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 other 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 the king's almost open hostility on the accumulation of public wrath and grievance which the ministers had with such luckless industry been employed during the year in raising for their own ruin. Fox looked abroad for help; and Gordon, the member for Portsmouth, was displaced from his borough, and Erskine was brought

into the house, with no slight triumph of his party, and perhaps some degree of anxiety on the орроsite side. On the night of his first speech, Pitt, evidently intending to reply, sat with pen and paper in his hand, prepared to catch the arguments of this formidable adversary. He wrote a word or two; Erskine proceeded; but with every additional sentence Pitt's attention to the paper relaxed; his look became more careless; and he obviously began to think the orator less and less worthy of his attention. At length, while every eye in the house was fixed upon him, he, with a contemptuous smile, dashed the pen through the paper, and flung them on the floor. Erskine never recovered from this expression of disdain; his voice faltered, he struggled through the remainder of his speech, and sank into his seat dispirited and shorn of his fame.

But a mind of the saliency and variety of Erskine's must have distinguished itself wherever it was determined on distinction; and it is impossible to believe, that the master of the grave, deeply-reasoned, and glowing eloquence of this great pleader, should not have been able to bring his gifts with him from Westminster-hall to the higher altar of parliament. There were times when his efforts in the house reminded it of his finest effusions at the bar. But those were rare. He obviously felt that his place was not in the legislature; that no man can wisely hope for more

than one kind of eminence; and except upon some party emergency, he seldom spoke, and probably never with much expectation of public effect. His later years lowered his name; by his retire ment from active life, he lost the habits forced upon him by professional and public rank; and wandered through society, to the close of his days, a pleasant idler; still the gentleman and the man of easy wit, but leaving society to wonder what had become of the great orator, in what corner of the brain of this perpetual punster and story-teller, this man of careless conduct and rambling conversation, had shrunk the glorious faculty, that in better days flashed with such force and brightness; what cloud had absorbed the lightnings that had once alike penetrated and illumined the heart of the British nation.

Erskine's well-known habit of talking of himself often brought the jest of the table against him. He was once panegyrising his own humanity: "There," said he, "for instance, is my dog; I wish it to be happy in this life, I wish it to be happy in the other. Like the Indian, I wish that wherever I may go, my faithful dog shall bear me company." "And a confoundedly unlucky dog he would be," murmured Jekyll.

All the London world was amused by Mingay's retort on Erskine, in one of those fits of laudation.

The trial was on some trivial question of a patent for a shoe-buckle. Erskine held up the buckle to the jury, and harangued on "the extraordinary ingenuity of an invention which would have astonished and delighted past ages. How would my ancestors," said he, "have looked upon this specimen of dexterity?" From this point he started into a panegyric on his forefathers. Mingay was counsel for the opposite side; and concluded his speech with,-"Gentlemen. you have heard a good deal to-day of my learned friend's ancestors, and of their probable astonishment at his shoe-buckle. But, gentlemen, I can assure you their astonishment would have been quite as great at his shoes and stockings.”

The conversation at the Pavilion once turned on the choice of professions. After a number of opinions in favour of the church, the army, and the other leading pursuits, Erskine pronounced for the bar, as "conducting to surer public distinctions than any other;" rather loftily adding, that "it was fitter for combining with noble blood than any of them, the army excepted." The allusion was obvious; and Curran, on being asked his sentiments, said, "that he had not the same reasons for cherishing the bar: he had brought to it no hereditary honours to foster; he had no infusion of noble blood to pour into it; but he believed as much money, and as much vexation, could be

earned at it as in any other profession. For one thing, however," he gracefully added, "I must feel indebted to the bar, and that is, its having raised me from an humble origin into the society of persons of the highest merit, and introduced the son of a peasant to the friendship of his prince."

Curran and Erskine had frequent opportunities of meeting, and must have looked on each other's powers with respect. But this foible of the English barrister sometimes shook the Irishman's philosophy. Grattan's name was mentioned; and Erskine casually asked what "he said of himself." "Said of himself!" was Curran's astonished interjection;—"nothing. Grattan speak of himself! Why, sir, Henry Grattan is a great man; sir, the torture could not wring a syllable of self-praise from Grattan,— a team of six horses could not drag an opinion of himself out of him. Like all great men, he knows the strength of his reputation, and will never condescend to proclaim its march like the trumpeter of a puppet-show.-Sir, he stands on a national altar, and it is the business of us inferior men to keep up the fire and the incense. You will never see Grattan stooping to do either the one or the other."

This sally may have been stimulated in some degree by one of those fits of irritability to which