that Brougham had hardly much surpassed in visible performances many of the very gifted young men who were his associates at the Scottish bar. But he had been silently building up the foundations of that surprising versatility which has been ever since one of the most marked of all his mental characteristics. When the "Edinburgh Review" began, with an audacity at least as great as its ability and knowledge, to fulmine over the literary world, Brougham was a distinguished member of the brilliant band of its contributors; but he had, at the same time, already completed a bargain with the publisher for his "Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers"-an extensive work, marked in an equal measure by extent of information, vigor of talent, and maturity and boldness of political views. That so good a book should have been written by so young a man, was extraordinary enough; but that the same individual should have also found time, within so short an antecedent period, to make his important communications to the Royal Society, to become a prominent debater in the Speculative, to prepare himself for his admission to the bar, to get through his foreign travel, and to write brilliant contributions to the "Edinburgh Review," was such a manifestation of intellectual activity and power as would not easily be paralleled in recent times. And there was one amongst his intimates by whom the strength and weakness of his singular nature was even then correctly and completely known. In a letter, written a few months after their joint admission to the Speculative Society, Horner says:

"Had you any conversation with Brough

am? He is an uncommon genius, of a composite order, if you allow me to use the expression: he unites the greatest ardor for general information in every branch of knowledge, and, what is more remarkable, activity in the business, and interest in the pleasures of the world, with all the powers of a mathematical intellect."

And again, four years later, on the eve of the publication of his friend's work on Colonial Policy, the same deep and calm observer writes:

"Should an active scene be opened to Brougham, I shall tremble with anxiety for some time, though it is what I very ardently wish his information on political subjects, especially in some departments, is now immense; his talents are equal to the most

effective use and display of that knowledge. But his ardor is so urgent, that I should be afraid of his being deficient in prudence. That he would ultimately become a leading and predominant mind, I cannot doubt; but he might attempt to fix himself in that place too soon-before he had gone through what I presume is a necessary routine of subordination."

He was, at any rate, not much disposed to continue long in subordination at Edinburgh. In that city of strong political partisanship, Whiggism, in the early years of the present century, was far from being the most profitable side for a young advocate to enlist on; and Brougham, animated by the consciousness of power, and the ambition which that consciousness engendered, may have been not prevented by his good professional success from seeking for a wider and a freer field for his exertions. Instigated by this consideration, and hastened, probably, in his determination by the result of his appearance before the House of Lords as one of the junior counsel for Lady Essex Ker in the Roxburghe peerage case, in his twentyninth or thirtieth year, he settled in London, where, after a short time, he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, and began to practice as a barrister in the Court of King's Bench.

This was in 1808, and from this date until that of his elevation to the woolsack in 1830, Mr. Brougham came by degrees to be engaged in what was literally an unparalleled amount of labor. In his capacities of statesman, advocate, and author, he was soon doing the work of three industrious men. Marvelous stories have been told of his dispatch of business, indubitable myths originating in a reality of performance of exaggeration. Business, indeed, surprising enough to stand in no need flowed in upon him in a deep and full tide. In the Court of King's Bench, and on the Northern Circuit, he quickly became, especially in political cases, a favorite advocate; and his distinction at the bar recommended him at once to an ample participation in the toils, and strife, and triumphs of the senate. In the midst of these abundant occupations he still found time for a multitude of publications of which he is the known, acknowledged author, as well as, probably, for no inconsiderable number-as there is good reason for surmisingwhich may be hereafter traced to his prolific pen. In order to understand

the extent of his activity during this portion of his indefatigable career, let us endeavor to catch a glimpse of some of his greater labors in each of these departments of exertion.

One of the earliest of his memorable efforts as an advocate, occurred within two years of his admission to the English bar. The Berlin decrees, by which Napoleon sought to cramp the commerce of England, had provoked the government of that day to a retaliatory absurdity in the shape of "orders in Council," which, by a subsequent modification, had been made oppressively severe. Mr. Brougham, as the representative of a large and influential portion of the mercantile community, was employed to plead against the coercion and continuance of these "orders" before the House of Lords; and his argument, which occupied two days in its delivery, though ineffectual as to its specific aim, manifested so rare a combination of knowledge, boldness, ingenuity, and eloquence, that the advocate himself was at once welcomed as a pillar of strength on the popular side in the fierce party warfare of the time. A seat in the House of Commons was one of the immediate consequences of this masterly discourse, but not the only or the most important one. It opened the way to a very considerable extension of his professional business; not merely by making known the warmth and vigor of his powers and the wide extent of his resources, but by making known also the liberality of his own political views, and the likelihood that he would, therefore, put forth his strength with a hearty goodwill in defense of those who had, by too free an advocacy of similar convictions, subjected themselves to the inquisition of a somewhat rigorous law. It was not long before cases of this kind occurred, in which he was actually called to champion the oppressed. In the volume of his "Social and Political Speeches," just published by Messrs. Griffin & Co., there are the reports of two speeches which were delivered in the following year, in defense of persons against whom prosecutions on a charge of libel had been instituted by the state. On both of these occasions, Mr. Brougham's clients were proceeded against for the publication of the same article-an article on Military Flogging, written by Mr. John Scott, who

