1826. ] Sketch from the Irish Bench. 489 
- “One qualification Lord Norbury possesses in an, extraordinary degree, 
and that is indomitable good temper. There are a few members..of the 
bar who, opposed to, him in principle, and. suspicious of his: political 
leanings, let no opportunity escape them of exposing his legal slips, of 
denying his minors, refuting his consequences, over-ruling his objections, 
and taking them to task as if, instead of judge he were a junior counsel. 
Mr. O+Connell especially is relentless in this sort of persecution; and if 
Lord Norbury had one atom of waspishness in his disposition, he would 
frequently be betrayed into unmeasured violence; yet nothing can be 
more marked by undeviating suavity than his intercourse with his pro- 
voking opponents. From his brethren on the bench, also, he has had 
much to endure: the late Judge Fletcher especially, who held his po- 
litics in horror, who looked down with contempt on his acquirements, 
and. never pardoned his judicial sproposit2, was:ever severe upon his 
“ learned brother,” and bore him hand in hand :, yet. we are not’ awaré 
of the parties having ever come to a scandalous rupture on the bench. _ 
But whatever may be Lord Norbury’s eccentricities or his legal’ defi- 
ciencies, it has on all hands been allowed that, where both parties are 
alike loyal men and good Protestants, omni exceptione majores, he is an 
acute and quick-sighted judge, bearing an even hand and a wary eye. 
In a country where litigation is a favourite vice—where the lower classes, 
bred to chicane and habitually in dread of violence, are remarkable for 
hardihood of assertion and dexterity of evasion—extensive powers of 
abstruse reasoning, and profound legal attainments, are by no means 
sufficient for discovering truth. In such cases Lord ‘Norbury’s natural 
shrewdness, knowledge of the world, and a peculiar facility of entering 
into individual peculiarities, and adopting all tones, are eminently useful. 
With the nobleman and the courtier, no man is more polite and. cour- 
teous ; with the peasant or the farmer, no man is more jocularly familiar. 
In whatever depends upon intuition he is quite at home. He perceives 
a lie while it yet lurks beneath the embarrassed look of a witness, and 
before it has found utterance; and he discovers an impure motive before 
it is demonstrated by the character of the evidence ; and he thus ‘is 
enabled to come to a sound conclusion, where men.of brighter parts or 
deeper acquirements would be unable to sift the truth, from conflicting 
testimony and contradictory circumstances. 
By a peculiar turnin his Lordship’s mind, acquired probably through a 
Jong habit. of conducting state prosecutions, he has been thought to lean 
generally and abstractedly in favour of the plaintiff. Attornies, at least, 
have imagined that they could discover advantage for their clients) in 
bringing their actions before the Common Pleas, rather than before any 
other tribunal. Some there are who have not scrupled to refer this 
leaning to a system for bringing grist to the mill, and multiplying fees : 
for our own parts, we are more disposed to refer it to a not unnatural 
presumption in favour of the eldest hand, and an opinion that no one 
would be at the trouble and expense of an action who had not cause to 
complain of a wrong. 
Such is, or rather such was, Lord Norbury; for latterly, although his 
corporeal faculties retain a vigour more than extraordinary at his 
advanced age, his intellects have been thought to have suffered under 
the hard hand of Time.. It is a part of the oddity that has marked his 
Lordship’s progress through life, that after having borne the nick-name 
of the hanging judge, he should have narrowly escaped impeachment for 
M.M. New Series. —Vou.II. No.11. 38R 
