In this grave cigar-smoking age of ours, in which Irishmen exhibit so little of the love of fun and merriment--the drolleries and _escapades_ which distinguished them in preceding ages--it is a pleasant thing to us septuagenarians to look back occasionally to our youthful days, and call up from the storehouse of our memories the merry men whom and whose merry freaks we were either familiar with, or at least had heard of or seen. One of these choice spirits is just now present with us in our mind’s eye, and we are certain that we have only to mention his name, to bring him equally before a great number of our Dublin readers. We mean the late musical doctor, John Cogan. There, now, Dublin readers, some thousands of you at least have the man before you, though many of you are unfortunately too young to have heard his exquisitely delicate and expressive hands on the piano, extemporising with matchless felicity upon Garryowen or some other melody of Old Ireland; or participated in his playful and always inoffensive merriment and good humour. Even the youngest of you, however, must surely remember the little man--little indeed in size, but every inch of him a gentleman, who but a few years since might be occasionally seen taking an airing, when the sun shone on him, in Sackville Street, sometimes leaning on his servant’s arm, and at others driven in his pony-phaeton, which his prudence in youth had enabled him to secure for his days of feebleness and old age. That pleasant intellectual countenance, bright and playful as his own music even to the last, has disappeared from amongst us; but the memory of such a man should not be allowed to die, and we will therefore, while in the vein, devote a column of our Journal to a sketch of one of the many incidents remembered of his long life, as illustrative in some degree not only of his character, but also of that of society in Dublin during the last century.