sure, against whose vagaries they felt they could never ensure material guarantees, and by whose antecedents the wisest of their corps could never hope to solve the query, What will he be up to next? So long ago as the foundation of the Edinburgh Review, we know that he was refused room in the first three numbers, because the then editor, Sydney Smith, had (says Jeffrey)" so strong an impression of Brougham's indiscretion and rashness." Already there was no mistaking in him the man who, opportunity once given, would gain European notoriety for allowing "libre cours à ses qualités incisives, mordantes, acérées, et se montre personnel envers les potentats et les ministres impunément." Friends and foes both have had occasion in their turn to recognize in his freespeeches, what one of Shakspeare's ladies

What a sinking fund, deeper and deeper still of scolding language this γλωσση δεινος orator possesses! What a study his poses plastiques used to be, when in the good old days of parliamentary war to the knife he would plant himself in the attitude of a Homeric hero, intent on putting somebody's head "in chancery." What a volley of superlatives he would pour on the enemywhat a flight of fluttering winged-words: like Coleridge's "character,"

Blood-sucker, vampire, harpy, ghoul,
Come in full clatter from his throat,
Till his old nest-mates changed their note
To hireling, traitor, and turncoat.

and a strong-bow, at the creaking string whereof his passion, fancy, pique united would make a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether.

The effect of these stormy harangues was capitally increased by the aspect and gestures of the storm-compeller--the Jupiter tonans of the woolsack; by what a popular essayist calls the "inscrutability of his features, which, though sharp and angular, conceal more meaning than they enunciate; the unkindled lightnings of his eye; the iron massiveness of his forehead; the saturnine swarthiness of his complexion; the meaning twitch of his cheek; and the clearness, flexibility, and power of a voice over which his command is supreme." And again he is pictured in one of his loftiest moods, as "not now calmly bestriding, but fairly caught in the wind of his spirit"--on which occasion his face is seen brightened into full and fierce meaning," and his eye shines "like a sunken pit of fire suddenly disclosed," and his arms vibrate "like sharp tongues of flame in the blast," and his brow darkens "like iron in the shade," and his form "dilates to his dilating soul," and his voice is "now exalted to a harrowing shriek, and now sunk to a rasping and terrible whisper." So depicts him a countryman with the gift of the gab. Allowing for the "long metre" of its rhetorical bravura, the description is not without its points of vraisemblance to Brougham's physique, which indeed is that

of a man

Whom no one well can pass without remark:
Active and nervous in his gait; his limbs
And his whole figure breathe intelligence.

Brougham," said the Chief of the Clan North (ap. Ambr.), just twenty years since, "Brougham is no beauty; but his mug is a book in which men may read strange matHow ingeniously, too, when he had exhausted his quiver, would he bewail the pov-ters-and take him as he stands, face and erty of diction to meet the emergencies of figure, and you feel that there is a man of the theme, and declare that "never before," great energy and commanding intellect." never within his experience," ""never within Another and very different writer, Mr. Grant, once of "Random Recollections'" celebrity, memory of man," had he encountered any in a work of about the same date, says: atrocity, any malignity, any baseness, any "When Lord Brougham rises to speak, the scandal, at all approaching in character to this atrocity, this malignity, this baseness, stranger is so forcibly struck with his singuthis scandal. Words failed him-the dic- lar personal appearance, as to be altogether tionary was nonplussed--for in his hands-inattentive to the first few sentences of his

the plain truth would seem to be

A constrained hyperbole

speech. His lofty forehead-his dark complexion-his prominent nose-the piercing glare of his rolling eye-the scowl of his brow-the harshness of his features gene

so practiced was he in drawing a long-bow rally--the uproarious condition of his dark

[May,

gray hair, and his attenuated appearance al- on the sun, moon, and stars. He has gone together, cannot fail in the first instance to far to realize Voltaire's doctrine, that "il faut attract the eye and arrest the attention, to donner à son âme toutes les formes possible. the exclusion of any thought about what he | C'est un feu," continues Monsieur, "que is saying." "Did you notice his physiogno- Dieu nous a confié; nous devons le nourrir my?" wrote Francis Horner to a friend, de ce que nous trouvons de plus précieux. when Brougham was not yet out of his teens Il faut faire entrer dans notre être tous les "I am curious to know your observations modes imaginables, ouvrir toutes les portes on it." The physiognomy is now nearing de son âme à toutes les sciences et à tous the wear and tear of fourscore winters, and les sentiments; pourvu que tout cela n'entre its curiosa infelicitates challenge the observa- pas pêle-mêle, il y a place pour tout le tion of the curious more than ever. monde." Says the satirist of Men and Manners:

In this patchwork prosing-a thing of shreds and patches-it is not my aim to give any methodical résumé of his lordship's composite career, but merely to play at "touch and go" with the summa fastigia rerum. So before alluding to the specialities, in law and letters, of a "man so various," let me celebrate the general fact of his versatility itself. The same Francis Horner, just cited, in the same letter-referring to his "earliest friend," then ætat. 19, says: "Had you any conversation with Brougham? He is an uncommon genius of a composite order. . .; 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 as with the face, so with the mind more than a half century of years have given astonishing development to this characteristic. Eight-and-fifty years ago, there he was in print in the "Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society," enlightening the old Fellows (quorum pars magna he soon became) on the dark places of Op. tics--the same science which still absorbs and fascinates so much of his leisure at Cannes. Jurisprudence, mathematics, philosophy, history, biography, languages, criticism,--all have come within his ken, and none has come amiss. Whether he has mastered them, is another matter at the least he has so far rendered himself au fait of a liberal curriculum of studies, as to be at no loss when confronting acknowledged masters in the several departments, but ready at any moment to amble with them on their respective hobbies -whether with Bentham on the organic reform of law, or with Wellington on strategics, or with Sir Walter Scott on Border Minstrelsy, or with Romilly on the penal code, or with Liston on surgical manipulations, or with Southey on the claims of literature, or with Playfair on the calculus, or with Haydon on high art, or with Thiers on statecraft, or with Hamilton on ontology, or with Arago

What cannot Brougham do?-in him unite
Newton and Milton and the Stagirite-

...

(all in incredulous odi-ism, however; for the satirists adds in a foot-note: "It is the fashion to call Brougham a great man (I have heard him compared to Bacon); he might be one in St. Domingo. What has he done to deserve to be compared with any fourth-rate man of established reputation ?"). Another "satirical rogue" testifies thus far without irony, and all in good faith:

There was an orator of giant force,
That like a meteor ran a zig-zag course;
A mind to fathom Nature's secrets deep,
A voice that now fell soft as dropping snow,
That could the flaming bounds of space o'erleap;
And now was as a sting or sudden blow;
The poet's fancy, the logician's skill,
Persuasion, passion, irony at will,
Were his, &c.

And yet another satirist-made up of sterner
stuff-thus addresses the chancellor that
then was:

Illustrious Mime! whose philosophic soul

And flexile features top whatever rôle,
Cato last night, to-morrow Catiline.
Alike in Bobadil or Bottom shine,
Still when the fever ebbs, with some sly dose
Refresh the rage that for thy rising rose;
It skills not what the stimulus-bold rub-
New Catch, New Code-up College or up Club!
Now laud God's book, and now his church attack,
Fetch laws from Birmingham, from Grub-street
And notes on Paley mix with notes to Black;
Knights,

And damn the Negroes--so you dupe the Whites:

(the last couplet heaping together allusions to his lordship's parliamentary éloge (1832) of the Birmingham Union and its modus of political discussion, as contrasting favorably with the two universities-to his scheme of literary knighthood, familiar to readers of

Southey's Letters--and to his "soothing the ear of fraudful East India sugar-men," oblivious of his work on Colonial Policy). |

Of a verity his lordship surpasses Scrub
in the play, who, to Archer's notion that he
is simply a butler, scornfully replies: "Of a
Monday I drive the coach; of a Tuesday I
drive the plough; on Wednesday I follow
the hounds; on Thursday I dun the tenants ;
on Friday I go to market; on Saturday I
Ι
draw warrants; and on Sunday I draw beer."
Give his lordship these seven days in the
week, and multiply them unrelentingly by
the fifty-two weeks in the year, and still
would he, without taxing his memory, afflict-
ing his conscience, or losing his breath, name
you a new pursuit of his for every new mor-
row. Was für eine Mannigseitigkeit! Ex-
traordinary enough, indeed, to impel old Jer-
eme Bentham to write verse-very heavy
verse, but pronounced a jeu d'esprit (save
the mark!) by Dr. Bowring:

O Brougham! a strange mystery you are;
Nil fuit unquam sibi tam dispar :
So foolish and so wise-so great, so small-
Everything now-to-morrow nought at all.

