The force and vigour of Canning's mind were dis- at his assaults. In other times the country may have guised by its graces of endowment and accomplish- heard with dismay that 'the soldier was abroad.' It ment. The mind of Brougham may have appeared in will not be so now. Let the soldier be abroad if he comparison more athletic, because less polished-his will; he can do nothing in this age. There is another oratory more robust, because more rude. No two personage abroad-a personage less imposing-in the orators, not Fox and Pitt, Demosthenes and Cicero, eyes of some perhaps insignificant. The schoolmaster differed more in all that constitutes style or manner. is abroad; and I trust to him, armed with his Primer, Each will be preferred according to the taste and pre- against the soldier in full military array. I disapprove dilections of him who would rashly, if not presump- the appointment of the Duke of Wellington in a contuously, venture to decide between them. Persons of stitutional point of view; but as to any apprehension a judgment sufficiently comprehensive and sound, of violence to the liberties of my country, I have none. would perhaps hesitate and shrink from giving the I look upon such fears as groundless and futile.” palm. The reader and the hearer of their respective What was the public effect of these few words? It speeches might assign to Canning a wider and more was to teach the civil community confidence in moral happy range of endowment and acquirement. Can- opposed to physical force,—and in itself—to make his ning, perhaps, excelled all orators, in moulding to his baton of marshal drop from the hand of the military purpose the resources of his wit, his fancy, his various premier, or continue in it to be regarded as a mere scholarship-a metaphor, a simile, a classic allusion bauble by the people. The great moral dictum thus -with plastic and polished art. Brougham, inferior put forth was essentially popular, or democratic. The in what may be called the elegancies and ornaments shortsighted and vulgar partisans of aristocracy viewof literature, but with a still greater compass of read-ed it as calculated to foment popular insubordination. ing, or stock of knowledge, and of a kind more pro- Its effect, on the contrary, like all maxims and sentifound,-accomplishments equally various and more robust, rarely draws upon his memory, still more rarely upon the dazzling play of imagination or fancy, with which he is but scantily if at all provided. His speeches, therefore, will appear on the surface-compared with those of Canning-monotonously unrelieved; but only on the surface. He relies upon the inherent energies of his mind; but energies so versatile and elastic, that though the colouring be less diversified and engaging, there is a variety and a vigour of intellectual attitude and action, which does not merely engage or interest attention, but subjugates reason. In one particular he may be pronounced without an equal, the felicity with which he clothes a great moral dictum or moral truth in a phrase so expressive, familiar, and portable, that it is taken up and circulated with electric rapidity among the people. This is one of the arts or means which place him above all rivalry in his age for popular or public effect. His phrase of "the school-master abroad" was wafted, wherever the English language is spoken, to every corner of the earth. Every body felt and feels the point and apropos of that phrase. Those only who meditate and reason have appreciated its operation and value. The memorable passage in question is so short, that it may be cited even in this sketch. It had reference to the appointment of the Wellington Ministry on the death of Canning in 1828. "Field marshal the Duke of Wellington," said the orator, "may take the army-he may take the navy-he may take the great seal-he may take the mitre. I make him a present of them all. Let him come on with his whole force sword in hand against the constitution, and the English people will not only beat him back, but laugh VOL. XXXIII. AUGUST, 1833. 59 ments founded in natural right and accordant with universal reason, was to promote quiet government and social peace. It smoothed the public temper to the administration of the Duke of Wellington,-to be indiscreetly if not wantonly ruffled by himself. Lord Brougham's genius as an orator is essentially constituted and armed for attack. An adversary discharges at him an argument or phrase from which great execution has been expected by the speaker, and which tells with effect. He on his side takes it up, turns and views it for an instant like a weapon in his hand, slightly modifies or distorts it, and flings it back upon the antagonist, or upon the adverse ranks, with terrible execution. He cannot act merely upon the defensive. When he retorts he becomes an assailant. Even in speeches which should be of mere exposition, he cannot resist a passing personality or party thrust. His speech in 1817* on the state of the nation in its various relations, domestic and foreign, is perhaps his best specimen of luminous statement, various knowledge, and methodical order. The description of the virgin resources offered to English wealth and enterprise by the new states of South America is a noble strain of studied eloquence. It has an air of repose which he seldom seeks, and is uncongenial to him. The reader is no less instructed and delighted than the hearer was. His speech on law reform in 1828, confined to the administration of justice in the courts of common law, was a tour de force which may be called unparalleled for grasp of mind, variety of topics, and the achieve *It was published in a