1829. [ 305 ] 



MONTESaUIEU BEI.LEW AND LAWYER SHEII, : 

 A SKETCH l^ROM LIFE. 



All newspaper readers have seen an account of a drunken quarrel 

 which lately took place at a diimer in the county of Louth, between 

 Montesquieu Bellew and Lawyer Sheil, the two candidates, under the 

 Emancipation Bill, for the honour of representing that place. Some 

 people may suppose that this brawl was a mere wine-bibbing prank — 

 an accidental Irish row — an electioneering combat. No such thing : its 

 elements were more deeply seated ; its rise' and origin must be traced to 

 causes which have escaped attention, in the confusion of more important 

 subjects. 



Sheil, in writing his " Sketches of the Irish Bar," forgot to write his 

 own sketch ; — we shall supply the deficiency ; and if our portrait be not 

 quite so poetical and imaginative as he would have made it, the differ- 

 ence of temperament must be taken into consideration. Our object is 

 truth — his has been fiction. 



The progress made by this assertor of "grievances" — ^himself the 

 worst of all — to notoriety, is one of the remarkable evidences of the 

 state to which society has been brought in Ireland, by the vulgar 

 intolerance of the liberators. We should not now be led to chronicle 

 his name, if Ireland had been less enslaved by the arts and mendacious 

 profligacy of a faction. His name would never have attained the 

 distinction conferred by the billsticker and the secretary of a con- 

 spiracy assembly. But in the storm straws are thrown to the surface ; 

 and now that the 'excuse for agitation is removed, the shred struggles 

 to float, with a certain consciousness that when the waters are calmed, it 

 must sink to the bottom. 



Years passed over his bag, and never brought a brief. He was 

 to be seen in the vast hall of the Four Courts, traversing its sullen 

 round with inflexible submission : and it was not the least amusing 

 part of the exhibition to observe his figure, as it glided along in 

 contrast with the oily, well-fed, and monk-like looking rotiuidity of 

 O'Connell, who had commenced his trade of clamour, and was begin- 

 ning to receive his new customers in the crowded lounge of the Irish 

 Westminster Hall. O'Comiell takes a remarkable pleasure in the 

 disappointment of others ; and the chuckle of self-satisfaction is so 

 habitual to Iris nature, that it has worn its facetious channels into his 

 cheeks and hps. On those occasions he might have been observed cast- 

 ing a satirical glance at the junior, who had as yet never ventured in his 

 political displays beyond the noisy turbulence and equivocal patriotism 

 of the tavern. Sheil was originally bred amongst Jesuits, and had con- 

 tracted from them that peculiar air of pedantry and insidious pliancy which, 

 thougli apparently contradictory to each other, those admirable profes- 

 sors of Machiavelian theology have blended into harmonious union. 

 His response to O'Connell's sneer was a jerk and a smile ; he dared not 

 dissent or remonstrate in words, because he knew that his future hopes 

 depended upon embarking, when he could summon courage for the 

 enterprise, in the same bout with the demagogue. He bore the silent 

 taunt, the supercilious contempt, and arrogant ridicule of his more 

 powerful fellow Catholic with external submission ; but he burned at 

 the heart to revenge it one day or another. Having no business to 

 transact in the Courts, he had the more leisure for cultivating the ac- 



M.M. New Series.— Vol. y 111. No. 45. 2 R 



