Last, and perhaps not least, that the question not long ago agitated between an illustrious personage and his consort, startled certain habits of thinking in society; and did certainly dispose the public to turn their consideration to what Fielding has recommended; namely, a little more fair dealing between the sexes; a little less arrogation of licence on the part of the men; or at least a little more charity towards those women, who first or last may trace their misfortunes to the existence of it. There is no getting over this dilemma. Either the liberty permitted should be more equal, (we are merely putting the case logically); or when the greater burden of consequences is laid upon the women, it is a mere abuse of argument, the cant of which is no longer available since the worse the women for so forgetting themselves, the worse their seducers for leading them into the forgetfulness. The former give rise to no more bad consequences than the latter, turn the argument how we may. Nay, they do not give rise to so much; for the only difference is, that the chance of suffering for them is twenty times greater on the part of the woman; which makes the selfishness and responsibility on the other side so much the more striking.

MEMOIRS OF THE MARGRAVINE OF ANSPACH.-Our readers will remember, that up to a late period, there lived at Brandenburgh House, on the banks of the Thames, a lady celebrated for her love of theatricals, and for retaining in advanced years the vivacity and attractions of youth. Some, from her German title, took her for a foreigner; others wondered, that being a Margravine, she was never seen at court. The fashionable world knew her well for having been, in the first instance, the interesting and deserted wife of the late Lord Craven's father, then the companion, and finally the consort of a German Prince, the late Margrave of Anspach. The Margrave sold his territory to the King of Prussia, and came to settle with her in England. In the volumes before us, this celebrated and somewhat mysterious lady has presented us with memoirs written by herself; and it is understood that she has done so in order to forestall representations of a less friendly nature, and at all events put the world in possession of her own state of the case. We apprehend that she need not have been under much alarm. Fairer play is shown to women in disputes of this nature, than there used to be; and the world cares little at any time for the bluster of long-departed lords, and the fuming etiquette of snuff-taking queens. But the chat of a lively woman about herself and her acquaintances will always be amusing, especially if she has travelled, and has something to tell us of foreign courts and celebrated characters. That the charming Lady Craven ever became a princess, we regret for our parts, because she would certainly have omitted divers instructions on music and murder, and reminiscences of the ancient Egyptians, which could have proceeded from nobody but a sovereign lady accustomed to be didactic at the head of her table, and secure of an audience. But we are glad to hear about the Countess of Suffolk, and Marie Antoinette, and Frederick the Second, and the Russians and Catharine, and the Italians, who, when her ladyship rode on a sidesaddle, used to pity her for having but one leg, and the Lilliputian court of Anspach, and all the courts of Europe, and the amusements at Brandenburgh House, and rough old Lord Thurlow, when she "saw tears starting from those eyes, which were supposed never to have

wept." The Margravine (who by the way is now very old, and resides abroad) talks with a pleasant and pardonable self-love of her fascinations in former days. We can readily believe her, for she was the reverse of a spoiled child; her mother, the Countess of Berkeley, having taken a dislike to her; and she grew up, praised, courted, and patient, without knowing well what it was all about. She was healthy from temperance, good-humoured, intelligent, disinterested, affectionate; and with a strong inclination to pleasure, was capable of great sacrifices. These are the elements of more than fascination. The following trait, among many others, will afford a specimen of that habitual regard for the feelings of others, united with a readiness to oblige and be obliged, which is perhaps the most fascinating of all combinations; and not the less so, because it seems little at first sight. "Here (at Constantinople) I met with Sir Richard Worsley, who had a person with him to take views. He showed me a coloured drawing of the Castle of Otranto, which he proposed as a present to Horace Walpole. I then asked him, whether he were an acquaintance of his. Upon his replying in the negative, I did not hesitate to ask him for it, that I might, as a friend of Mr. Walpole's, have the pleasure of giving it to him. He then entreated me to accept some Egyptian pebbles," &c. vol. i. p. 170. This is what we call taking a freedom in a high and cordial style, upon the best grounds in the world, and such as we love to be taken. At the same time, it must be owned that it provokes a grateful wish to take liberties in return, not always so feasible. Fascinating women, as the world goes, are inconvenient.

