It was

sented to Bushe in the Library of the Four Courts. read by Blackburne,* and signed by the late Thomas Dickson, Q.C., Father of the Bar. The entire body of the profession attended.

66

ADDRESS.

Sir, The Bar of Ireland cannot regard your retirement from the Bench on which you have so long presided, without feelings of the deepest interest. While we fervently hope it may contribute to promote your health and happiness, we would avail ourselves of it as an occasion on which to express the sincere, grateful, and affectionate respect which we have ever felt for you, and which can never cease to be associated with the memory of one so beloved, so honored, and revered. It is to us a source of the purest gratification to offer our testimony and tribute to those distinguished qualities, social, moral, and intellectual, which carried delight and instruction into every circle within their influence, and which formed your title to the preeminence so justly and universally accorded to you. There is not a stage or period of your life in which we can fail to discover proofs of your eminent abilities and acquirements. Our University conferred on you her highest honors; the Historical Society recorded your proficiency in all its literary pursuits; and both gave the early but certain promise of that brilliant career at the Bar, in the Senate, and on the Bench, by which you afterwards became the pride and ornament of your country. As an orator, in the opinion of many, you surpassed all your illustrious cotemporaries; while those who thought you but the rival of the most eminent of them, conferred on you an honor that might have satisfied the ambition of any man. Deriving from the richest gifts of nature all the endowments essential to true eloquence, they were matured and perfected by culture and by study; and we witnessed in you a rare combination of mental powers and resources, which were yet to be rendered irresistible in their effects, by dignity and impressiveness of manner, voice, and action, which at once increased and mellowed the lustre which your commanding intellect shed on every subject on which its powers were exerted. The decisions of the Court of Queen's Bench, whilst you presided there, are, we believe, not inferior to those of any tribunal in the land; and though the learned and eminent persons whose cooperation and assistance you enjoyed, divide with you the praise which is due to learning, to talent, and to diligence, we can easily discover in your Lordship's judgments the pure and classic style, the lucid order and arrangement, which are discernible even in the loftiest, and most impassioned displays of your eloquence. For your

*It is a curious fact that Blackburn, who, as Attorney General, wrote, read, and presented this address to Bushe in 1841, should, in 1806, when only one year called, have been the only dissentient, at the Bar meeting then held, to congratulate Curran upon his nomination to the Rolls. For an account of this affair sce IRISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, Vol. I. p. 386.

uniform patience, courtesy, and kindness, we are bound to offer you our most grateful acknowledgments; nor would we have thus regarded as a mere expression of personal obligation, acts emanating from pure kindliness of nature, and the principles and habits of a gentle man; their influence has been felt in the whole administration of justice, and in fostering the talent and encouraging the exertions of the junior members of the profession. We now bid you farewell. If we have not done justice to your merits, the difficulty of the task must plead our excuse; but in whatever language it is conveyed, we feel that the sincerity of this Address will be its best claim to your acceptance.

Signed on behalf of the Bar of Ireland,

THOMAS DICKSON, Father."

To this Address, Bushe-" the old man eloquent"—spoke the following

ANSWER.

"GENTLEMEN OF THE IRISH BAR,-When I think of this unanimous Address of the assembled Irish Bar, their Father presiding, and her Majesty's Attorney-General leading; when I see that it is an Address abounding with kindness as it does, and liberal of praise bestowed on me by cultivated, and judicious, and honorable gentlemen;-I dare not venture in this place to do more than return my thanks; it would overpower me to state one-half of what I feel :

'Leves curæ loquuntur, Ingentes stupent."

But in my retirement I shall turn to this document with fond and proud recollection; and it shall be a precious legacy to my children. One word, and no more. I should feel oppressed by the weight of praise undeserved, if I were to arrogate to myself merit that does not belong to me; and I well know that whatever satisfaction I was able to give in the discharge of my judicial duty, I was enabled to give it, by having sat for twenty years surrounded by venerable and learned Judges of my Court-I speak of the living and the dead :—and to that Bench, and to the gifted and enlightened Bar that practised before us, I give the thanks and praises that I owe. Not to have availed myself of such advantages would have manifested incompetence, or neglect, or presumption; and that I have profited by such opportunities, your favorable judgment forbids me to doubt. I feel, therefore, justly proud of such a tribute. But, honorable as such a tribute must be, its value has been increased by being conveyed to me in that affectionate and cordial spirit of unabated regard, to which, from youth to age, the partiality of my brother barristers has habituated me; and if, in returning thanks for this continuing kindness, I were to attempt particularizing, the effort would be vain. I should not know. where to begin or where to stop; for, I thank God for it, I have had, and still have, that which should accompany old age-'honor, love, troops of friends.' To those friends I must now bid farewell. As individuals, may you be prosperous

and happy. As members of the Bar, may your influence, and station, and character, and independence, contribute to strengthen the foundation of that pure administration of justice which is indispensable to the maintenance of civil society among mankind.'

