In O'Connell's early days the judicial bench was disgraced by a Judge Boyd "Who was," said O'Connell, "so fond of brandy that he always kept a supply of it in court upon the desk before him in an inkstand of peculiar make. His Lordship used to lean his arm upon the desk, bob down his head, and steal a hurried sip from time to time through a quill which lay among the pens, which manoeuvre, he flattered himself, es caped observation. One day it was sought by counsel to convict a witness of having been intoxicated at the period to which his evidence referred. Mr. Henry Deane Grady labored hard on the other hand, to show that the man had been sober. ' Come now, my good man,' said Judge Boyd, ' it is a very important consideration, tell the court truly, were you drunk or were you sober on that occasion.' "'Oh, quite sober, my Lord,' broke in Grady with a significant look at the inkstand, ' as sober — as a judge'" The seemly gravity of the Bench was in the hands of a queer keeper when committed to the care of Lord Norbury (the Lord Chief Justice of the Irish Court of Common Pleas, 1 800-1 827). All who remember him as he presided in court can bear witness that nothing appeared to delight him so much as the uproar created by his volleys of puns. "What is your calling and occupation, my honest man? " he once asked a witness. "Please, your Lordship, I keep a racket court." "So do I," rejoined Lord Norbury in gratified allusion to the racket which his wit ticisms constantly excited in court. "It was an appropriate joke at the burial of a joking hanging judge, that jest of a butcher's apprentice that Brophy the dentist told me. When they were burying Norbury, the grave was so deep that the ropes by which they were letting down the coffin did not reach to the bottom of it. The coffin remained hanging at mid-depth while some body was sent for more rope.
"' Aye,' cried a butcher's apprentice, ' give him rope enough, don't stint him. He was the boy that never grudged rope to a poor body.' "It is told of Lord Norbury that when passing sentence of death on a man con victed of stealing a watch, he said to the culprit, ' My good fellow, you made a grasp at Time, but, egad, you caught Eternity.'" O'Connell spoke with great severity of the practice of making promotions to the bench for political services. "Daly (a judge of the Irish Queen's bench) went into Parliament to vote for the Union, and to fight a duel if requisite with any one who opposed it. Norbury was one of Castlereagh's unprincipled janissaries. Daly was no better. Daly was made Prince Serjeant for his services at the Union, although he had never held a dozen briefs in his life. He was on the bench, I remember, when some case was tried involving the value of a certain tract of land. A witness deposed that the land was worth so much per acre. 'Are you a judge of the value of land?' asked Daly. ' I think I am, my Lord,' replied the witness. ' Have you experience of it?' inquired Daly. ' Oh, my Lord,' cried Mr. Powell, one of the counsel in the case, with a most meaning emphasis, ' did you ever know such a thing as a judge without ex perience? '" O'Connell used to relate the following pathetic story of a Mr. Tim Driscoll, for many years a leading member of the Munster circuit: "I remember," he said, " an occasion when Tim behaved nobly. His brother, who was a blacksmith, was to be tried for his life for the part he had taken in the Rebellion of 1798; and Tim's unfriends among the banisters predicted that Tim would shirk his brother and contrive to be engaged in the other court when the trial should come on, in order to avoid the public recognition of so humble a connection as the blacksmith. Bets were offered upon the