pamphlet form, doubtless with his own revision at the time. been, like theirs, imperfect; for Grecian scholarship had not, and perhaps has not, crossed the Tweed. He, about this time, in mature age took up the Greek clas ment of a six hours' harangue without lassitude on the part of the orator, or, more extraordinary still, on the part of an assembly far from patient of tedium or fatigue. But this famous speech, with the distinc-sics, with a natural preference of the orators, and he tions just stated, conveyed truths and theories only by unsteady glimpses, and threw out ideas absolutely crude. As an oration it may be safely pronounced inferior to that of 1817. ranged himself, under the banner of Demosthenes, with the fresh feelings and partial enthusiasm of a student and a partisan. His own oratory may be called intermediate. He has not the force and rapidity of touch and movement which characterize Demosthenes; he does not give such an image as that of the horse's mane (xi) like the Athenian, in a single word; or the simile of stroke at the close of a period. Still less does he venture upon a movement so dramatic and bold as the oath by the spirits of those who fought at Salamis, and Marathon, and Platea. He comes nearer to the Ciceronian copiousness and details; and if he be deficient in the grace and nobleness of style-the prodigious affluence of a mind supremely endowed and Neither the occasions, however, nor the designs which he proposed to himself were calculated to call forth his peculiar genius as an orator. He must have a party, a person, a prejudice, or an abuse on which to concentrate his fire, and the variety of his resour-the cloud (ep vepos), in two words by a calculated ces. His mission is to break adverse ranks, or carry a stronghold by storm. It is then that he brings to bear his logic, (technically speaking, in no great force, for his favourite, if not exclusive forms are, the disjunctive syllogism and dilemma;) the utmost compass of dialectics, sometimes undisguised, at other times latent, always vigorous and adroit, whether he has to lay bare a fallacy, or crush a weak pretence, or dis- accomplished-his redundant declamation does not lodge an antagonist and occupy his post, or retort upon him his own weapons; galling irony, personal mockery and malice, sarcasm, which might be called flaying, if the epithet were not chargeable with tautolo-ized Demosthenes when he called him to Irpor.* gy, in reference to the origin of the word; in fine, an under current of rhetoric or reasoning for his purpose, whatever the tone or course his declamation may as sume. lose its vigour in Ciceronian diffuseness. He has again much of that rushing resistless energy of language and delivery, by which a rival orator character This instinctive energy or impetus of mind and temperament leads to his besetting sin. It frequent ly becomes ungovernable. His attacks are then made with reckless temerity. He transgresses the bounds He gave, on a particular occasion, an affected, not of prudence, discretion, and even good taste. He to say a conceited preference to the Athenian over the mistakes intemperate violence for severe truth; and Roman orator. Addressing the students of the Uni- he is checked in his career with some peril to his versity of Glasgow, as Lord Rector, he permitted dignity. He picks up from the streets some vulgar himself to call Cicero "the Latin rhetorician" who personality, and throws it out as a sarcasm in debate "pours forth passages sweet indeed, but unprofitable, in such a manner as to compromise his dignity and fitted to tickle the ear without reaching the heart;" taste. He presumes rashly upon a forbearing, unand he follows up this rash censure with other disin-generously upon a weak adversary. He gives way to genuous flippancies, worthy only of a nisi prius lead-passion, pique, the vain glitter of a passing triumph. er, drawing without limit upon the simplicity of his hearers.* There are two ways of accounting for this marvellous indiscretion. First, he was anxious to impress upon the students the necessity of studying Greek-next, his own early education, in Greek, had He trusts to his rhetorical powers with desperate confidence, obtains a momentary success by the vigour and effect with which he launches fragments of decla mation and barbed sarcasms, almost indiscriminately, upon antagonists and allies, provokes a fearful recoil, and is so damaged that he finds it prudent temporarily to quit the field. These are general terms, but particu lars will readily suggest themselves to those who re gard the career of Lord Brougham with curiosity and interest;-and who does not? "Cicero's finest oration (says he), for matter and diction together, is in defence of an individual charged with murder; and there is nothing in the case to give it a public interest, except that the parties were of opposite factions in the state, and the deceased a personal as well as political adversary of the speaker. His most exquisite performance, in point of diction, was addressed to one The genius of Lord Brougham, as an orator, scarceman in palliation of another's having borne arms against him, in a war with a personal rival; even the Catilina-ly sustains itself-his defects or weaknesses as such, rians are principally denunciations of a single conspirator -the Philippics are abuse of a profligate leader-the Verrine orations are charges against an individual governor. But that 'deceased,' and 'adversary of the speaker,' was Clodius-the 'single conspirator' was Catiline-the 'profligate leader' was Antony-the ‘one man' was Cæsar -the 'individual governor' was the spoiler of a Roman province! * Eschines, whilst