Whilst the Address and Reply were being read, the Bar were grouped around the centre table of the old Library, and at the conclusion of the proceedings, Bushe withdrew through the large door, only opened on State occasions, supported by two of his sons.

It may be said that we have devoted too considerable a space to this memoir; but in all our biographical papers, we have aimed at the possibility of doing justice to those who formed the subjects of our sketches, and if from all, some man or some woman sprung from Ireland, and glorifying our country by genius or by worth, may live in the hearts of our people, our object will have been attained, and then the people of Ireland, who have forgotten, or who seem to have forgotten, all their old friends, for whom they shouted whilst living— Grattan, O'Connell, Moore, will show, as the sage of Malmesbury, Thomas Hobbes, writes: "The Signs of Honour are those by which we perceive that one man acknowledgeth the power and worth of another; such as these, to praise, to magnifie, to bless." In preparing this memoir of Bushe we have felt a very considerable pleasure-Almost the last of a great era, he was honored to his grave, and in a time like this, when the absorption of our Law Courts, and of our Viceroyalty will be, and must be, attempted, for the purpose of carrying out the great scheme of centralization, it was but right, we thought, to show fully, how the Bar, the Irish Bar, acted on the occasion of that greatest scheme of centralization-the Union. Another point to which we would direct the attention of the Irish Bar is to that question recently agitated in EnglandShould barristers act without the intervention of an attorney? We know that many a weary heart beats under the gown of the barrister in the Four Courts; we know that Hope, term after term, grows weaker, as bills come in frequently, but briefs or cases, never, or rarely; we know that men may feel disgust, when they see legal office given as the price of political prostitution, or as the reward of time-serving or of meanness. But, when we look back to the past times, and whilst we consider the great judges our Bar has produced, we hope, we feel, that the first step toward the abrogation of that Bar will

not be taken by its own members. We trust that the time "when some traveller from New Zealand, in the midst of a vast solitude, takes his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's," will be the same as that period in which the Irish barrister shall act without the intervention of an attorney.-Then, when the New Zealander shall have grown weary of sketching the decay of man's handiwork, he may long to commune with the Omnipotent Architect of the world, and to

"Look through Nature up to Nature's God-" and in visiting Killarney, or the Giant's Causeway, may he be the first who shall tell, that our country towns, on Sessions days, were infested by a set of men called lawyers, who, in gown, and wig, and bands, asked people, as do the American lawyers now, half entreatingly, half self-recommendatory, "Want a barrister, do your business cheap." Better anything than legal touting; and to this touting the Bar would of necessity fall, in a very few years after the removal of our Law Courts.

Look to America, with its vast extent of country, where one might expect to find the legal profession in a high position; but such is not the case, simply because the professions of barrister and attorney have been amalgamated. There is no profession or business in America so low, judged by the learning of its followers, as the law; all Americans admit this fact. We have referred to this subject here, as we believe that in no more fitting place could it be introduced than in the memoir of a patriot, a scholar, an orator, a lawyer, a judge, a Christian-like Charles Kendal Bushe. He would have been proud to support his professional honor, as his private, even though his purse might grow lighter in the struggle, for he could feel with Petrarch

"Povera e nuda vai filosofia,

Dice la turba al vil guadagno intesa.”

Bushe held, four times, the office of Keeper of the Seals, and governed the country three times as Lord Justice. He died, on the tenth day of July, 1843, at the house of his son, Mr. Thomas Bushe; he was buried in the cemetery of

* See Mackay's "Western World."

Mount Jerome, Harold's Cross. His tomb is placed in Section C of the burial ground, and is a plain obelisk of mountain granite, capped by a monumental urn, and bears the simple inscription

CHARLES KENDAL

BUSHE.

JULY 10TH, 1843.

"And thus we leave our good Judge to receive a just reward of his integrity from the Judge of Judges, at the great assize of the world."*

ART. IV. ENGLISH CONVIVIAL SONG WRITERS.

1. Bibliotheca Madrigaliana.-A Bibliographical Account of the Musical and Poetical Works published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, under the Titles of Madrigals, Ballets, Ayres, Canzonets. By Edward F. Rimbault, LL.D., F.S.A., 1 vol. 8vo. London: John Russell Smith.

2. A Little Book of Songs and Ballads, gathered from Ancient Music Books, MS., and Printed. By Edward

F. Rimbault, LL.D., F.S.A., 1 vol. 8vo. London:
John Russell Smith.

3. Lyra Urbanica; or the Social Effusions of the Celebrated Captain Charles Morris of the Life Guards, 2 vols. 8vo. London: Richard Bentley.

THERE are, in no modern language, so many songs, beautiful in thought, poetic in inspiration, charming and melodious in structure, as in the English. We possess songs that steal into the heart in its hours of gloom, and brighten all its sorrows like a dream of heaven; songs that sung round the winter fire, bring back the days of youth, and hope, and joy, when those between whose faces and ours, the veil of death is drawn, were beside us in all the pride of health and strength; songs that call up the dreams of half forgotten joys, and from

*Fuller's "The Good Judge."