the progress of an Irish trial, even when the
crime was of the very gravest, cannot fail to have been struck by the
continual clash of smart remark and smarter rejoinder between the Bench
and the Bar; showing how men feel the necessity of ready-wittedness, and a
promptitude to repel attack, in which even the prisoner in the dock takes
his share, and cuts his joke at the most critical moment of his existence.

The Irish theatre always exhibits traits of this national taste; but a
dinner-party, with its due infusion of barristers, is the best possible
exemplification of this give and take, which, even if it had no higher
merit, is a powerful ally of good-humour, and the sworn foe to everything
like over-irritability or morbid self-esteem. Indeed, I could not wish a
very conceited man, of a somewhat grave temperament and distant demeanour,
a much heavier punishment than a course of Irish dinner-parties; for even
though he should come out scathless himself, the outrages to his sense
of propriety, and the insults to his ideas of taste, would be a severe
suffering.

That breakfast-table at Kilgobbin had some heavy hearts around the board.
There was not, with the exception of Walpole, one there who had not, in the
doubts that beset his future, grave cause for anxiety; and yet to look at,
still more to listen to them, you would have said that Walpole alone had
any load of care upon his heart, and that the others were a light-hearted,
happy set of people, with whom the world went always well. No cloud!--not
even a shadow to darken the road before them. Of this levity, for I suppose
I must give it a hard name--the source of much that is best and worst
amongst us--our English rulers take no account, and are often as ready to
charge us with a conviction, which was no more than a caprice, as they are
to nail us down to some determination, which was simply a drollery; and
until some intelligent traveller does for us what I lately perceived a
clever tourist did for the Japanese, in explaining their modes of thought,
impulses, and passions to the English, I despair of our being better known
in Downing Street than we now are.

Captain Curtis--for it is right to give him his rank--was fearfully nervous
and uneasy, and though he tried to eat his breakfast with an air of
unconcern and carelessness, he broke his egg with a tremulous hand, and
listened with painful eagerness every time Walpole spoke.

'I wish somebody would send us the _St