All Curates hope to draw Great Prizes. I am surprised it does not strike the mountaineers how very much the great emoluments of the church are flung open to the lowest ranks of the community. Butchers, bakers, publicans, schoolmasters, are perpetually seeing their children elevated to the mitre. Let a respectable baker drive through the city from the west end of the town, and let him cast an eye on the battlements of Northumberland House; has his little muffin-faced son the smallest chance of getting in among the Percies, enjoying a share of their luxury and splendour, and of chasing the deer with hound and horn upon the Cheviot Hills? But let him drive his alum-steeped loaves a little further, till he reaches St Paul's Churchyard, and all his thoughts are changed when he sees that beautiful fabric; it is not impossible that his little penny-roll may be introduced into that splendid oven. Young Crumpet is sent to school-takes to his books-spends the best years of his life, as all eminent Englishmen do, in making Latin verses-knows that the crum in crumpet is long, and the pet shortgoes to the university-gets a prize for an Essay on the Dispersion of the Jews-takes orders-becomes a bishop's chaplain-has a young nobleman for his pupil-publishes a useless classic, and a serious call to the unconverted-and then goes through the Elysian transitions of prebendary, dean, prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and power. FRANCIS JEFFREY. FRANCIS JEFFREY, who exercised greater influence on the periodical literature and criticism of this century than any of his contemporaries, was a native of Edinburgh, born on the 23d of October 1773. His father was a depute-clerk in the Court of Session. After education at the High School of Edinburgh, two sessions at the university of Glasgow, and one session-from October to June 1791-92-at Queen's College, Oxford, Mr Jeffrey studied Scots law, and passed as an advocate in 1794. For many years his income did not exceed £100 per annum, but his admirable economy and independent spirit kept him free from debt, and he was indefatigable in the cultivation of his intellectual powers. He was already a Whig in politics. His literary ambition and political sentiment found scope in the Edinburgh Review, the first number of which appeared in October 1802. We have quoted Sydney Smith's account of the origin of this work; the following is a statement on the subject made by Jeffrey to Mr Robert Chambers in 1846: I cannot say exactly where the project of the Edinburgh Review was first talked of among the projectors. But the first serious consultations about it-and which led to our application to a publisher-were held in a small house, where I then lived, in Buccleuch Place (I forget the number). They were attended by S. Smith, F. Horner, Dr Thomas Brown, Lord Murray (John Archibald Murray, a Scottish advocate, and now one of the Scottish judges*), and some of them also by Lord Webb Seymour, Dr John Thomson, and Thomas Thomson. The first three numbers were given to the publisher-he taking the risk and defraying the charges. There was then no individual editor, but as many of us as could be • This gentleman, distinguished for his liberality and munificence, died in Edinburgh, on the 7th of March 1859, aged eighty-one. 77 got to attend used to meet in a dingy room of Willison's printing-office, in Craig's Close, where the proofs of our own articles were read over and remarked upon, and attempts made also to sit in judgment on the few manuscripts which were then offered by strangers. But we had seldom patience to go through with this; and it was soon found necessary to have a responsible editor, and the office was pressed upon me. About the same time, Constable (the publisher) was told that he must allow ten guineas a sheet to the contributors, to which he at once assented; and not long after the minimum was raised to sixteen guineas, at which it remained during my reign. Two-thirds of the articles were paid much higher-averaging, I should think, from twenty to twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number. I had, I might say, an unlimited discretion in this respect, and must do the publishers the justice to say that they never made the slightest objection. Indeed, as we all knew that they had-for a long time, at least-a very great profit, they probably felt that they were at our mercy. Smith was by far the most timid of the confederacy, and believed that, unless our incognito was strictly maintained, we could not go on a day; and this was his object for making us hold our dark divans at Willison's office, to which he insisted on our repairing singly, and by back-approaches or different lanes. He had also so strong an impression of Brougham's indiscretion and rashness, that he would not let him be a member of our association, though wished for by all the rest. He was admitted, however, after the third number, and did more work for us than anybody. Brown took offence at some alterations Smith had made in a trifling article of his in the second number, and left us thus early; publishing at the same time, in a magazine, the fact of his secession-a step which we all deeply regretted, and thought scarcely justified by the provocation. Nothing of the kind occurred ever after.' Jeffrey's memory had failed him as respects the first number of the Review, for Brougham wrote six of the articles in that number. In the Autobiography of the latter, it is stated that Jeffrey's salary as editor was for five or six years £300 a year, and afterwards £500. We have always understood that it was £50 each number from 1803 to 1809, and afterwards £200 each number. The youth of the Edinburgh reviewers was a fertile source of ridicule and contempt, but the fact was exaggerated. Smith, its projector, was thirty-one; Jeffrey, twenty-nine; Brougham, Horner, and Brown, twenty-four each-'excellent ages for such work,' as Henry Cockburn, the biographer of Jeffrey, has remarked. The world was all before the young adventurers! The only critical journal of any reputation was the Monthly Review, into which Mackintosh, Southey, and William Taylor of Norwich, occasionally