In ordinary disturbances in Ireland, whenever they rose above the dignity of local mischief, the assistance and sympathy of France was always used as a sort of menace to England. It was a threat very certain to irritate, if it did no more. As, however, by course of time, we grew to form closer relations with France,--to believe, or affect to believe,--I am not very sure which,--that we had outlived old grudges, and had become rather ashamed of old rivalries, France could not be employed as the bugbear it had once been. Fortunately for Irish rebellion, America was quite prepared to take the vacant post, and with this immense additional gain, that the use of our own language enabled our disaffected in the States to revile us with a freedom and a vigor which, if there be that benefit which is said to exist in “seeing ourselves as others see us,” ought unquestionably to redound to our future good. The present movement had gone so far as to fill the public mind with terror, and our jails with suspected traitors. To try these men a special commission had been named by the Government, from which, contrary to custom, the Chief Baron had been omitted. Nor was this all. The various newspapers supposed to be organs, or at least advocates, of the Ministry, kept up a continuous stream of comment on the grave injury to a country, at a crisis like that then present, to have one of its chief judicial seats occupied by one whose age and infirmities totally disabled him from rendering those services which the Crown and the nation alike had a right to expect from him. Stories, for the most part untrue, of the Chief Baron's mistakes on the Bench appeared daily. Imaginary suitors, angry solicitors, and such-like--the Bar was too dignified to join in the cry--wrote letters averring this, that, or the other cruel wrong inflicted upon them through the “senile incapacity of this obstructive and vain old man.” Never was there a less adroit tactic. Every insult they hurled at him only suggested a fresh resolve to hold his ground. To attack such a man was to evoke every spark of vigorous resistance in his nature, to stimulate energies which nothing short of outrage could awaken, and to call into activity powers which, in the ordinary course of events, would have fallen into decline and decay. As he expressed it, “in trying to extinguish the lamp they have only trimmed the wick.” When, through Sewell's pernicious counsels, the old Judge determined to convince the world of his judicial fitness by coming out a young man, dressed in the latest fashion, and affecting in his gait and manner the last fopperies of the day, all the reserve which respect for his great abilities had imposed was thrown aside, and the papers now assailed him with a ridicule that was downright indecent. The print shops, too, took up the theme, and the windows were filled with caricatures of every imaginable degree of absurdity.