EXPERIENCES OF AN IRISH COUNTY-COURT JUDGE.*

WE lay down this latest addition to the crowd of reminiscences with the sense that we have made acquaintance with a very distinct personality indeed,—an Irishman of the Irish in all the pride of race and peculiarity, whose sometime scholarship at Oriel has failed altogether to turn him into Saxon byways, and behind whose declaration of Unionism there lies that irrepressible aspiration for some kind of Home-rule or another, if it only could be squared with the rights of the Orangeman, the conscience of the Protestant, and the industries of Belfast, which seems to animate even the most devoted of the adherents of English rule in the most per- plexing and perplexed of islands. His life and career seem to have been to Judge Morris the subject of unmixed satis- faction, and certainly no man can ever have had a better right to record his experiences in type, on the strength of having written articles on every conceivable subject in every conceivable place, as a persona qratissima to the Times and the Edinburgh Review, a great authority on the questions of his country, and by an especial taste on military matters so keen a critic upon strategy as to have won the praise and admiration of Moltke himself, by an exhaustive essay upon the tactics of the Franco- German War. Bat to enter upon details. Mr. O'Connor Morris has written some forty essays in the Edinburgh Review on subjects within a wide range,—historical, legal, social, political. His contributions were at first not frequent, which he attributes to the natural tendency of an editor to "feel his way," but in later years they became much more numerous. The editor having gradually discovered where his tastes lay, gave him articles to write in harmony with them. He had known the French tongue from boyhood, and had devoured history, especially the history of war, at Langharne and Oxford, at a season of youth when the mind receives its most vivid impressions. He had pursued those studies less since he became a lawyer, though even in those years he oen read Thucydides, who had a greater fascination for him than for Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff. But when he returned to these subjects for the Edinburgh Review, he gave his mind to them fully, and read a great deal, and, like letters breaking through an overlaying text, his old knowledge came out clearly again, and proved fruitful, mellow, and useful. He has reviewed for the Edinburgh, besides other books, a considerable number of French works relating to eminent personages in the history of France, and examined the achievements of many great chiefs in the field and in the councils of the State. Contribution to the great journal being anonymous (is it a journal F), and Mr. Morris still a contributor, he has not disclosed the titles of any of his articles. Mr. Morris has contributed largely to other reviews and magazines, articles of his having appeared in places so diverse as the Encyclopcedia Britannica, the Quarterly, the Law Quarterly, and the North British, the Monthly Contemporary and the so-called Fort- nightly—an epithet conceded to a taste for accuracy—the magazines of Blackwood and Fraser, and Temple Bar, and the Saturday, in its flourishing prime. He has received much courtesy from many editors, and once only in his career he received curt lithographed refusals from one nameless excep- tion, whose object was to secure the names of "people of quality," whose contributions were despicable stuff. We have not been able to resist transcribing this simple record of un- broken comfort in Mr. Morris's own words from a man whose work in this field has certainly been of no light order. At one time he occupied fifteen columns of the Times with a review of the evidence on Bazaine's trial ; and that be is not one of those who hold that any view once taken should be obstinately adhered to is shown by his having "reproduced the Welling- tonian legend" in a long review of Thiers's history of 1815, but " returned to a truer and earlier conception which he sub- sequently embodied in a book called The Great Commanders of Modern Times, rejecting the "excuses still made for the Duke by a few critics of little repute," and upholding "the enormous superiority of Napoleon's strategy." We must, however, agree with Mr. Morris that "the last word on this passage of arms has not been said." It is not only upon the tactics of Waterloo that the historical fame of • Memories and Thoughts of a Life. By Wiliam 0 Connor Morris. County. Court Judge d Chairman of Quitter SersioLs for the Unit.ti Counties of

Ito:common ani Lorchn: George Allen.

Wellington rests as one of the foremost of commanders. With due deference to Mr. Morris, history will not so easily let him go. But the felicity of expression which bas always distinguished his countrymen, does not desert our Judge when he adds that at this period he wrote in -the Times the series of articles on the correspondence of Napoleon, a prodigy of intellectual power. It requires a little examination of the text to show that the prodigy is in the -correspondence, and not in the articles. But it is amusing to be referred to an early prophecy of his college tutor at Oriel, who told him that his style was turgid and Celtic, that he would never understand what pure English was, and would be just fit to write for the Edinburgh Review and the Times, in the fashion of Macaulay's "brassy rhetoric." The inevit- able Celt and Saxon are placed throughout the book in their usual antagonism—though it is doubtful history to tell us that in the Franco-Prussian War the Irish were on the side of the French, and the English on that of the Germans. We thought that, whatever our own view amongst that of others -might be, the majority in England sympathised latterly with France.

The ancestors of Mr. O'Connor Morris emigrated to Ireland from Staffordshire, where they sprang of a freeholder's race, in the reign of Charles I.; and after many a fight at Water- ford during the wars of Cromwell and William III., had become merchants of good position in that city by the time of the final subjugation of Ireland in the days of Queen Anne.