Lord Stowell and Lord St. Leonards and
ever so many more law lords have been ac-
credited with the mot, that if Brougham only
knew a little about Chancery law, he would
know a little of everything. Allowing that
he is superficial, and can only wade in the
shallows of every sea of science, not dive into
the depths of any, how memorable never-
theless the energy and industry with which he
dared to sweep all the strings, to run through
the entire gamut, to sound the diapason of
"all possible knowledge." The "gigantic
Brougham," Sydney Smith calls him, on the
occasion of his receiving the Great Seal;
'sworn in at twelve o'clock, and before six
has a bill on the table abolishing the abuses
of a court which has been the curse of the
people of England for centuries." Energy
and industry with a vengeance (on chan-
cery!). As Nestor exclaims of Hector in the
field-

Here, there, and everywhere, he leaves and takes ;
Dexterity so obeying appetite,

That what he wills, he does; and does so much,
That proof is call'd impossibility.

One notable example out of many is on record, in illustration of Brougham's labors in his prime-how, after a long day's toil and trouble in Westminster Hall, he joined the Commons and mingled in their debates until

two of the morning-then home (to sleep?
perchance to dream?-not a bit of it; but)
to work up an article for the Edinburgh till
Westminster Hall opened again-again busy
before "my luds" until Mr. Speaker was
seated, when wig and gown were doffed for
another tilt in the Commons, lasting to an
hour that would have broken the heart of a
Brotherton-and then, and not till then, in-
dulging himself in a snooze.

The same fever in his blood it is, that in
later years has made him so forward to take
part in whatever agitates society at home or
abroad. He loves dearly to have a finger
(and more than one, if practicable) in the pie,
whatever its contents, and whether baked in
the domestic oven or of foreign structure.
How much is Punch indebted to this lively
Who
disposition in the "man so various!"
can forget Richard Doyle's multiform por-
traitures of him, as the Citizen of the World,
clad in every known diversity of costume
sanctioned by the usages of the two hemi-
spheres-or who can overpraise the subtle
humor which presents to us in each success-
ive avatar, alter et idem? The cue to this
masquerade was given by his lordship's ad-
venturous endeavor to become a naturalized
Frenchman, under the Republic of '48.
Forthwith there appeared an imitative peti-
tion in his name, addressed to the Chief Rab-
bi in London, and praying to be admitted-
of course according to the usual initiatory
"modus operandi"--into the fellowship of
the Hebrew nation; and the favorite joke of
the day was to invent some similar "begging-
letter," urging his pretensions to identifica-
tion with all people, nations, and language--
red, black, and white, with whom to mingle
as he might. He might have sat, at this pe-
riod, for Benedict's portrait as taken by Don
Pedro, when the Don records the fancy his
friend "hath to strange disguises; as to be
a Dutchman to-day; a Frenchman to-mor-
row or in the shape of two countries at
once, as, a German from the waist down-
ward, all slops, and a Spaniard from the hip
upward, no doublet." All this metaphoric-
ally, of course; for his lordship's fast attach-
ment to one pattern in what the Don calls
"slops," is a stock jest with vulgar imperti-

nence.

Very little space is left to note his status in law and literature. His place in the former jealous, exacting profession, was inevitably affected by the versatility just described. Law asks for the sum total of a man's attentions, and this man vouchsafed her only a fractional remainder. While Scarlett, and

by agony, its most earnest intonations finding vent in an angry cracked voice. The bagpipes--that is what he plays upon at his best, according to his implacable critic. Well, at any rate the performer has squeezed some excellent music out of his instrument-good enough, at least, to gather a throng of listeners round him, not all of them devoid of ear; and generally speaking the listeners have waited to hear out the last note, not omitting free gifts of both pudding and praise, wherewith to pay the piper.