afterwards conducted the "Champion," and the " London Magazine," and who was killed in a duel consequent upon a stern, unpalatable reprehension of the personalities of "Blackwood's Magazine;"-and it is a curious instance of the uncertainty of law, that whilst John and Leigh Hunt were acquitted by a jury at Westminster, Drakard was convicted at Lincoln and sentenced by the Court of King's Bench to imprisonment for eighteen months. But the defense on both occasions was clear, and vigorous, and eloquent; doing as much justice to the principle of free discussion, which these prosecutions aimed at, as to the individual defendants in the two causes. It was the very natural result of a frequent advocacy of this kind to make Mr. Brougham eminently popular both as a barrister and a politician. How great his business and his popularity had grown, may be in some degree inferred from the well-remembered delight of the people when it became known to them that he had engaged in the onerous duties of Attorney-General to the Queen. He had been for many years her lawadviser, and in that capacity had, in conjunction with Mr. Whitbread, strongly remonstrated against her perilous residence abroad; and when the fruits of her unfortunate resolution appeared in their mature bitterness in the Bill of Pains and Penalties, he entered with his whole heart and soul into her defense.

But to him, as to the great mass of the people of England at that time, the question at issue was not one that might be compressed within the narrow limits of an inquiry into the guilt or innocence of his ill-fated client. It expanded itself into the broader and the higher problem-the problem infinitely more momentous, both in its moral and political bearing-of the absoluteness of the king's power to degrade and do away with a consort whom he had outraged by his own uniform career of coarse, unprincipled sensuality; whom he had from the beginning of their union slighted, hated, and by meanest arts oppressed; and whom he sought at last to cast down from her queenly rank, and ruin outright; though, had the foulest perjuries that English gold had bought against her been believed, she would still have seemed, even to human eyes, immeasurably less stained

and scarred by guilt than her persecutor, in the revolting grossness of his life, had ever condescended to appear.

From first to last, during the long continuance of proceedings in the House of Lords, Mr. Brougham's energies were poured forth unsparingly in this important case. It is the occasion which his biographer will have to dwell on, as revealing within definite limits all his rare and multiplied endowments —all his defiant and indomitable daring -his lightning-like conception-his multifarious knowledge-his comprehensive grasp of details, and his skillful marshaling of them in production of some climax startling from magnificence of power, his lynx-eyed insight into falsehood and prevarication under all their wide variety of cleverly-contrived disguises his fierce, intolerable sarcasm-and his vehement and impassioned eloquence, touched sometimes with an unwonted pathos, and raised sometimes into an unwonted solemnity of tone, which were inspired by the greatness of the cause, and were not unworthy of it. The chaste and noble impressiveness of the peroration of his speech in defense was a new excellence in his marvelous oratory. One brief emphatic passage in it, which Lord Eldon reprehended as an intimidation,, was in these memorable words:

"My Lords, I pray you to pause. I do earnestly beseech you to take heed! You are standing upon the brink of a precipicethen beware! It will go forth your judg ment, if sentence shall go forth against the Queen. But it will be the only judgment you ever pronounced which, instead of reaching its object, will return and bound back upon those who give it. Save the country, my Lords, from the horrors of this catastrophe-save yourselves from this peril -rescue that country, of which you are the ornaments, but in which you can flourish no longer, when severed from the people, than

the blossom when cut off from the roots and the stem of the tree."