threw a few pages of literary or political speculation, but without aiming at such lengthy disquisitions or severe critical analysis as those attempted by the new aspirants. The chief merit and labour attaching to the continuance and the success of the Edinburgh Review fell on its accomplished editor. From 1803 to 1829 Mr Jeffrey had the sole management of the Review; and when we consider the distinguished ability which it has uniformly displayed, 383 and the high moral character it has upheld, together with the independence and fearlessness with which from the first it has promulgated its canons of criticism on literature, science, and government, we must admit that few men have exercised such influence as Francis Jeffrey on the whole current of contemporary literature and public opinion. Besides his general superintendence, Mr Jeffrey was a large contributor to the Review. The departments of poetry and elegant literature seem to have been his chosen field; and he constantly endeavoured, as he says, 'to combine ethical precepts with literary criticism, and earnestly sought to impress his readers with a sense both of the close connection between sound intellectual attainments and the higher elements of duty and enjoyment, and of the just and ultimate subordination of the former to the latter.' This was a vocation of high mark and responsibility, and on the whole the critic discharged his duty with honour and success. As a moral writer he was unimpeachable. In poetical criticism he sometimes failed. This was conspicuously the case as regards Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose originality and rich imaginative genius he would not or could not appreciate. To Montgomery, Lamb, and other young authors he was harsh and unjust. Flushed with success and early ambition, Jeffrey and his coadjutors were more intent on finding fault than in discovering beauties, and were more piqued by occasional deviation from old established conventional rules than gratified by meeting with originality of thought or traces of true inventive genius. They improved in this respect as they grew older, and Jeffrey lived to express regret for the undue severity into which he was occasionally betrayed. Where no prejudice or prepossession intervened, he was an admirable critic. If he was not profound, he was interesting and graceful. His little dissertations on the style and works of Cowper, Crabbe, Byron, and Scott (always excepting the review of Marmion, which is a miserable piece of nibbling criticism), as well as his observations on moral science and the philosophy of life, are eloquent and discriminating, and conceived in a fine spirit of humanity. He seldom gave full scope to the expression of his feelings and sympathies, but they do occasionally break forth and kindle up the pages of his criticism. At times, indeed, his language is poetical in a high degree. The following glowing tribute to the universal genius of Shakspeare is worthy of the subject: On the Genius of Shakspeare. Many persons are very sensible of the effect of fine poetry upon their feelings, who do not well know how to refer these feelings to their causes; and it is always a delightful thing to be made to see clearly the sources from which our delight has proceeded, and to trace the mingled stream that has flowed upon our hearts to the remoter fountains from which it has been gathered; and when this is done with warmth as well as precision, and embodied in an eloquent description of the beauty which is explained, it forms one of the most attractive, and not the least instructive, of literary exercises. In all works of merit, however, and especially in all works of original genius, there are a thousand retiring and less obtrusive graces, which escape hasty and superficial observers, and only give out their beauties to fond and patient contemplation; a thousand slight and harmonising touches, the merit and the effect of which are equally imperceptible to vulgar eyes; and a thousand indications of the continual presence of that poetical spirit which can only be recognised by those who are in some measure under its influence, and have prepared themselves to receive it, by worshipping meekly at the shrines which it inhabits. In the exposition of these there is room enough for originality, and more room than Mr Hazlitt has yet filled. In many points, however, he has acquitted himself excellently; particularly in the development of the principal characters with which Shakspeare has peopled the fancies of all English readers-but principally, we think, in the delicate sensibility with which he has traced, and the natural eloquence with which he has pointed out, that familiarity with beautiful forms and images-that eternal recurrence to what is sweet or majestic in the simple aspects of nature that indestructible love of flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters-and soft airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, and moonlight bowers, which are the material elements of poetry-and that fine sense of their undefinable relation to mental emotion, which is its essence and vivifying soul—and which, in the midst of Shakspeare's most busy and atrocious scenes, falls like gleams of sunshine on rocks and ruins-contrasting with all that is rugged and repulsive, and reminding us of the existence of purer and brighter elements-which he alone has poured out from the richness of his own mind without effort or restraint, and contrived to intermingle with the play of all the passions, and the vulgar instant the proper business of the scene, or appearing course of this world's affairs, without deserting for an to pause or digress from love of ornament or need of repose; he alone who, when the subject requires it, is always keen, and worldly, and practical, and who yet, without changing his hand, or stopping his course, scatters around him, as he goes, all sounds and shapes of sweetness, and conjures up landscapes of immortal fragrance and freshness, and peoples them with spirits of glorious aspect and attractive grace, and is a thousand times more full of imagery and splendour than those