SPORTING AND ANGLING.-During the past month, the usual number of" shocking accidents" have appeared, resulting from guns and triggers; and the several agonies and disfigurements undergone have been very naturally lamented. We sympathize unaffectedly with these shat. tered bones, eyes blown out, &c. and with the sorrows of the fair friends and others who lament over them. Yet somehow we cannot help thinking, what heaps of similar and more shocking paragraphs might be written, if bird could write, by partridges and grouse. Take a specimen. “Dreadful OCCURRENCE. Yesterday, in consequence of the extraordinary barbarities committed, as usual at this season of the year, in the neighbourhood of Immington, thirty of the Partridge family were thrown into the most dreadful agonies by wounds of various kinds, too horrible for description. Some had their legs and thighs shattered; others their eyes blown out; others a great part of the face carried away. A few had the good fortune (for such it must be called) to be killed at once: but by far the greater part lingered in excruciating torment for want of proper assistance, and at length died, as usual, exposed to the inclemency of the weather, and the additional torments arising from the ground and stubble they were left upon. The horror and grief of the survivors may be better conceived than expressed."

The following is a description of as finished a human otter as we remember to have seen; we should say pelican, from the instinct he had of stowing his property about him; but this would not be so well, considering the family attachments of that humaner biped.

"Died, in the course of last week, at Mr. John Rossiter's, of Burkestown, county of Wexford, an old man, known in that neigh

bourhood by the name of "The Angler." He was frequently pressed upon to declare his true name, but never complied except on one occasion, when he said it was Matthew Smith. He was miserably dressed, wore a long beard, and carried about with him all the utensils for fishing. Some months back he was accompanied by a person whom he represented to be his brother, and whom he sometimes brought with him as attendant to a tavern, where he would dine, and allow his supposed brother to do so at a different table, after he had availed himself of his services as waiter. At his death he refused the attendance of any clergyman. When his body was about to be placed in the coffin, there was found, in a swathe girded round his body, a quantity of gold, to the amount of forty guineas. This sum is now in the hands of Mr. Rossiter, above-mentioned, and will be given to his nearest relative, after the affinity is satisfactorily proved."

GRANBY.-This is another novel, founded upon the manners of high life, and able to give information to those who require enlightenment thereon. Mr. Brummell has turned us away from the iniquity of sending up our plates twice for soup; and warned us against the reprobate state of eating cabbage. After Granby, nobody can plead ignorance of what is done in the country at lords' houses, or of what ought not to be done in town of a Wednesday. The author perhaps is not without his objections to the very highest and most assuming order of dandies,a class which he also informs us is on the decrease; but on all other points, even these gods of great people, our Dii majorum gentium, would allow him to be good authority. They might think him perhaps a little too anxious to make his favourites lords; and not sufficiently aware of the superfluousness of denouncing Bond Street in November. In plain truth, the author of Granby is a young man of considerable promise, and of much agreeable performance. He evidently moves in the upper circles, has an eye for portrait-painting and landscape; and in the course of a love-story, which shows him to possess a good taste in heroines, and a proper healthy belief in generosity and good faith, gives

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some piquant hints towards the character of a dandy wit, and a tragical and well-sustained history of a gambler. The book is too long; and too much is set down, with the intention of giving the dialogue an air of reality. The colouring is often thin; the canvass too much betrayed: but the groundwork, we fear, only so much the more faithfully represents the region he copies. If the author, the next time he writes, will lessen his dialogue, introduce more pictures, metropolitan or otherwise, and animate them with a few more of his best portraits, always taking care to preserve his good-heartedness, and belief in good, which leaves a pleasant taste in one's mouth, and is one of the wise things for which we admire him, he will produce a book twice as amusing as Granby itself, and not lose a jot either of his lustre in the fashionable world. The description of a morning for sportsmen, and of the principal characters who assemble for the chace, we take to be masterly.

SKETCHES OF THE IRISH BAR. NO. XII.

Calamities of the Bar.

