Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/90

 Absent-mindedness on the Bench and at the Bay in Ireland. 69

ABSENT-MINDEDNESS ON THE BENCH AND AT THE BAR IN IRELAND. Д BSENT-MINDEDNESS is not gener£ ally in the category of the failings of eminent lawyers. There are, however, in the careers of some of the most eminent men both at the bar and on the bench some well-authenticated instances of this weak ness. Here are some curious stories of this failing: — Mr. Peter Burrowes was called to the Irish bar in 1/85, and died in 1841, in his eighty-eighth year. He was the most cele brated advocate of his generation, and is believed by competent critics among his contemporaries to have surpassed in brillianey of intellect, Plunket, Burke, and Curran. Burrowes owed his lack of promotion to his relations of cordial personal friend ship with the leaders of the Irish insurrec tionary movement in 1798, and late in life was appointed to the very subordinate post of commissioner in the Irish insolvent court. All through his life he was noted for his absent-mindedness. A friend who called on Peter Burrowes found him one morning in his dressing-room shaving himself with his face to the wall, and asked him why he chose so strange an 'attitude. The answer was, " To look in the glass." " Why, there is no glass there," said his friend. " Bless me," exclaimed Burrowes, " I did not notice that before." Then, ringing the bell, he called the servant, and questioned him re specting the looking-glass which had been hanging on the wall. " Oh, sir," said the man, " it was broken six weeks ago." It is recorded of Burrowes that on circuit a brother barrister found him at breakfast time stand-

' his watch in the saucepan. Burrowes had murder case which caused much excitement. In one hand — having a heavy cold — he held a box of lozenges, and in the other a small pistol bullet, by which the man met his death. Ever and anon between the pauses in his address he kept supplying himself with a lozenge, until at last in the very middle of a sentence, his bosom heav ing and his eye starting — a perfect picture of horror — he exclaimed : " Oh-h-h! gen tlemen, I've — I've swallowed the bullet!" The late Right Hon. Edward Pennefather, who was chief justice of Ireland from 1841 till 1846, when presiding at the O'Conncll state trials in 1844, was the victim of a curious freak of memory. On more than one occasion during his charge to the jury he seemed to be oblivious of the fact that he was on the bench, and referred to the counsel for the traversers as if he were prosecuting at the bar, as " my learned friends on the other side." The late Mr. Justice Keogh, who was a justice of the court of common pleas in Ireland from 1856 till his death, in 1878, at tended a representation of "Macbeth" in a Dublin theatre. When the witches, in reply to the Thane, who inquired what they were doing, declared that they were doing " a deed without a name," the learned judge, catching the sound of the words, and im agining, no doubt, he was on the bench, exclaimed, " A deed without a name! Why, it 's not worth sixpence! "
 * ing by the fire with an egg in his hand and
 * to state the case for the prosecution in a