the effects of bitter irony. He proceeds, then, to apply a logical vice to Canning's arguments, from which they come out battered and sorely bruised. He next assails them with the tremendous figure of "Reductio ad absurdum;" he pushes them to cer tain imaginary consequences, and, while doing so, he uses now veritable irony, and sinks, the while, his voice into a rasping whisper, which goes on in its own piercing current like a separate existence, amid the roars of laughter from all sides which it has provoked. And then he restores silence like that of the grave, when the raising of his voice proclaims that he is about to grasp the quickest and hottest of his thunderbolts, that of invective. His brow flushes, his eye is unveiled to its pit-like depths, which are found to be filled with flame; his arms vibrate and tremble, not with weakness, but with excess of power; his lips quiver; he has become, in the sight of all, an Accusing Spirit. His words against tyrants abroad, and their sycophants at home, seem echoes of the trump of doom; and his enemies, cowering, shivering, yet admiring, with the enthusiasm of despair, are tempted to murmur out the awful words, "Fire goes before him, and it is very tempestuous round about him." This picture may appear, now-a-days, somewhat exaggerated; but it is a mere translation into our own language and imagery of descriptions by such writers as Mudie, Jonathan, and others, who were eye-witnesses of the effects Brougham's oratory produced in the days of Queen Caroline and the Holy Alliance. No man on the arena of Parliament ever wielded like him the weapons of sarcasm, red-hot argument, and terrible invective, weapons reminding you of those which Moloch's gloomy and desperate imagination sought to grasp "infernal thunder," "Tartarean sulphur," and "black fire and horror." The defects of this extraordinary man are not less conspicuous than his merits. His thinking, as hinted above, is seldom philosophical. A dash of the lawyer mingles with it all. Even in his discussions on the being of a God, prefixed to Paley, we see little real depth or subtlety of reflection. He is always, indeed, an acute and clear, but seldom a profound thinker. One proof of this is, that very few of his single thoughts are ever quoted. Long, diffuse, eloquent, and energetic passages abound in his speeches: little compact sentences, like vials full of essence, are scarce. Compare him, in this respect, with Burke, whose pages sparkle with maxims, like a January heaven with stars. Subjects never rise upon Brougham's mind as wholes-as globes, shall we say?— at once completely round, and minutely accurate in detail; they come in series and in parcels-in swift series, indeed, and in parts and parcels exceedingly numerous, and distinctly marked. Not a mere special pleader, not a mere nisi prius barrister, he does not sufficiently look abroad into universality. He seldom sees the large in the little, the infinite in the finite, and the dew-drops of his fancy have no suns swimming in them. But, in truth, of such dew-drops there are few. Brougham has not much either of fancy or imagination. His pictorial power is often vividly discovered, but it is rough, stern, literal painting, reminding you of Crabbe; never of the high and idealizing sort. Take, for example, his famous description in the "Edinburgh Review" of the witnesses against Queen Caroline. Here is a touch which recalls Crabbe very forcibly to your mind: "Pimps of hideous aspect, whose prurient glance could penetrate through the keyhole of rooms where the rat shared with the bug the solitude of the deserted place." This is true, but does not startle the imagination, or give it any thrilling suggestion. The rat and bug do not pair very well, and rather disgust than terrify. How differently Bulwer manages his toad in the dungeon of the house of Arbaces the Egyptian! How differently would any great artist describe, we shall suppose, a vault below ground in the Inquisition, where, after the first deluge of darkness has passed off the eye of the newly-come victim, the dim and dubious light, which remains imprisoned like himself, discovers the huge, fat, slimy monsters who have fed on darkness for years, the spiders, and scorpions, and centipedes, hastening to their prey; first surrounding him with a circle of loathsome eyes, and then crawling over his limbs with horrid wrigglings, and hisses, and contortions of unearthly gladness, till the wretch shrieks as at the touch of demons, and maddens or dies in unseen and single-handed contest with those accursed and unutterable abortions of his prison-house ! Yet we grant that, as Brougham has a strong love for powerful and harrowing pictures, he often succeeds in them. He has, with vehement literalness, with almost Dantesque gusto, described the debasing and degrading practice of flogging in the army, the distresses of the manufacturing classes, the miseries of the down-trodden poor, and the horrors of negro-slavery. His geniusif genius we grant him to have-must not be painted with dove's eyes and wings, mildly moving over subsiding waters; nor as an eagle, soaring to the sun, and taking in the broad earth below at one imperial glance; but as a raven, bent and brooding over carcases, with a look as intense, keen, and narrow, as the object over which he flaps his wings is naked, hideous, and putrid. Brougham, in fact, has little sense of the beautiful. We defy any of his warmest admirers to point out one passage in his speeches or writings which can be called elegant or truly