“Never,” said the journal which was once his most bitter opponent, “has the Chief Baron exhibited his unquestionable powers of thought and expression more favorably than on this occasion. There were no artifices of rhetoric, no tricks of phrase, none of those conceits by which so often he used to mar the wisdom of his very finest displays; he was natural for once, and they who listened to him might well have regretted that it was not in this mood he had always spoken. _Si sic omnia_,--and the press had never registered his defects nor railed at his vanities. “The celebrated Sir Brook Fossbrooke, so notorious in the palmy days of the Regency, sat on the Bench beside his Lordship, and received a very flattering share of the cheers which greeted the party as they drove away to Killaloe, to be present at the wedding of Miss Lendrick, which takes place to-morrow.” Much-valued reader, has it ever occurred to you, towards the close of a long, possibly not very interesting discourse, to experience a sort of irreverent impatience when the preacher, appearing to take what rowing men call “second wind,” starts off afresh, and seems to threaten you with fully the equal of what he has already given? At such a moment it is far from unlikely that all the best teachings of that sermon are not producing upon you their full effect of edification, and that, even as you sat, you meditated ignoble thoughts of stealing away. I am far from desiring to expose either you or myself to this painful position. I want to part good friends with you; and if there may have been anything in my discourse worth carrying away, I would not willingly associate it with weariness at the last. And yet I am very loath to say good-bye. Authors are, _par excellence_, button-holders, and they cannot relinquish their grasp on the victim whose lapel they have caught. Now I would like to tell you of that wedding at the Swan's Nest. You 'd read it if in the “Morning Post,” but I'm afraid you'd skip it from _me_. I 'd like to recount the events of that breakfast, the present Sir Brook made the bride, and the charming little speech with which the Chief proposed her health. I 'd like to describe to you the uproar and joyous confusion when Tom, whose costume bore little trace of a wedding garment, fought his way through the servants into the breakfast-room.