"The reader of this dignified list will surely see no indecorum in an admiralty judge hav ing now and then exchanged broadsides, more especially as they did not militate against the law of nations." He describes his family duelling-pistols, which were called "pelters." They were made of brass, the barrels being very long, and were what were denominated point-blankers. They had been in the family many years, and descended as heirlooms; one being named " Sweet Lips," and the other " The Darling." The family rapier was called " Skiver, the Pullet," hav ing been so christened by Sir Jonah's granduncle, Capt. Wheeler Barrington, who had fought with it repeatedly, " and run, through different parts of their persons, several Scots officers who had challenged him all at once for some national reflection." In Sir Jonah's time the number of killed and wounded among the bar was very considerable. Lord Mount Garret (afterward Earl of Kilkenny), finding himself likely to be worsted in a law suit, conceived the thoroughly Irish plan of challenging the attorney and all the counsel on the other side. He accordingly challenged the attorney, but that worthy got the better of his lordship by wounding him quite se verely. His son, however, then took the field, and challenged and wounded one of the opposing counsel. Next his lordship, having recovered from his wound, challenged and wounded another of the counsel. The latter, on being asked by Sir Jonah during his con valescence how he felt when he received the crack, replied that he felt "just as if he had been punched by the mainmast of a man-
of-war." Sir Jonah remarks : " Certainly a grand simile! but how my friend Byrne was enabled to form the comparison, he never divulged to me." . This whimsical course of procedure might have gone on until all the counsel were hors du combat, had not his lordship's second son, in taking his turn at it, injudiciously insulted one of the barristers in open court, whereupon he only escaped imprisonment by promising not to meddle further with the learned counsel. This ended the matter, his lordship finding that neither the laws of the land nor those of battle were likely to adjust his affairs to his satisfaction. These random selections from Sir Jonah's "Sketches" have already exceeded the length of a " Green-Bag " article. The societies of duellists and " point-of-honor men," with their elaborate codes of duelling rules; the Irish gentry, divided into " The halfmounted Gentlemen," "Gentlemen every inch of them," and " Gentlemen to the back-bone," and their debts, duels, horse races, and carousals; the Irish squires in their tumble-down country-houses and " cas tles," administering a paternal government over their tenants, and dying, at eighty or ninety, of gout, rum-shrub, and Drogheda usquebaugh; and the politics, society, and stage of the Irish capital; together with the further anecdotes of the bench and bar, and the weightier matters of the law, — all these I must leave to the research of such mem bers of the profession as care to read for themselves the " Sketches " of this most entertaining Irish barrister and judge.