Owing to the matchless efforts of the Queen's defenders, the Bill of Pains and Penalties met with so discouraging a fortune in the House of Lords, that it was, after the third reading, finally withdrawn. The news of that event was welcomed with a jubilant delight throughout the land. In the homes of the great masses of the people, even in the lanes and courts and alleys where the very poorest of them lived, the windows gleamed with light, and bonfires blazed in the public places, as

never windows gleamed or bonfires blazed for any victory before; for this was felt to be a victory which the people might rejoice in heartily, without misgiving or alloy; a victory over the strong hand of selfish and unscrupulous oppression: and he who had been foremost in the arduous strife became the idol of the people, and was hailed as the people's friend. But the fiery indignation which Mr. Brougham had often given utterance to during the course of these proceedings against the Queen, did not die away at their termination, nor even on the mournful death of his unhappy client. From time to time, ever since, the pent emotion has burst forth, rapid, fierce and burning, as in its first consuming outbreak. A wellremembered example of the abiding, unabated strength of this feeling occurred in the defense of Ambrose Williams, in a trial for libel on the Durham clergy. The defendant had, in the 'Durham Chronicle," published

some severe censures on the conduct of the clergy, in not having the bells of their churches tolled on the occasion of her Majesty's death; and Mr. Brougham, roused to pitiless resentment by the insult which had provoked his client's strictures, poured forth a bitter stream of mingled sarcasm, irony, and stern vituperation on the complainants, which must have made them in the depth of their abasement look back, almost lovingly, on the milder libel of which the evil spirit had come back to them in the strength of seven even more wicked than himself. Amongst the multitude of Mr. Brougham's speeches at the bar, we question whether any other equaled this in the one quality of concentrated scorn: some were undoubtedly more richly graced with knowledge, some more soundly argumentative, some wittier, and some more classically eloquent; but in that peculiar power in which the orator surpassed the whole of his contemporaries—the power of a contemptuous, withering, merciless invective-it is doubtful whether this defense of Ambrose Williams is not, even now, to be regarded as his best oration at the bar.

It has been a hundred times remarked, how seldom a distinguished speaker in the courts is equally suocessful in the House of Commons. Mr. Brougham's first efforts in that new arena are said to have made it likely

that his name would have to be inscribed in the catalogue of those to whom this disappointment had occurred. But there was a stubborn invincibleness in his nature, a power to do whatever he determined on, that soon bore him up above all fear of permanent failure. Before he had been many months a member of the House, he became so well accustomed to it as to wield the rare weapons of his oratory in that great assembly with just as much ease, and with just as assured a mastery, as he was wont to do elsewhere. In little more than two years it was thought not imprudent for him to contest a Liverpool election against Canning, and his defeat on that occasion excluded him from Parliament for four years. But, in 1816, he again obtained a seat there, which he continued to hold-as representative, successively, for Winchelsea, for Knaresborough, and for Yorkshire-until his elevation, in 1830, to the House of Lords. In the House, it was soon felt that a master-spirit was again amongst them-an orator of nature's fashioning, yet well sustained by all the helps of art-a worthy successor of the great parliamentary chiefs of a generation just passed away. Compared with the mightiest of that by-gone race, though he might fall short of the gorgeous imagination and the philosophic depth of Burke, or of the sonorous and sustained strength of Pitt, or of the vehemence, and simplicity, and genuine nobleness of Fox, or of the wit, and polish, and dramatic point of Sheridan, he had powers of his own, quite as formidable, at least, as any of these in debate as much dreaded by opponents, and as much confided in by friends. For, to the consideration of almost every subject that could come before the council of a great nation, he brought an ample and exact fund of knowledge, a comprehensive acquaintance with all the principles of sound and scientific government, and a very competent familiarity with all the details of our home, foreign, and colonial affairs, which a retentive memory enabled him to bring to bear at any moment in debate, which he had the skill-in spite of an unstudied style-to set before his hearers clearly, fully, and impressively; and which, upon occasion, he would enforce with an eloquence in which the reason and the feelings were alike

addressed, or uphold against attack with a surpassing storm of sarcasm, scorn, and sneers, and fierce and passionate invective, against which, no member of the House, but Canning, could, with any hope of victory, contend. With this influence in the House, there was no lack of sustenance to his

popularity out of doors. Of every liberal measure, of every measure tending to relieve, redress, refine, and raise the people, he was the strong and staunch supporter. On all those momentous themes, in which the problem is to reconcile the widest benefits of civil government with the smallest possible encroachment upon individual rights, his exertions were unsparing on the popular side. On some of these his labors and endeavors have, to such an extent, identified him with the cause, that the memories of the measure and the man must go down to posterity together. And if we have not misconceived the character which is revealed beneath the tumult and the turmoil of his life—if the high ambition of a benefactor to his fellow-countrymen, and to the world, has been in truth amongst the foremost of the dispositions which inspired and sustained him-he would himself wish to be remembered in no nobler association than that of the faithful and triumphant leader in the great battles for the abolition of colonial slavery; the reform of law; and the diffusion of knowledge, the helpmate and chief servant of Christianity in the work of civilization, into the understandings and the hearts of all the population of the land.