refined, or in which gentleness mitigates strength resting on it, like "The soft shadow of an angel's wing" vulsively. His style, too, is essentially a spoken style-better to hear than to read; and which, to those who have not heard him, can never, we understand, give any full conception of the effects and impressions he has produced. The man is there, but is dimly mirrored. This disadvantage, however, he only shares with some of the greatest of orators. Demosthenes' speeches, in spite of Brougham, are exceedingly flat and dull. Fox's are strong in reasoning, but singularly poor and mediocre in language. Erskine's are fine in passages, but as wholes are either lame or stilted. Brougham, indeed, although inferior on the written page to what he seemed in the spoken declamation, is one of the few whose triumphant speeches are legible to all, after the prestige and excitement of their occasions have passed away. And, as we mean to show afterwards, many parts of them are in composition admirable, and justify us in calling him a great writer as well as a great orator. Ere looking to his speeches in detail, we have something to say about his character as a reviewer and a critic. In this respect he has gone through a singular change. The truculent satirist and fierce libeller, the man who wrote the reviews of Walker's "Defence of Order," Byron's "Hours of Idleness," upon a marble column or a rock of granite. Burke is often graceful and refined, and could be always so, if he pleased. Brougham seldom tries to be, and never succeeds. He can argue closely, flog fiercely, flutter "Volscians in Caroli," include his adversaries in a merciless mesh of satire and irony till they writhe again; but he cannot soothe any mind, melt any heart, or beautify by idealizing any subject. His mark has been a certain severe simplicity and stern sub-"Don Pedro Cevallos," &c. ; who praised no limity, and to that he has but hardly attained, and is only a demi-Demosthenes or demi-Dante, after all. His style requires a passing notice. It is a style the reverse of classical-much as he speaks of classical models—if classical mean polished, finished, and rounded. It is a rough, ragged, roundabout style, nearly as unwieldy as John Foster's, with long sentences stuffed with parentheses, and as full of folds as a sleeping boa-constrictor. It has, of course, much energy and fire, but seldom those compact, shining sentences, those meteoric images, flashing over the page, those brief and sudden felicities, which mark the mind of genius. Even in its noblest passages there is an air of heaving effort. It is a great stream; but the waters are troubled, swollen, and beating against their banks. It is a colossal Laocoon; but Laocoon wrestling with serpents, and uplifting "clamores horrendos" to the sky. It is the effort and the agony of Power not weakness; but still it is an agony and an effort. Brougham, in no sense of the term, understands what ease is. He can be powerful, passionate, fierce, and overwhelming; but is all this consciously and often con one if he could help it, and treated principalities and powers, peers and poets, as if they were broken-down hacks, created chiefly for the purpose of proving the mettle of his whip, became latterly, in the "Edinburgh Review," on the whole, one of the mildest and milkiest of critics, and showered indiscriminate floods of laudation upon most of his contemporaries, including even many of his political and personal foes. We must say that we prefer him greatly in the former character. He was in it truer to himself. He has not subsided gracefully into a panegyrist. His praise seems sometimes to sound hollow, and is often clumsy in its expression. His "Gallery of Statesmen" is, of course, interesting, from the names it includes, from the vast amount of information it contains, from the prolific fields over which it conducts us; but is not trustworthy, as a whole, in its judgments. Vigorous as many of the portraits are, there is none of them of which you say, This is a perfect likeness-a daguerreotype of the man. Like most critics, he has his pets and fondlings, and one or two, at least, whom he exempts from his lavish praise, he hardly treats with justice. He seems, for instance, greatly to overrate the is done." Yes, his work is done; but not such work as Burke has performed. What schoolboy, in his first exercise, could not have compared a great calamity to the gathering of a cloud? and this is all Demosthenes has done. But Burke has taken up this every-day figure, and has, by elaboration and genius, expanded it into one of the noblest of pictures. With Demosthenes it is a commonplace of the flattest_sort-with Burke it is a glorious image. He has impregnated the cloud with poetry; and those acing meteor," and "blackening the horizon," &c.