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friend (121). O’Molloy is, in a word, a talented barrister on
the decline, falling deeper and deeper in debt. “Practice
dwindling” might have contributed to his financial difficulty
and downfall, but it is gambling which dooms him to disaster
and ruination. His financial trouble notwithstanding,
O’Molloy endeavors to maintain an air of respectability: he
speaks “gently” (108) and “quietly” (109, 114), and offers
several rounds of cigarettes in the course of the
conversation
—
the only person who offers cigarettes. As a
barrister, ironically, O’Molloy does not work in his office or at
the bar, but loafs around with a gang of spongers and
ne’er-do-wells in the newspaper office and struggles to get a
loan. He is “socially superfluous” as Herr suggests (1986: 73),
despite being an intellectual of the third profession.
However, even without his financial problems, O’Molloy
cannot be accounted an adequate and respectable lawyer
despite Bloom’s positive assessment of his capability. For one
thing, his statement concerning the wife of the Lord Lieutenant
of Ireland buying a commemoration postcard of the Invincibles
proves to be an embellished flourish, not fact (Gifford &
Seidman, 1988: 142). When the nostalgic Crawford says with
disdain that silver-tongued barristers existed in the past but not
at present, O’Molloy retorts, and applauds Seymour Bushe for
his eloquence in the Childs murder case, during which Bushe
delivered “[o]ne of the most polished periods” he has “ever
listened to in [his] life” (Joyce, 1986: 114). As O’Molloy
recollects: “[Bushe] spoke on the law of evidence . . . of
Roman justice as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the
lex talionis
. And he cited the Moses of Michelangelo in the
vatican” (115). O’Molloy’s recollection slightly differs from
what actually happened in court. To begin with, Bushe did
speak on the laws of evidence during the trial, but he
compared Irish laws of evidence with English laws, and did not
mention the contrast between Roman justice and the Mosaic