Nor very long after I had been called to the Bar, I one day chanced to observe a person standing beside a pillar in the Hall of the Four Courts, the peculiar wretchedness of whose aspect attracted my notice. I was upon my way to the subterranean chamber where the wigs and gowns of lawyers are kept, and was revolving at the moment the dignity and importance of the station to which I had been raised by my enrolment among the members of the Irish Bar. I was interrupted in this interesting meditation by the miserable object upon which my eyes had happened to rest; and without being a dilettante in affliction, I could not help pausing to consider the remarkable specimen of wretchedness that stood before me. Had the unfortunate man been utterly naked, his condition would not have appeared so pitiable. His raiment served to set his destitution off. A coat which had once been black, but which appeared to have been steeped in a compound of all rusty hues, hung in rags about him. It was closely pinned at his throat, to conceal the absence of a neckcloth. He was without a vest. A shirt of tattered yellow, which from a time beyond memory had adhered to his withered body, appeared through numerous apertures in his upper garment, and jutted out round that portion of his person where a garb without a name is usually attached. The latter part of his attire, which was conspicuous for a prismatic diversity of colour, was fastened with a piece of twine to the extreme button of his upper habiliment, and very incompletely supplied the purpose for which the progenitors of mankind, after their first initiation into knowledge, employed a vegetable veil. Through the inferior regions of this imperfect integument, there depended a shred or two of that inner garment, which had been long sacred to nastiness, and which the fingers of the laundress never had profaned. His stockings were compounded of ragged worsted and accumulated mire. They covered a pair of fleshless bones, but did not extend to the feet, the squalid nakedness of which was visible through the shoes that hung soaked with wet about them. He was dripping with rain, and shivering with cold. His figure was shrunken and diminutive. A few grey locks were wildly scattered upon a small and irregularly shaped head. Despair and famine sat upon his face, which was of the strong Celtic mould, with its features thrown in disorder, and destitute of all symmetry or proportion, but deriving from the passions, by which they were distorted, an expression of ferocious haggardness. His beard was like that which grows upon the dead. The flesh was of a cadaverous complexion. His grey eyes, although laden with rheum, caught a savageness from the eyelids which were bordered with a jagged rim of diseased and bloody red. A hideous mouth was lined with a row of shattered ebony, and from the instinct of long hunger had acquired an habitual gape for food. The wretched man was speaking vehemently and incoherently to himself. It was a sort of insane jabbering-a mad soliloquy, in which "my lord" was frequently repeated. I turned away with a mingled sentiment of disgust and horror, and, endeavouring to release my recollection from the painful image which so frightful an object had left behind, I proceeded to inFeb.-VOL. XVI. NO. LXII.

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vest myself in my professional trappings, tied a band with precision about my neck, complained, as is the wont with the junior bar, that my wig had not been duly besprinkled with powder, and that its curls were not developed in sufficient amplitude, set it rectilinearly upon my head, and, after casting a look into the glass, and marking the judicial organ in a certain prominence upon my brow, I readjusted the folds of my gown, and reascended the Hall of the Four Courts in a pleasurable state of unqualified contentedness with myself. I directed my steps to the Court of Chancery, and, having no better occupation, I determined to follow the example of certain sagacious aspirants to the office of Commissioner of Bankrupts, and to dedicate the day to an experiment in nodding, which I had seen put into practice with effect. There are a set of juvenile gentlemen who have taken for their motto the words of a Scotch ballad, which, upon a recent motion for an injunction, Lord Eldon affected not to understand, but which, if he had looked for a moment upon the benches of youthful counsellors before him, while in the act of delivering a judicial aphorism, he would have found interpreted in one of the senses of which they are susceptible, and have discovered a meaning in "We're all a nodding," of obvious application to the Bar. Confident in the flexibility of my neck, and a certain plastic facility of expression, I imagined that I was not without some talent for assentation; and accordingly seated myself in such a place that the eye of my Lord Manners, in seeking refuge from the inquisitorial physiognomy of Mr. Plunket, would probably rest upon me. The Court began to fill. The young aristocracy of the Bar, the sons of judges, and fifth cousins of members of parliament, and the whole rising generation of the Kildare-street Club, gradually dropped in. Next appeared at the inner bar, the more eminent practitioners tottering under their huge bags, upon which many a briefless senior threw a mournful and repining glance. First came Mr. Pennefather, with his calm and unruffled forehead, his flushed cheek, and his subtilising and somewhat over-anxious eye. He was succeeded by Mr. Sergeant Lefroy, who after casting a smile of pious recognition upon a brace of neophytes behind, rolled out a ponderous brief, and reluctantly betook himself to the occupations of this sublunary world. Next came Mr. Blackburne, with his smug features, but beaming and wily eye; Mr. Crampton, with an air of elaborated frankness; Mr. Warren, with an expression of atrabilious honesty; Mr. Saurin, looking as if he had never been attorney-general; and Mr. Plunket, as if he never could cease to be so. Lastly appeared my Lord Manners, with that strong affinity to the Stuart cast of face, and that fine urbanity of manner, which, united with a sallow face and a meagre figure, makes him seem like The Phantom of Charles the Second. The Court was crowded, the business of the day was called on; Mr. Prendergast, with that depth of registerial intonation which belongs to him, had called on the first cause, when suddenly a cry, or rather an Irish howl, of "My Lord, my Lord," rose from the remote seats of the court, and made the whole assembly look back. A barrister in a wig and gown was seen clambering from bench to bench, and upsetting all opposition, rolling over some and knocking down others, and uttering in a vehement and repeated ejaculation, "My Lord, my Lord," as he advanced, or rather tumbled over every impediment. At length he reached the lower