an exile at Rhodes, opened a school of eloquence. He took occasion to read to his pupils first his own oration against Ctesphan, upon which they be stowed great praise; next, that of Demosthenes in reply, and then the hearers set no bounds to their admiration. "Ah!" said he, "if you had but heard To Spor UTO,” which we will not venture to translate. are aggravated in him-as a politician. His minis-pending. The Whigs offered and he accepted the terial elevation is one of the misfortunes of his public chancellorship, in an evil hour for both. Those to life. It afforded him no opportunity to exercise or whom he had been, through his whole life, opposed, prove the extent of his capacity as an administrator, loaded him with suspicious eulogies. A marvellous and it has disenchanted the public of much of its con- change was soon visibly wrought upon him by the air fidence in his force of character. of the court, now breathed by him for the first time. He rebuked the march of reason and reform; he stigmatised the revolutionary measures and crude legislation of the House of Commons; he praised the constitutional spirit and legislative wisdom of the House of Lords, as the great corrective of the Commons which saved the nation,-all in a tone so unlike his former self, that his identity might be doubted in an age less familiar with political tergiversation. He was recognised for some time, expressly or tacitly, as leader of the Whig Opposition in the House of Commons. But by far the greater number of his parliamentary campaigns have been made by him as a sort of partisan chief in the war of freedom and the people's cause. His services, by being independent, were only the more prominent and signal; and that great section of the community, called reformers, looked up to him with admiration for his talents and trust in his zeal. Those however who sat round him or near him in the House of Commons, even after they admitted or acted with him as their leader, saw something to distrust or fear, partly in his temper, partly in the constitution of his mind-in his want of discretion-of selfcontrol-in his overweening pretensions, as they appeared to them, but which, in fact, were only on a level with the transcendent superiority of his powers. Minds of the common size have a sort of jealous fear of those which greatly overtop them. There was however something to alarm prudent politicians in his indiscreet sallies of temper and character in the spirit of reckless hazard with which he would venture into a position the most equivocal, doubtless from ambition, for he is above all meaner motives. His well-known journey with Lord Hutchin- | son to St. Omer is the great enigma of his public life; and it is truly astonishing to find it passed over not only unsolved but with entire silence, in his recent historic declamation on the troubles and trials of Queen Caroline. How any man could suppose-whatever his consciousness of the force of his mind, the authority of his character, the adroitness of his diplomacy-that he could manage interests so conflicting and antipathies so inveterate as those of George IV. and his unhappy queen, and this without compromising himself with the public, is likely to continue a mystery, since the solution so often asked of Lord Brougham continues to be refused by him. This passage in his public life deprived him of the confidence of the Queen, though she continued to avail herself of his ability as her counsel, and it would have impaired his popularity to this hour, if the people of England had not a placable temper and short memory. When the Ministry became Whig in 1830, an offer of the attorney-generalship from the Whig Premier is said to have been literally spurned by Lord Brougham. With his characteristic impatience and precipitancy he repudiated, in his place, all share in the arrangements * Edinburgh Review, April, 1838. He boasted the favour and practised the arts of a courtier with the zeal, but also with the awkwardness, of a neophite. An indiscreet familiarity, which escaped him in one of the highland towns of Scotland, was wafted over the border and reached the court, where it shocked the pride of caste and gave unpardonable offence. The ministry was dismissed in the person of the Premier, and Lord Brougham proclaimed in the Court of Chancery, that his own retirement was wholly his own choice and act. The chancellorship, doubtless, was offered him,-for he said it, but it must have been through some hollow and perfidious court intrigue and party artifice. The indiscreet and unfortunately familiar sally in the highlands, had given invincible disgust,—and a fresh indiscretion, from his ungovernable impatience and restlessness of character, had broken off the negotiation for the continuance of the Whig government. There are obliquities to which a mind of the first order can never bend itself; and happily for his fame, happily for the interests of reason, freedom, humanity, and his country, he retired first from office, soon after from public life, to reappear, after a year's repose, with the strength, the faculties, and principles of his best days, as if his genius had been steeped in the fountain of youth and liberty. Whether to avenge secret but suspected wrongs on the ministry and the court, or atone to the people for his momentary desertion, he has espoused every popular cause and popular principle, with a frankness and decision, from which it might be inferred and hoped that the politician has been abandoned by him for the nobler personage and more suitable mission of the great social reformer. He made a grievously false step when, knowing himself the child, he ceased to be the