-serve to deepen the suspense, to magnify the skyey preparation, and to swell the grandeur of the burst of the whirlwind of fire which it at length pours over the plains of the Carnatic. How many a preacher had prated, and prates still, about the rising of the sun, the glory of the sunrise, &c.; but it was reserved for Jeremy Taylor to compare his rays to the horns of glory which appeared on the head of Moses when he came down from the Mount. Thus Genius often siezes upon a hackneyed thought or image, and surprises it into new and unheard-of brilliance. It" touches" a barren hill, and it smokes. The dull stone becomes a lump. of gold in its radiance. Grecian school of eloquence, in comparison with that of modern times. In his "Inaugural Discourse to the Students of Glasgow," he says, "Addison may have been pure and eloquent, Dryden airy and nervous, Taylor witty and fanciful, Hooker weighty and various; but none of them united force with beauty, the perfection of matter with the most refined and chastened style." And then he speaks of the "vast superiority of the chaste, vigorous, manly style of the Greek orators." We just advise the student who has read this to take up the best Eng-epithets to which Brougham objects-" menlish translation of Demosthenes, and to compare it, for thought, for imagery, for richness, for suggestive matter, with Jeremy Taylor's "Sermons," or with Bacon's "Essays," or with Barrow's "Sermons," or with Milton's "Areopagitica," and conscientiously declare the result of the comparison. Away with chatter about style! Whether does the Greek or any one of these Englishmen discover more mind, or thrill you with profounder emotion? Can you without much difficulty read Demosthenes through? Can you avoid recurring again and again to the moderns? What passage in the Greek orator is there to be named beside Milton's description of the Eagle in the "Areopagitica?" It may be said, indeed, that Demosthenes suffers from translation; yet why should he suffer more than Homer or the Bible? And yet you can read both these, or rather cannot help reading them, even in rude and poor translations; but we defy you to read Demosthenes, in the best rendering, without tedium or disgust. Or, shall we propose another test still? Let the student read Brougham's own speeches, which are meant to be formed upon the Grecian models, along with Burke's, which he accuses of diffuseness and amplification; and, waiving all comparison as to the genius and soul of the two men, as one from which Brougham would probably shrink, we ask, which of the two has produced the more interesting and readable compositions?-over which series of speeches do you yawn least, or does your eye sparkle most clearly? We have no fear as to the result, even with the most devoted Grecian alive. Brougham, as we hinted in a former paper, has carped at Burke's picture of the Cloud," in his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, and prefers to it the single word of Demosthenes "As a cloud" applied to the passing away of a danger in the history of Athens. He says, "Demosthenes uses but a single word, and the work We did not hear Lord Brougham deliver this Inaugural Discourse; but we remember that, coming to Glasgow College shortly after, we found many of the students raving about it; and not a few whom it had set to read Demosthenes, with a resolute determination to admire him. The result was rather amusing than edifying. Some had the honesty to confess that they saw little beauty or merit in his orations, but the humility to grant that it might be their own fault. Others read on, muttering "celestial," while all the time it was evident that they thought the heaven rather a dry and dreary one, and were sick of it in their hearts. Others (like Drs. Hutton and Gregory over their dish of snails) were waiting anxiously till one of their fellows, or till some person of reputation, should cry out, "Don't you think these speeches, eh? a little green, eh ?" But Brougham's influence was then paramount, and ten years had to elapse ere one quite qualified, by scholarship as well as by taste, (De Quincey,) ventured, in "Tait's Magazine," openly to avow himself a doubter in the plenary inspiration of Demosthenes, and an asserter of the superiority of some of the moderns. Next to Demosthenes, Lord Erskine is Brougham's great favorite. Now, that a num- | ber of sparkling, splendid passages are to be found in Erskine's speeches, is admitted on all hands. But, in the first place, as Hazlitt justly remarks, his "general matter is quite flat and dead." And, 2dly, the gorgeous passages, which occur now and then, are the very reverse of those Brougham admires so much in the Grecian orators, They are flowery, diffuse, exaggerated, and, had they occurred in Burke, would have been called by him extravagant. Erskine's real forte lay in those animated impromptus, those passionate retorts, which broke from him in the course of his pleadings, and which proved him, if not a man of genius, a man of high spirit, ready intellect, and great moral courage. Brougham, we repeat, excels most in severity of criticism. Even his collected speeches contain nothing so racy, so thoroughly hearty, so sincere and pointed, as some of his early diatribes in the "Edinburgh Review." We remember, with especial gusto, his assaults on poor George Rose, on the author of "Calumnies against Oxford," and the running fire of commentary that he kept up for so many years upon the bad ministries which preceded the rise of Canning. He went to this kind of work with a savage satisfaction-like a cannibal rushing to his feast of blood. He hacked and hewed at his adversaries till they were down, and then he trampled them in the mire; raising now subdued chuckles, and now loud shouts of laughter over their discomfiture. It was said of Canning, that he never made a speech without making an enemy; so Brougham never wrote a review without either making a new foe or increasing the exasperation of an old one. We have been told, upon good authority, that he often forced Jeffrey to insert some of his savage papers sorely against his will. This was true of his bitter ironical attack on Walker's "Defence of Order." Mr. Walker, afterwards Professor of Humanity in Glasgow, if not a great poet, was a most amiable