In the twenty-two years which intervened between his call to the English bar and his accession to the woolsack, it would have been excusable enough if Mr. Brougham had written nothing. In the harass of his extensive business in the courts, or in the excitement of his labors in the House of Commons, an ordinary man would have found quite task enough for body and for mind, and the anxieties, and toil, and efforts of the two occupations, actively pursued, might have satisfied the most intemperate avidity for work. But Mr. Brougham found time and vigor for a third. Hazlitt says-truly, indeed, though not in an obvious sense-the more we do, the more we can do; the busier we are, the more leisure we have: and Mr. Brougham's accumulated labors at the time we

as

are speaking of, exemplified the theoretic truth. In the production of addresses, pamphlets, and revised and published speeches, and in the great body of his contributions to the "Edinburgh Review," there was an intellectual harvest which might have been held not scanty in amount even for a man of letters by profession; and yet these were but the superabundance which his indefatigable spirit yielded. The larger portion of these writings have, unquestionably, a political cast and character about them, and were probably. their manner indicates-written hastily and carelessly; yet in all their indifference to elegance, abounding in vitality and strength, as auxiliaries in the great public causes pending at the time. Sometimes, however, we meet with a genial paper, so eloquent of the charm of early, unforgotten studies, and old classical memories and joys, as to set us pondering on the great things the writer might have accomplished if, in his young days, he had wedded himself to literature instead of statesmanship or law. Of this kind is the Inaugural Discourse on his installation as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. Opposed, as a candidate, by Sir Walter Scott, and winning the election only by the casting vote of Mackintosh, Mr. Brougham's address is said to have been composed amidst the complicated business and bustle of the northern circuit. But, wherever it was written, the address is redolent of fond remembrance of the pure and high delights belonging to the scholar's life, rich in eloquent incentives to exertion, nobly stored with dissertation on the grace, and power, and beauty of the language of old Greece, commendatory but not enough so-of the great masters of our own glorious tongue, wise and earnest in the counsels it enforces, and, above all, bold in the declaration of a great philosophic truth, which raised a host of hoodwinked volunteers against him; and it is, moreover, distinguished by a better and exacter style than was habitual to the writer in the works referable to that laborious time. Bearing this discourse in mind, as a model, we might, without injustice, apply to some few of his other writings of the same period his own words: " Had he studied correctness equally, the effect would have been heightened, and a far more excellent thing would have been offered

to our deliberate admiration, after its appeal to the feelings had been successfully made."

On the accession of the Whigs to office in 1830, Mr. Brougham, much to the surprise of Parliament and the nation, became their Lord Chancellor. On him, and on Earl Grey, the burden of the battle rested in carrying the memor able Bill for Parliamentary Reform against the deeply-rooted opposition of the Upper House. But Lord Brougham, with his long experience in the Commons and the courts of law, was just the man that an emergency so startling needed. Like Massena, he was most himself when difficulties thronged most against him. Those who remember the perilous excitement of that time when the people's voice was heard from every quarter of the land in stern and deep tones demanding that the proffered measure of relief should be no longer kept from them, and the press, in all its multitudinous channels, from the hawker's penny sheet to the almost omnipotent "Times," was clamoring and thundering for the passing of the Bill, and both press and people were looking angrily towards the House of Lords as the one obstruction to the great redress they claimed-will remember how, in the nightly conflicts and commotions which disturbed the immemorial dignity of their Lordships' deliberations, the strangest of all innovations was the fierce and passionate rhetoric, the ever-ready artillery of invective, menace, sarcasm, and denunciation of their new colleague in council, Henry, Lord Brougham. And it will be remembered also, how, when every argument in favor of the Bill had been insisted on, till frequent use had made it threadbare, his Lordship, on the second reading, delivered an oration full of wit, and novelty, and eloquence, and argumentative impressiveness, which delighted, by its force and beauty, those who most disliked and dreaded its effect, and which stands to this day in the foremost rank in merit, if not itself the very first in merit, of all the countless speeches he has made. On the passing of this much-contested measure, in the summer of the next year, the Whig ministry were at liberty to proceed to other and extensive amendments of domestic and colonial law. In all these legislative labors the Chancellor was an able, energetic, and