relates to the Statutes of Limitation, or to prescriptive title:"If Time destroys the evidence of title, the laws have wisely and humanely made length of possession a substitute for that which has been destroyed. He comes with his scythe in one hand to mow down the muniments of our rights; but in his other hand the lawgiver has placed an hour glass by which he metes out incessantly those portions of duration which render needless the evidence that he has swept away."

Explaining why he had now become a reformer, when he had before opposed the question:-" Circumstances," said he, "are wholly changed; formerly Reform came to our door like a felon-a robber to be resisted. He now approaches like a creditor; you admit the justice of his demand, and only dispute the instalments by which he shall be paid."

expense of his force. John Kemble described him as "the greatest actor off the stage;" but he forgot that so great an actor must also have stood highest among his Thespian brethren had the scene been shifted. In 1798, he came into Parliament. The great struggle of the Union was then beginning; he at once flung himself into the ranks of its adversaries; and the most splendid speech to which that controversy gave rise, after Mr. Plunket's, was made by Mr. Bushe. On the measure being carried, he had serious thoughts of removing to England, for he considered Dublin as now become a provincial town. The difficulties into which his honourable conduct in undertaking to discharge the debts of his family had placed him, prevented, in all probability, the execution of this plan, and in the course of a few years he first became Solicitor-General under Mr. Plunket and Mr. Saurin successively, and afterwards, in Lord Wellesley's first vice-royalty, he succeeded Lord Downes as Chief Justice of the King's Bench. All parties allow that amidst the fierce political contests which filled the period of nineteen years during which he was a law-officer of the crown, he performed his duty with perfect honour towards the Government, but with the most undeviating humanity and toleration towards their opponents in church or state. Nor has the breath of calumny ever tarnished the purity of his judicial character during the twenty years that he presided on the bench. He was stern in his administration of the criminal law, but he was as rigidly impartial as he was severe. In one particular he was perfect, and it is of great importance in a judge; he knew no distinction of persons among those who practised before him, unless it was to protect and encourage rising merit; for a young advocate was ever sure of his ear, even when the fastidiousness of veteran practitioners might disregard his efforts. This kindly disposition he carried with him from the bar, where he had been always remarkable for the

courtesy with which he treated his juniors; indeed, it went farther; it was a constant habit of protecting and encouraging them.

His oratorical excellence was plainly of a kind which might lead us to expect a similar success in written composition. Accordingly he stood very high among the writers of his day; so high that we may well lament his talents being bestowed upon subjects of an ephemeral interest. The work by which he is chiefly known as an author is the pamphlet on the Union, published in answer to the Castle manifesto, written by Mr. Under-Secretary Cooke. Mr. Bushe's tract is called 'Cease your funning,' and it consists of a wellsustained ironical attack upon the Under-Secretary, whom it assumes to be an United Irishman, or other rebel, in disguise. The plan of such an irony is, for a long work, necessarily defective. It must needs degenerate occasionally into tameness; and it runs the risk every now and then of being taken for serious; as I well remember an ironical defence of the slave trade once upon a time so much failed of its object that some worthy abolitionists were preparing an answer to it, when they were informed that the author was an ally in disguise. No such fate was likely to befallCease your funning.' It is, indeed, admirably executed; as successfully as a work on such a plan can be; and reminds the reader of the best of Dean Swift's political writings, being indeed every way worthy of his pen.

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It would be impossible to give any specimens of this far-famed pamphlet; but there is another, the production of his earlier years, which appears to me possessed of the greatest merit; it is an answer to Paine's Rights of Man;' and it would be hard to say whether the sound and judicious reasoning, or the beautiful and chaste composition, most deserve our admiration. Mr. Bushe was only four-and-twenty when this work appeared, and it is no exaggeration to

say that it deserves a place on the same level with Mr. Burke's celebrated 'Reflections.' To support such a panegyric, examples will be required; and I have no fear in appealing to such passages as the following, after premising that they differ in no respect from the rest of the work, which extends to above eighty pages.

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Any man who has studied the merits and enjoyed the blessings of the English constitution, cannot but be alarmed when the legislators of France ('these babes and sucklings in politics')* are held up in their cradle to the imitation of a country whose government adds the strength of maturity to the venerable aspect of age; a government which I trust will not be exchanged for a certain tumult in the first instance, and a doubtful reform in the second. I love liberty as much as Mr. Paine; but differ from him in my opinion of what it is-I pant not for the range of a desert, unbounded, barren, and savage; but prefer the limited enjoyments of cultivation, whose confines, while they restrain, protect us, and add to the quality more than they deduct from the quantity of my freedom; this I feel to be my birthright as a subject of Great Britain, and cannot but tremble for my happiness, when a projector recommends to level the wise and ancient land-marks, break down the fences, and disfigure the face of every inheritance. I have no wish to return to the desert in search of my natural rights. I consider myself to have exchanged them for the better, and am determined to stand by the bargain.

"These sentiments, my dear Sir, have tempted me to trouble you and the public with this book. The times are critical, and the feeblest exertion cannot be unwelcome, when a factory of sedition† is set up in the metropolis, and an assistant club sends an inflammatory pamphlet through the kingdom; when these

* An expression of Paine's applied to others.

† An Association had been formed in Dublin for the purpose of circulating Paine's book, at a low price, through the country.

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state quacks, infecting their country at the heart, circulate, by fomenting applications, the poisons to the extremities, and reduce the price of the pestilence, lest the poverty of any creature should protect him from its contagion. The times are critical when such a book as Mr. Paine's appears, and the consequences would be fatal if its success were proportioned to the zeal of its author, or the assiduity of its propagators. It is a system of false metaphysics and bad politics. Any attempt to carry it into effect must be destructive of peace, and there is nothing practical in it but its mischief. It holds out inducements to disturbance on the promise of improvement, and softens the prospect of immediate disorder, in the cant of the empiric, 'You must be worse before you can be better. It excites men to what they ought not to do by inform ing them of what they can do, and preaches rights to promote wrongs.* It is a collection of unamiable speculations, equally subversive of good government, good thinking, and good feeling. It establishes a kind of republic in the mind; dethrones the majesty of sentiment; degrades the dignity of noble and elevated feelings; and substitutes a democracy of mean and vulgar calculation. In their usurpation, all the grace, and elegance, and order of the human heart is overturned, and the state of man,

'Like to a little kingdom suffers

The nature of an insurrection'

The following passage is somewhat more ambitious and figurative, though not more terse and epigrammatic; and, though less severe, it cannot be justly charged with violating the canons of correct taste.

"If the institution of honours perfects and stimulates ambition, and that ambition looks beyond the grave,

* An instrument was sold in France for less than half a-crown, called "Droits de l'Homme." It concealed a cut-and-thrust sword, and looked like a common whip.