and accomplished man; but Brougham, finding the poetry mediocre, and knowing the author to be a Tory, and connected with the revenue, made him the object of his vengeance, although the more amiable Jeffrey tried to get him to withhold the article. Now, every author of any mark expects attacks, and laughs at them when they come. They are just left-handed certificates of his eminence. It was otherwise in those days, when a cutup in the "Edinburgh" was equivalent to literary ruin, if not also to pecuniary bankruptcy. Brougham, too, was the author of the review of the "Hours of Idleness," and might thus be called Byron's stepfather. He tickled the slumbering lion by the hair, and he roused, and rose, and began to roar for revenge; and seldom was there heard "So musical a discord-such sweet thunder." Brougham and Byron, unlike Jeffrey and Byron, were never reconciled; but continued to hate each other mortally, till the close of the poet's life. They were too like each other, not indeed in genius, but in ambition and in fierce passions, to become friends. Once or twice, too, Brougham, we believe, went out of his way to assail some of the finest poets of the time; such as James Montgomery, Coleridge, Wordsworth. As might have been expected from his prosaic nature and pecular training, his criticisms on their poetry, although clever and caustic in style and manner, are in substance cold, unjust, and worthless. In our next paper we mean to glance over and characterize some of the principal of those LAW-PAPERS ON FIRE—his speechesas well as to consider the moral purpose of his history, and to express our general judgment as to his future place in the great gallery of ages. From Bentley's Miscellany. GABRIELLE D'ESTREES. FROM THE CAUSERIES DU LUNDL M. NIEL, librarian to the Minister of the Home Department, a student of history and an amateur of art of considerable taste and judgment, has been publishing, ever since 1848, a succession of Portraits or Crayons of Celebrated Persons of the Sixteenth Century. And here we are introduced to kings, queens, and kings' mistresses, who make already a folio volume. M. Niel has been careful not to admit into his collection any thing which might not be authentic and thoroughly original, and he has confined himself to one style of portraits-to those, namely, which are drawn in crayons of different colors by the different artists of the sixteenth century. Drawings which were executed in red chalk and black and white leadpencil, were then called crayons, says M. Niel; they were tinted and touched up in such a manner as to give them the appearance of paintings. These drawings, in which a red shade predominates, and which are faithful productions, are chiefly by unknown artists, and appear to be of the pure French school. These artists must be viewed from the light of humble companions and followers of the chroniclers, for they only sought in their rapid sketches to give a faithful notion of the face according to their ideas of it; the desire of producing a close resemblance alone occupied their mind; they never dreamt of adopting any foreign mode of treatment of their subject. Francis the First opens the volume with one at least of his brilliant mistresses, namely, the Countess de Chateaubriand. Henry the Second, who is giving his arm to Catherine de Medicis and to Diane de Poitiers, is placed next to him; then we have two portraits of Mary Stuart when quite young, and before and after her widowhood. In this style of drawing the men in general appear rather to advantage, while, on the contrary, it requires a strong effort of imagination to invest many of the women's portraits with that delicacy of expression and freshness of beauty which the artist nevertheless intended to convey to the mind of the beholders. There are two sketches of Charles the Ninth, at twelve years old, and again between eighteen and twenty, which are taken from nature, and seem actually endowed with animation. Then there is Henry the Fourth, younger and fresher than we are accustomed to see him; it is Henry of Navarre before his beard became gray; there is also a portrait of his first wife, Marguerite de France, in the prime of her beauty; but she is so much disguised by her toilet and buried in her ruffle, that it is necessary to be perfectly acquainted with the charms she possessed to feel at all sure that this doll-like figure could ever have been attractive. Gabrielle d'Estrées, who stands next in order, and looks quite stiff and imprisoned in her rich toilet, would not be appreciated without the aid of the short memoir which M. Niel has affixed to each of the portraits, and which is prepared with much care and erudition. The date of her birth is not well known, and consequently we are ignorant how old she was when she died, so suddenly, in the prime of her youth and beauty. M. Niel imagines that she was born somewhere about 1571 or 1572, which would make her about twentyeight at the time of her death. She was the daughter of a woman not famous for her purity of conduct, and came of a race remarkable for its gallantries, and about which little mention has been made. Madame Gabrielle is the fifth of six daughters, all of whom created a sensation in the world. Her brother was the Marquis de Coeuvres, afterwards the Maréchal d'Estrées. He was a man of much penetration and shrewdness, a gay fellow, and so clever and intriguing, that he made all the warriors and negotiators appear blockheads. One of her sisters was Abbesse de Maubuisson, whose unbridled conduct rendered her |