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CURRAN. the title of Avonmore, as was said, in consideration of his support to the measure of union, in direct opposition to the principles of his whole life, and to the sentiments of all his friends and admirers at the bar, to whom that measure has never ceased to be peculiarly obnoxious. About this time an unfortunate division separated the friendship be- tween those eminent men, which had subsisted from their boyish days, and no reconciliation took place until the year 1805, when it was casually efected by an incident highly honourable to the feelings of both. Ou the memo rable cause of the King v. Mr. Justice Johnston, in the court of exchequer, when Mr. Curran came to be heard, after alluding to a previous decision in the king's bench against his client, he thus pathetically appealed to Lord 313 Avonmore:_ " I am not ignorant, my lord, that this extraordinary construction bas received the sanction of another court, nor of the surprise and dismay with which it smote upon the general heart of the bar. I am aware that I may have the mortification of being told in another country of that unhappy decision, and I foresee in what confusion I shall hang down my head when I am told it. But I cherish too the consolatory hope, that I shall be able to tell them that. I had an old and learned friend, whom I would put above all the sweepings of their hall, who was of a different opinion; who had derived his ideas of civil liberty from the purest fountains of Athens and of Rome; who had fed the youthful vigour of his studious mind, with the theoretic knowledge of their wisest philosophers and statesmen; and who had refined the theory into the quick and exquisite sensibility of moral instinct, by contemplating the prac- tice of their most illustrious examples; by dwelling on the sweet soul'd piety of Cimon; on the anticipated chris- tianity of Socrates; on the gallant and pathetic patriotism of Epaminondas; on that pure austerity of Fabricius, whom, to move from his integrity, would have been more difficult than to have pushed the sun from his course. I would add, that if he had seemed to hesitate, it was but