Copley, and Sugden trod the narrow way --an amalgam of hard and splintery senwith patient toil and ultimate triumph, tences-its vivacity consisting in twitches of Brougham rambled in by-ways and cross-sarcasm, its highest springs being inspired paths whithersoever he would. While he did devote himself, indeed, to rolls and records, his devotion was too intense, too resolutely concentrated, not to yield results which it would cost a dull plodder ten times the labor to realize. But he never took first class honors (the woolsack notwithstanding) in the courts of Themis. In the estimate of the people, however, he was, at the bar, the pearl of barristers; and on the woolsack, for a brief space, the facile princeps of Chancellors. And in his peculiar line, perhaps he has never been surpassed, if equalled, in his tactics as an advocate-in his swift insight into the bearings of a cause, his indomitable "pluck" in making the worse appear the better reason, his presence of mind in meeting a sudden emergency, his dogged determination in worming out a latent fact, his impromptu adroitness in covering defective evidence with rhetorical drapery, and dazzling a confused juryman's vision with sallies of wit, and patching up a rent in the case with "three-piled velvet" sophistry, and supplying the place of valid testimony or strong right by impetuous iteration, and withering sarcasm, and vehement abuse, and unscrupulous browbeating. To apply the words of another: "Il saisissait vite toutes choses, devinait ce qu'il ne savait pas, décidait et tranchait là où il en avait besoin, avait la réplique heureuse et prompte, l'assertion résolue et hautaine, le front hardi comme le verbe et sans cette pudeur native dont quelques honnêtes scrupuleux n'ont jamais pu se défaire." Brougham had mighty little trouble "se défaire" of that.

As an author, too, he has occupied a large share of public attention. His Statesmen of the Reign of George III., his Lives of Voltaire, Robertson, Black, &c., his Dialogues on Instinct, his illustrations of Paley's Natural Theology, his multifarious contributions to the Edinburgh Review and to scientific periodicals, all bespeak more or less of nervous talent, though there is an obvious haste in his movements, an impatience of delay, which warns the reader to be wary. His style may not be that of a master-may not rank with the rich fulness of one great model, or the picturesque coloring of a second, or the vivid conciseness and pregnant simplicity of a third-but surely it merits another kind of appraisement than that volunteered by Savage Landor, who describes it as made up of hard vulgarity and intractable distortion

As a man by way of finale — Lord Brougham has, times and ways without number, been allowed by his foremost foes, when the battle raged at the fiercest too, to be a "good fellow"-a bijou of a phrase (though of the rough diamond kind of bijouterie) for epitomising a hearty English compliment. His friends find him a fast friend; his political opponents come to love him when they find out in private what a joyous companion he is, how wealthy in table-talk, how fresh in feeling, how frank in utterance, how sagacious, how witty, how thoroughly entertaining. "Me and Hairy Brumm's great freens," quoth The Shepherd to North, twenty years ago-" and batin yoursell, sir, he's the grandest companion I ken, whether in a mixed company o' ordinary dimensions, or at a twa houn' crack." And again, thirty years ago, said the same idealized Bucolical to the same immortal Præses, "Hairy Brumm's just a maist agreeable enterteenin fallow, and I recollect sittin' up wi' him a' nicht, for three nichts rinnin', aboot thretty years syne, at Miss Ritchie's hottle, Peebles. O man, but he was wutty, wutty-and bricht thochts o' a maist extraordinar' kind met thegither, frae the opposite poles o' the human understanding. I prophesied at every new half-mutchkin, that Mr. Brumm would be a distinguished character, and there he is, you see Leader o' the Opposi tion." Never mind what he is now, in Parliament; out of it he is the same genial creature that hob-a-nobbed (by hypothesis) with Jamie Hogg at the "hottle" in Peebles.

Long may he retain the strength and spirits to play the same part, in the evening of a life which has played so many parts. Long may we hear of him setting the table in a roar at home; and, abroad, slaying the wild boar of Cannes,or joining in any bracing exercise the place and season afford.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

WITH A PORTRAIT.

FRENCH AUTHORS.-M. De Mirecourt, who | is writing the history of his literary French cotemporaries, gives some of them the credit of having very eccentric habits. Scriby, he says, rises at five every morning, and works till noon without any interval. Balzac retired to rest every evening at six, rose at midnight, and wrote till nine in the morning, and after breakfasting resumed his pen till three, when a walk of two hours, and dinner at five, brought him again to his bedtime. Alfred de Musset, when asked for "copy" for the