In the notes which Mr. Fitzpatrick has appended to his biography of the "Sham Squire" as "addenda" we have some well-authenticated and racy revelations of many of the singular Irish characters who flourished during the last thirty or forty years of the last century, and in the first few years of the beginning of this. Ireland appears to have been the "paradise of adventurers" in that day, as the times appear to have been out of joint, and the habits and general _morale_ of the upper and middle ranks were to the last degree loose and irregular. As the manners and modes of action of a people are in a considerable degree fashioned and influenced by the example set them by those who are placed in authority over them, it is not too much to assert that a great deal of the lax morality, unscrupulous spirit, and general demoralization were produced by some of the occupants of the vice-regal throne, and their "courts," the character and course of life of whom are painted by our author in anything but a seductive way. Brilliancy, show, pleasure, wit, and extravagance were the order of the day; lords-lieutenant were either dissipated _roués_, or incompetent imbeciles, and in either case they were sure to be coerced or cajoled by a mercenary tribe of political adventurers, who directed their actions and influenced their minds. We at once see by the wholesale corruption practised to bring about the Union, how utterly depraved must have been the men who openly or covertly prostituted themselves, when it was in contemplation; and never was political profligacy more open and more daring in its violation of honor, probity, and principle than in the abject submission of the Irish parliament, and its unhesitating anxiety to sell themselves, souls and bodies, to those who tempted them, and who had studied them far too accurately not to be sure of their prey. Amongst those who consented to accept the remuneration thus profusely offered them the lawyers bore a very prominent part; in fact, government could hardly have succeeded without their aid; of these, Fitzgibbon, afterward Lord Clare and chancellor, was the most forward and efficient. There was never a man better adapted for the work he had to do. Bold, active, astute, and unscrupulous, he could be all things to all men; those whom he could not cajole, he frightened; equally ready with the pen, the pistol, and the tongue, he was neither to be daunted nor silenced; terrible in his vengeance, no windings of his victims could escape him; and extravagant in his generosity (when the public purse had to bear the blunt), his jackals and partisans felt that their reward was sure, and therefore never hesitated to comply with his most exact demands. Few men had a larger number of followers, therefore, and no man ever made a more unscrupulous use of them. He had nothing of the recusant about him, however, and first and last he was consistent to his party and to the Protestant creed which he had adopted in early