4‘ Final " is Mr. Morris's expression, not ours. He has much

to relate of his forefathers and their doings on both sides of the Channel, one of them investing largely in the purchase of the greater part of Tunbridge Wells, and then abandoning his possessions at a cheap rate in order to take up his old life in Ireland. His uncle, Shapland Morris, is the hero of a very interesting story. He served through the Peninsular War, wes promoted after Busaco, and wounded at Salamanca at the head of his company :—

"He was fond, like Corporal Trim, of describing feats of arms, and as a child I used to hang on his lips as be told, as Bugeaud wrote many years afterwards, how the shaken column recoiled from the steady red line, and the cuirass blazed in vain against the British square. He was at St. Helena for a short time .during the years of Napoleon's sad captivity. The first words the emperor addressed to him were, You are an Irishman, I am told ; but where do you come from ? ' And on learning that his home was Waterford, Napoleon replied, 'There is a little fort near the harbour, and your Government did not know, as I did, that every one of the guns was honeycombed.'"

A French governess who was the daughter of a General in the Grand Army, helped to fill the young Morris's mind with the deeds of Napoleon, and she wept at the name of Waterloo. "Ii vous a enseign6 son art," she used to say when British victories were spoken of, and her pupil became ever after a devotee to Napoleon's memory,—his sketch of him in the "Heroes Series" having achieved, he tells us, a more than ordinary success.

Deserts and Cuffs and St. Legers follow each other rapidly through the genealogical part of Mr. Morris's story, and though there is a notable absence of what are popularly known as Irish stories throughout the book, it is nevertheless certain that one breathes the atmosphere of the island and its perturbed history throughout ; and the fox-hunters of the Kilkenny field call out a characteristic tribute of admiration for the gallant gentlemen who met in arms at the riverside to

protect them against agrarian outrage, "brilliant at a fence or over a bottle, gay, hearty, generous, and up to anything." It is like a revival of some of Lever's pages, while there is an anachronistic flavour about a Cuff not being good enough for an O'Connor, and the absolute refusal of an English family, a very few years ago, to entertain the proposal of a young Irishman of old birth and ample estate, the latter especially, which suggests more of the novel than the biography. In dealing with the political side of his work Mr. Morris will perhaps number most readers amongst those who have not fairly discarded as hopeless all further argument upon the

exhausted and exhausting problem. We are sorry to see that he ranks himself amongst those of Mr. Gladstone's opponents who can find in him no certain rule of conduct but the love of office; and attributes his adhesion to Home-rule to nothing but his desire to secure the solid Parnellite vote. We had thought that his curious conviction that the Irish majority of that date was the matured conviction of a genuine national wish, was even admitted by his enemies. It cannot be too often

repeated that too careless a disregard of office has been one of the great Minister's weaknesses. Power is another thing, and a power he never failed to be, nor could fail, in office or in opposition. We are more inclined to agree with Mr. Morris when he maintains that the comparative failure of the Dis-

establishment of the Irish Church to do what was expected of it was due to its stopping short of concurrent endowment, and not being carried out in what the writer describes as Irish interests. It was not, according to Mr. Morris, a wise or a states- manlike measure ; but was, nevertheless, as far as it went, an act of justice, and the Church has been all the better for it. "The Catholic Church in Ireland," he writes, "is a great living fact," and it is idle to think that it does not embody the professed spiritual convictions of a pious race. That the Irish Establishment was doomed, and that the Catholic Church had the future on its side, was from youth his ob- servant conviction ; but he holds that while the Anglican Church in Ireland must ever be the Church of the few, it has more of the "living water" in it since the passing of the Act than it ever had before.

Statesmen and lawyers, Irish and English both, of many types and from many points of view, pass in their turn rapidly before us in Mr. Morris's pages ; and the curious touch of naivete which signalises his remarks about himself and his work, especially in the literary kind, of which after the manner of men he is evidently much prouder and fonder than of his own professional labours, does not detract from his merits as a keen observer. If his conclusions are often too Celtic for us, they follow from his point of view. His remarks upon local government and administration in Ireland, in which he looks on a complete change as certain, though disbelieving with no very sure conviction that it will

come in the guise of Home-rule, are interesting throughout ;

and the Land question is carefully and suggestively argued. His closing picture of himself is pleasant to read. Com- paratively unknown to a new race of editors, he still writes in his vacations, farms a few fields of his ancestral domain, restores plantations and improves landscapes, and has success- fully inclosed his " Thurnaby Waste," a bog derelict since the famine :—

"Since the National League has become quiescent, the tradi- tional good-will of the people round to the race of Offaly has revived. I often give them friendly advice. I hope I am thought a just and kind landlord. I write, study, prescribe in my court, and settle disputes between my peasant neighbours."

And so flows on the time at Gartnamara, making the Saxon envious of the poetry of names. The race of Offaly at Gart-

namara is like au echo from an Irish Walter Scott, and suggests the personality of a county court Judge as little as names can.