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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 precipice then 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and Penalties met with so discouraging a fortune in the House of Lords, that it was, after the third reading, finally withdrawn.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 successful 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

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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, commendatorybut 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

untiring sharer. In the case of some of them, such as the abolition of colonial slavery, the amendment of the criminal law, and the improvement of the destructive and demoralizing poor-laws, both wisdom and humanity demanded the reform. His speeches upon these subjects, even if they remained alone, instead of being merely instances of his continuous and consistent effort to make his influence beneficial to the nation, would amply prove him to have been earnest, outspoken, and enlightened, in performance of the legislative ́ duties of his brief official life. But he had, at the same time, judicial duties to perform; and it is in reference to his competency to these that detraction has been busiest against his fame. We think it quite probable that he was less deeply learned in the technicalities and precedents of law than many of his predecessors had been, but he was a master of its principles, and he made up by prodigious toil and care for any deficiencies. He gave, moreover, more hours in the day, and more days, than had been usual to the court, and by this means, and by his unequaled quickness and activity of mind together, he left not a " single appeal unheard, nor one letter unanswered." In dispensing the extensive patronage of his office, he had the rare merit of doing nothing that the malignancy of spite could found a censure or a cavil on, whilst he left, on quitting power, more than one glad and grateful home, made happy by his unexpected kindness.

Lord Brougham remained in office little more than four years. His subsequent position in the Upper House has been that of an independent peer. During that long portion of the intervening time in which his activity in Parliament was unabated, there was sometimes a purpose to be served by representing him as one who had abandoned and opposed his former views, and had been, in fact, without any obvious or sufficient motive, guilty of that very tergiversation with which he charged Canning, in the memorable scene between them during the debate on Catholic Emancipation, in 1823. But when we look at the particulars on which it is attempted to substantiate this sweeping charge, they are found to be contemptibly inadequate to any such design; the facts arrayed against him showing, not that he has proved a traitor

to any of the great principles of liberty and progress, or to any momentous policy, that he had ever advocated earnestly in earlier years, but that he has not chosen to be bound by the shibboleth of any of the parties in the state. His opposition to the Whig ministry under Lord Melbourne, in which the charge originated, began reluctantly; and, as he himself proclaimed, at the conclusion of a masterly and eloquent defense, wrung from him by an imputation of the kind within the House

"Only began, as every man in the country knew, and as those slanderous assailants alone

willfully forgot, when the government took a new line against reform of Parliament, and other reforms; and when on that, and on their

extravagant civil list, and their Canada Bills, and their slave-question, they had compelled him to oppose them, if he did not mean to abandon all his most sacred and most constantly avowed principles and feelings upon the whole policy of the state. These things were quite notorious-they were facts, and even had dates, which at once dispelled the whole charges made by willful fabrications out of doors, and at length, with an indiscre tion to which great wits are too subject, brought forward by a cabinet minister in that House."

Since his emancipation from the toils of office, in 1834, his lordship has engaged in a career of literature which, at any previous time, must have been, even to his unexampled industry, impracticable. It is true that the greater portion of his "Discourse of Natural Theology" was written whilst he held the Great Seal, but, amidst the cares that pressed upon him, "it was impossible to finish the work." The revision and conclusion of this philosophical discourse was one of the first fruits of subsequent leisure. The edition of Paley's treatise on the same subject, with scientific notes and illustrations, in the preparation of which Sir Charles Bell was his colleague, and the " Dialogues on Instinct," were the next ripe produce of his lordship's versatile ability. these there has succeeded a considerable series of Lives of Philosophers, Men of Letters, and Statesmen of the time of George the Third-a collection of biographies, full of interesting information, and richly interspersed with criticisms which, themselves, occasionally need a passing word of comment. To the consideration of some of these productions we would gladly turn had we the space.

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In a few months his lordship will have entered on his eightieth year. Very recently he has gone back to investigations in physical science like those by which his celebrity in youth was won. As the memories of those studious days in the university of his native land, and of the intervening years of struggle and success upon the busiest of the world's stages, are recalled to him in his sweet southern home, it would be excusable, though his pulse should beat quicklier, and his cheek flush with pride, as he dwells on the remembrance of the labors he has gone through, the good he has accomplished, and the high example he has given to the world. In such a retrospect there should be a noble and sufficient consolation for the sorrows that have fallen to his lot. In advanced age, the bereavements of affection are less

keenly deplored, as we look forward to a more quickly forthcoming reunion with the departed objects of our care and love; and all the lesser cares and troubles of his long life, all the coldness and injustice, and calumnious misrepresentation that have occurred to him in his public course, how abundantly have they been counterbalanced by the indefatigable use which it has been permitted to him to make of his great natural endowments, either by himself originating, or by ably seconding others, in the protection given to the weak against the strong, in the freedom won for our colonial slaves, in the amelioration of our laws, and in the glorious boon of knowledge, the enlightener to myriads of our fellow-men, who, but for his ceaseless, splendid services, would have been doomed to linger on in hopeless intellectual darkness.

FEMALE COOPERAGE.

A NEW fashion always proves to be old. Trades change; and a female dress-maker is only a cooper working in crinoline. A "portrait of a lady" is now no more exhibited in a frame than the lady herself. There is this difference: in the picture the frame is visible; in the original it is hidden.

In England, at the present moment, ladies wear hoops in full dress at balls and dinners upon state occasions; at which times, also, men wear dress-coats and white waistcoats, if they like white waistcoats -or have them. In this country, a lady wears hoops at breakfast, in the street, calling, and shopping. It is not ascertained that she is ever unhooped. A laudable curiosity inquires, "Does the American lady sleep in hoops?"

There is reason, however, even in the extravagance of fashion: that is to say, every fashion has some good idea. Some attempt to please; some aim at beauty, grace, ease, propriety, or convenience. We do not say how often that effort is successful, or how frequently a fashion is beautiful or graceful.

One thing only is sure that to be entirely out of the fashion is to be neither beautiful nor graceful. It is in

vain to talk Iroquois in Greece. The finest poetry, the sublimest truth, are equally lost. Fashion, in dress, is the solvent that reconciles and adapts. To be out of fashion, is to be out of tune and time.

Now we shall let our betters speak of these mysteries. We said a new fashion is always old. There is nothing new in hoops, and we shall soon have patches. In 1715, petticoats had swollen to that degree, that a writer says: "If the men, also, adopted the old fashion of trunk-hose, a man and his wife would fill a whole pew in church."

In a letter to the " Spectator," we find the following account of hoops: "Since your withdrawing from this place, the fair sex are run into great extravagancies. Their petticoats which began to swell and heave before you left us, are now blown up into a most enormous concave, and rise every day more and more. In short, sir, since our women know themselves to be out of the eye of the Spectator,' they will be kept within no compass. You praised them a little too soon for the modesty of their head-dresses; for as the humor of a sick person is often driven out of one limb into another,

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