one occasion, the prince quoted a phrase from Homer. Jackson doubted, the prince persisted. "Well, then," said the old man, with the freedom of former preceptorship, "if that be the line, you have got it by heart to puzzle me: you have parroted it." "Let the Homer be brought," said the prince, "and now see if I have parroted it." The book was brought, and he repeated half the page from memory. Jackson was delighted. "Ah!" said he, "I knew that you would be a scholar; and it was I who made you one."

Fox disliked Dr. Parr; who, however, whether from personal admiration, or from the habit which through life humiliated his real titles to respect-that of fastening on the public favourites of the time, persecuted him with praise. The prince saw a newspaper panegyric on Fox, evidently from the Dr.'s pen; and on being asked what he thought of it, observed, that "It reminded him of the famous epitaph on Machiavel's tomb,

"Tanto nomini nullum Par elogium."

If English punning be a proscribed species of wit; though it bears, in fact, much more the character of the chartered libertine," every where reprobated, and every where received; yet classical puns take rank in all lands and languages. Burke's pun on the "divine right of kings and toastmasters,”—the jure de-vino-perhaps stands at the head of its class. But in an argument with Jackson, the prince jestingly contended that trial by jury was as old as the time of Julius Cæsar; and even that Cæsar died by it. He quoted Seutonius: "Jure cæsus videtur.”

The late Sir William Curtis was equally known for his loyalty and his good living, his speeches and his jovial visage; in particular, that feature which

gave Bardolph his fame, was the sign of many a banquet, as it was the theme of a good deal of caricaturing and temporary pleasantry. The prince, locking over one of those caricatures, representing Sir William, with an exaggerated nose, going to the siege of Walcheren, and singing a parody on Black-eyed Susan; remarked, that he supposed his old friend would succeed better as an orator than a poet, for-"no man cut a greater figure in the rostrum."

St. Leger was repeating a fragment of a striking speech which Grattan had delivered at the Rotunda (a place of popular meeting in Dublin), in his parliamentary canvass. The colonel apologized for its want of the original effect, which "belonged to the circumstances under which it had been spoken,the place, the people, the speaker himself," &c. "Yes," said the prince, "nothing will do for a speech of Grattan's but the ore Rotundo!"

Among the adventures to which the prince's unrestricted style of life exposed him, he was once robbed; not by his friends or his household, for that seems to have been the daily occurrence with, at least, the lower ranks of both; but by those professional collectors of the streets, who, fifty years ago, made a midnight walk in London as perilous as a walk in Arabia. The prince and the Duke of York had remained till a late hour at one of the St. James's Street clubs, where the duke had played, and, by an unusual fortune with that honest and open character, had won a considerable sum. The royal brothers got into a hackney-coach, and were driving down Hayhill, when the coach was suddenly stopped, the doors were thrown back, and the robbers, masked, presented their pistols : resistance would have been idle. The prince had a diamond watch of great value, which he cleverly slipped under the cushion,

and thus saved: but the duke was obliged to refund all his winnings; and the robbers were so well satisfied with this prize, that they forgot the prince's purse, closed the doors, and wished them a good night. They had evidently been followed from the club-house, and, it was strongly suspected, by some of the gamesters themselves. On driving off, the prince triumphantly showed his purse. "How did you contrive to keep it?" said the duke. "Easily enough," answered the prince, drawing his watch from under the cushion; "there is nothing like having the watch in the coach with one."

The leading barristers, Erskine, Adam, Ponsonby, Curran, Butler, and others, were frequent guests at the Pavilion. The society of those accomplished men speaks not slightly for the intellect that could have enjoyed their company; and innumerable anecdotes might be told of their intercourse.

Erskine, always animated, full of conversation, and sportive, was then in the flower of his fame Led by his original propensities to take the side of the whigs, and personally attracted by Fox, Erskine had embraced party with a vividness natural to his character, and a sincerity new to his profession. No man, within memory, had so rapidly mastered the difficulties of rising at the bar. His singular eloquence, boldness, and fervour broke down the barriers of that most jealous and repulsive of professions; and, from the moment of his appearing, he was visibly marked for the highest success: he less solicited popularity than was carried on its shoulders up to fame and fortune. The Dean of St. Asaph's case, the trials of Keppel, Hardy, and a succession of others, made him the idol at once of the people and the bar. By the power given to genius alone, of impressing its own immortality on all that it touches, he turned the dry details of law into great intel lectual and historic records, exalted the concerns of

private individuals into monuments of national freedom, and raised on common and temporary topics, some of the richest trophies of forensic eloquence in any age or nation.

Erskine, by the result of those extraordinary displays, was a benefactor to the whole state-to the crown, the government, and the people. The times were disturbed in both the earlier and later periods of those great orations. In the former, the people were agitated by fears of the crown; in the latter, the crown was made jealous by fears of the people; prerogative in the one instance, and revolution in the other, were the terrors on both sides. The success of Erskine's incomparable appeals to the law showed the people that they had a sure defence in the last extremity, and thus quieted their alarms. His effect on the common sense of the people gradually quieted the alarms of the crown, which had been excited only by the dread that revolutionary principles were largely vitiating the national allegiance. Erskine proved that those principles were but on the surface, that the depths of the soil were of the same ancient and generous mould; and that the worst evil of the day was but the mixture of a few weeds foreign to the clime, and certain to be soon extinguished and overgrown by the native exuberance of the loyalty of England.

With the common fate of lawyers, Erskine added nothing to his legal distinctions by his appearance in parliament. Locke, in his chapter on the association of ideas, speaks of a man who, having learned to dance in a chamber where his trunk lay, could never afterward dance where that trunk was not present to inspire his agility. Something of this fetter, perhaps, clings to all men long accustomed to effort, mental or bodily, in a peculiar place. The barrister, divested of the array of judge, jury, counsel, and constables, loses the sources of his oratory; the props of his invention are stricken from under him;

the spring-wells of his fancy are dried up; the landscape, adust as it is, on which his eye fixed with the delight of a life of litigation, fills that eye no more. He is the Arab of the desert; his hand is against every man, and every man's hand against his; but he must have the desert for his display: and thrown into the "populous ways of men," the prince of plunderers is strange and helpless, a fugitive or a mendicant. Curran, the readiest and most versatile of human beings, a man whom it would seem impossible to embarrass by circumstances, pathetically declared, that "without his wig he was nothing." He said, that he felt not merely his barristerial physiognomy diminished, but his brains; he acknowledged the hand of another Delilah upon him, and the extinction of his faculties followed the curled honours of his brow. When the Dublin barristers were compelled to appear without their wigs in court, from the chamber where they were kept being overflowed by the river; Curran, opening a cause, began, "My lord, and gentlemen of the jury, the counsel for the plaintiff is-what remains of me."

But Erskine, like many characters of peculiar liveliness, had a morbid sensibility to the circumstances of the moment, which sometimes strangely enfeebled his presence of mind: any appearance of neglect in his audience, a cough, a yawn, or a whisper, even among the mixed multitude of the courts, and strong as he was there, has been known to dishearten him visibly. This trait was so notorious, that a solicitor, whose only merit was a remarkably vacant face, was said to be often planted opposite to Erskine by the adverse party, to yawn when the advocate began.

The cause of his first failure in the house was not unlike this curious mode of disconcerting an orator. He had been brought forward to support the falling fortunes of Fox, then struggling under the weight of the "coalition." The "India Bill" had heaped