1826.] Sketch from the Irish Bench. 483 
a’ deeper tone of sententious pathos, than that of Falstaff’s personification 
of old Kine Henry. 
Fortune, it’seems, may’bestow upon her favourites talents to which no 
obstacle: is ‘a difficulty, health which no exertion ‘can ‘destroy, and ‘an 
aptitude ‘for labour which no exercise can ‘exhaust; and yet) she will 
have' done little towards the building of a great man, unless she shall at 
the ‘same’ time have tuned him in harmony with the sphere in which he 
is destined to’move. It is by the want of this agreement between the 
inward man‘and the outward circumstance, by the absence of this happy 
adaptation of the back to its burden, that so 
“Many a ftower is born to blush unseen, 
And waste its sweetness in the desert air.” 
For the “ village Hampden,” who is opposed only to some * little tyrant 
of his fields,” will never be pushed into eminence by a state prosecution, 
nor become conspicuous by the exorbitance of his price in the rat market : 
while the ‘ mute inglorious Milton,” unawakened by the fostering pro- 
tection of his—bookseller, may pass his life behind a counter, for the 
mere want of that cerebral protuberance which is supposed by the 
initiated to be the peculiar seat and organ of the faculty of ** get-on-i-tive- 
ness.” Thus, the man whom nature designed to sing like the Wizard 
of the North at a guinea per line, may, by untoward circumstance, be 
reduced to the dreadful necessity of whistling for a dinner ! 
On this point, however, Lord Norbury has had little cause for com- 
plaint ; for, between him and the administration under which he sprang 
into political being, it may truely be said, 
‘* Ah, sure a pair were never seen, 
So justly formed to meet by nature.”’ 
At first sight, mdeed, it might have been thought that his lordship 
was ‘not exactly formed for the sphere in which he was destined to 
move. Not Joe Munden himself, nor Liston, the mirth-exciting child 
of Thalia, are by temperament gifted with animal spirits more buoyantly 
hostile to the dry, dusty pursuits of jurisprudence than his ; and never 
perhaps was there a lawyer whose intellectual peculiarities were less 
likely to make the study of Coke upon Littleton a facile and a prosperous 
task, in those rare moments, in which a sense of stern necessity might 
overcome the irksomeness of application. The perspicacity which 
detects a difficulty, and the perseverance which resolves the complex 
riddle of conflicting aphorisms and contradictory authorities, incidental 
to “a point of law,” do not fall to the lot of every one, whom “ fate 
and the metaphysical aid” of a due course of Temple legs of mutton 
equip with a wig and gown; and there are no few members of the Irish 
bar, who “are inclined to be of opinion” that his lordship was not of tha¢ 
number. But then on the other hand, if ill-adapted to the profession of 
the law, no man in the whole four courts was more fitted for zs trade ; 
and it was his singular lot to be thrown upon that arena at the only 
moment of time in which the qualifications which he did possess, could 
have been rendered available, to the same extent, to the purposes of 
gain and of ambition. 
Mr. Toler, for that is this nobleman’s family name, came into life the 
younger brother of a respectable family of country gentlemen. He was 
born in that county (Tipperary) whose name cannot. be pronounced 
sectindem artem, bat by organs gis and developed: beyond its limits. 
3Q2 