champion of the democracy of England; above all, when he changed the House of Commons for the House of Lords as the stage upon which he should act. In the House of Commons no ministry could withstand his opposition, as the leader of reform, within and without the house. Wielding in the House of Commons the force and spirit of reform, his harangues would be re- Brougham rather follows the current. Mirabeau seems sistless. In the House of Lords, where he can wake to have commanded a more extensive political horizon; no sympathy, his recent and finest declamations have and his foresight of the future course of individuals and been powerless. In the House of Commons his sar- incidents has been described by those who lived and casms would smite and rive as the lightnings of Jupiter acted with him as bordering on prophetic inspiration. Tonans. In the House of Lords they descend as mere Upon both may be charged the fault of embracing too bruta fulmina, or they receive the barren homage of much and meditating too little; but both had the art, party malice, and a laugh as the lazzi of Jupiter Scara- or more than the art, the rare endowment of acting mouche. When raised above his native element, like with electric power upon the social mass by a phrase the giant in the fable, his elevation deprives him of -or by a word-launched upon the ocean of mind. his giant strength. They stand out unrivalled in their day for public effect. The career of Lord Brougham presents curious points of resemblance and contrast, of disadvantage and superiority, to the three remarkable personages named in association with him at the commencement of this sketch. Like De Retz,-his personal ambition is tinged with vain-glory-he loves cabal for itself-his views are vast, but not sufficiently meditated, connected, and sagacious-sometimes even bordering on chimera-he is unfit for the court, and he is not content with the people he looks too much to the triumph of the hour; he appears to mistake ostentation for grandeur. But these resemblances are only in degree, and always with the superiority of intellectual and moral genius over the famous and eccentric cardinal. Another trait of more curious resemblance may be added. The cardinal, according to a recent character of him by a peer of France, converted the priest into a tribune, the pulpit into a rostrum, and thus harangued women and the people against the court and ministry. Lord Brougham converts the platform at Exeter 'Change, and negro apprenticeship, into means of raising the indignation of Quakers and the sex against recreant Whiggism. He has the personal ambition, without the selfishness of Shaftesbury. He has the restless inconstancy of that celebrated person, without being so steadily and fearlessly sagacious. His tergiversations are less numerous and flagrant than Shaftesbury's,-but he changes with less apropos. Like Shaftesbury, the resources of exercised and penetrating faculties, enabled him to dispense, as Chancellor, with experience and knowledge; like Shaftesbury, he seems to have had a sort of disdain of the Whigs of his day as a puny and stunted race of public men. Mirabeau is the nearest to a counterpart of him, in date, in position, and in character. The points of coincidence and opposition between them are more palpable and salient-as politicians, as men of letters, as great social reformers. His genius, like Mirabeau's, is grasping, eager, sanguine, and laborious. As a politician the Frenchman was in some points superior. His ambition was more steady, single purposed, and far-sighted.* Mirabeau would master events, whilst It was the great purpose of his life to become minister of a limited French monarchy, and the antagonist of Pitt, "J'aurais donné bien de la tablature à M. Pitt," was one of his dying expressions. The Englishman has his particular and more enviable superiorities-in his unsullied private life, the purity of his public character from all stain, not only of corruption but of cupidity, of the vulgar ambition to amass or display superior wealth. Mirabeau, without being sordid or rapacious, was notoriously corrupt. Brougham's pre-eminence is no less incontestable and conspicuous as a man of letters and as a social reformer. Mirabeau was unversed in the sciences; and all his writings, eight or nine in number, upon matters of social economy and legislation, are sunk into obli vion. He is remembered only for his speeches. Brougham gave early proof of scientific capacity; but Edinburgh, the place of his education, was not the school of mathematics; and his essays, printed-and forgotten-in the philosophical transactions, only prove his aptitude. He has since achieved a popular reputation for scientific acquirements. It is one which men of science, emphatically so called, would not and do not recognise, but it suffices for his noble mission of leading the march of education and knowledge, and proves the extraordinary compass, clearness, and rapidity of his apprehension. He converses and reads, seizes and fixes general principles, general laws, leading conclusions, and wields them with a dexterity and boldness which fill the multitude with admiration, but are far from imposing on men really scientific. These soon detect him in some loose phrase or palpable error, which proves that his science is information-not knowledge. His celebrated discourse, on the Objects and Pleasures of Science, would furnish more than one example. But that discourse could have been written by no other man living; and perhaps will never be rivalled as a porch by which to lead the popular mind into the temple of scientific truth and useful knowledge. His discourse on Natural Theology may be called the tenth Bridgewater Treatise. It however aims only at rivalry, not collision with its predecessors written by command. This tract has been charged with strenuous and artful advocacy, instead of the search of truth with pressing into its service what was long familiar to philosophic divines, and could be new only to the uninitiated: but, like most of its productions, it proves his wonderful vigour and versatility. He has written on various other subjects-some of ranean to the ocean, contains almost unrivalled stores temporary, others of permanent interest-but all having of the beautiful and the sublime. The victorious reference to the education, the liberty, the happiness career of Wellington and the British army, and the of the people,-down to his last essay in the Edin- succession of battles fought from one side of those rburg Review; which proves that, to be one of the most mountains to the other, satisfied the nation at large graphic, penetrating, and attractive of historians, it is that the Pyrenees were not really annihilated by the only necessary that he should control an excitable dictum of the sumptuous despot whom we have just temper, and private pique whether against individuals quoted. But when the result of those victories had or the press. opened the very heart of Europe to the spirit of British curiosity and research, the magnificent boundary line between France and Spain was practically unknown by the hordes who rushed abroad "in search of the Lord Brougham cannot, like Mirabeau, renounce his nobility at his discretion,* by merely calling himself a trader, and his ermine robe will continue to embarrass him more than the clerical gown did Swift. But picturesque." A few veteran campaigners, with ridif he renounce not alone aristocracy and the court, but the vulgar ambition of ministerial place and power, if he commit himself frankly with his mission as a great social reformer, he has before him a career the most truly noble by which ambition was ever tempted or genius inspired. Others may utter with a solemnity more mock-oracular ministerial common-places,-may tread with a pace more discreet the routine of office,-may amble more gracefully in the manège of a court; but to teach man the knowledge of his faculties, the lesson of his rights -to burst the chains of ignorance and prejudice asunder to break the spell by which the pride of caste or craft of an order would hold mankind in temporal or spiritual bondage,-to unmanacle reason and vindicate humanity—hæ tibi erunt artes-be these the accomplishments and achievements for which posterity shall hold in grateful honour the name of BROUGHAM! From the British and Foreign Review. 1. Sketches in the Pyrenees; with some remarks on don, 1837. 2. A Summer in the Pyrenees. By the Hon. JAMES ERSKINE MURRAY. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1837. Louis the Fourteenth's famous apophthegm, "Il n'y a plus de Pyrénées," unprophetic as it was in its figurative sense, might seem to have been taken in downright earnest, au pied de la lettre, by the mass of English; who, long since his time, swarmed over the Continent, century after century, trampling the snows of Alps and Apennines, yet leaving in neglect, if they could not stamp with obscurity, that splendid chain of mountains, which, stretching from the Mediter *He opened a shop with "Mirabeau, Marchand de Draps," written over it, to make him eligible to the Third Estate. dled bodies or shattered limbs, tottered at times to the baths of Barèges, to find relief for their gun-shot wounds; and occasional straggling victims of ennui or bile dropped for a week or two into the summer gaieties, or the eaux thermales, of Bagnères, St. Sauveur and Cauteretz. But the mob of self-expatriated English, were ignorant, even by description,* of the untrodden region in question, until the appearance of a work of fiction, the "Highways and Byways," popularized and eventually went far towards peopling, the scene of those stories with the author's countrymen. Many French and Spanish works were in existence, doing ample justice, both historical and poetical, to the beauties of the Pyrenees long before the publication of Mr. Grattan's tales. Ramond, the most profound and industrious of those who penetrated into the mysteries of those mountains, made his first excursions among them exactly fifty years ago; and the account of his scientific observations and hardy enterprises forms an admirable text-book for all who would trace his steps. The physiologists who proceeded him have given rather dry details of their proceedings: the measurement of the mountains, the analysis of the mineral waters in which they abound, and geological inquiries, were the chief purposes of most, from De Candale to Flamichon, at an interval of two centuries. Vidal, Reboul, Cassini, Darcet, De Marca, Bayen and De Diedrich are among the names best known in Connection with these subjects, besides De Plantade, who in 1748, at seventy years of age, died suddenly near the summit of the Pic du Midi, in the very act of measuring its proportions. More recent writers, such as Palasson, Charpentier and others who have guarded the anonymous, form altogether a fund on which an English author might also advantageously draw. But Ramond's volumes are those to which both reader and tourist may best have recourse for amusement and information, which is nevertheless occasionally conveyed in a pompous and long-winded style, out of keeping with the vigour of the writer's "I recollect the time when I rather thought that Barèges was the whole Pyrenees," says the authoress of the "Sketches" now before us, vol. i. p. 391. |