who, for the sake of such qualities, have shrunk back declined the discussion of human duties and cares. from the delineation of character or passion, and More full of wisdom, and ridicule, and sagacity, than all the moralists and satirists in existence, he is more wild, airy, and inventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the poets of all regions and ages of the world; and has all those elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his high faculties so temperately, that the most severe reader cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason, nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or ingenuity. Everything in him is in unmeasured abundance and unequalled perfection; but everything so balanced and kept in subordination as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions are given with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as merely to adorn without loading the sense they accompany. Although his sails are purple, and perfumed, and his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not less, but more rapidly and directly, than if they had been composed of baser materials. All his excellences, like those of Nature herself, are thrown out together; and instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his fruits crushed into baskets, but spring living from the soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth; while the graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the wide-spreading roots on which they depend, are present along with them, and share, in their places, the equal care of their creator. Of the invention of the steam-engine, Jeffrey remarks, with a rich felicity of illustration: It has become a thing stupendous alike for its force and its flexibility-for the prodigious power which it can exert, and the ease, and precision, and ductility with which it can be varied, distributed, and applied. The trunk of an elephant, that can pick up a pin or rend an oak, is as nothing to it. It can engrave a seal, and crush masses of obdurate metal before it draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift up a ship of war like a bauble in the air. It can embroider muslin and forge anchors, cut steel into ribbons, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves. How just, also, and how finely expressed, is the following refutation of a vulgar error that even Byron condescended to sanction-namely, that genius is a source of peculiar unhappiness to its possessors: Men of Genius generally Cheerful. legal brethren, elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and he then resigned the editorship of the Review into the hands of another Scottish advocate, MR MACVEY NAPIER (17771847). In 1830, on the formation of Earl Grey's ministry, Jeffrey was nominated to the first office and sat for some time in parliament. In 1834 he under the crown in Scotland-Lord Advocategladly exchanged the turmoil of politics for the duties of a Scottish judge; and as Lord Jeffrey, he sat on the bench until within a few days of his death, on the 26th of January 1850. As a judge he was noted for undeviating attention, uprightness, and ability; as a citizen, he was esteemed and beloved. He practised a generous though unostentatious hospitality, preserved all the finer qualities of his mind undiminished to the last, and delighted a wide circle of ever-welcome friends and visitors by his rich conversational powers, candour, and humanity. The more important of Jeffrey's contributions to the Edinburgh Review were collected by him in 1844, and published in four volumes, since reprinted in one large volume. We add part of a review of Campbell's Specimens of the British Poets, 1819. The Perishable Nature of Poetical Fame. Men of truly great powers of mind have generally been cheerful, social, and indulgent; while a tendency to sentimental whining or fierce intolerance may be ranked among the surest symptoms of little souls and inferior intellects. In the whole list of our English poets we can only remember Shenstone and Savage— two certainly of the lowest-who were querulous and discontented. Cowley, indeed, used to call himself, melancholy; but he was not in earnest, and at anyrate was full of conceits and affectations, and has nothing to Next to the impression of the vast fertility, compass, make us proud of him. Shakspeare, the greatest of and beauty of our English poetry, the reflection that them all, was evidently of a free and joyous tempera-recurs most frequently and forcibly to us in accompanyment; and so was Chaucer, their common master. ing Mr Campbell through his wide survey, is the perishThe same disposition appears to have predominated in able nature of poetical fame, and the speedy oblivion Fletcher, Jonson, and their great contemporaries. The that has overtaken so many of the promised heirs of genius of Milton partook something of the austerity of immortality. Of near two hundred and fifty authors, the party to which he belonged, and of the controversies whose works are cited in these volumes, by far the in which he was involved; but even when fallen on greater part of whom were celebrated in their generation, evil days and evil tongues, his spirit seems to have there are not thirty who now enjoy anything that can retained its serenity as well as its dignity; and in his be called popularity-whose works are to be found in private life, as well as in his poetry, the majesty of a the hands of ordinary readers, in the shops of ordinary high character is tempered with great sweetness, genial booksellers, or in the press for republication. About indulgences, and practical wisdom. In the succeeding fifty more may be tolerably familiar to men of taste or age our poets were but too gay; and though we forbear literature; the rest slumber on the shelves of collectors, to speak of living authors, we know enough of them to and are partially known to a few antiquaries and say with confidence, that to be miserable or to be hated scholars. Now, the fame of a poet is popular, or is not now, any more than heretofore, the common lot nothing. He does not address himself, like the man of those who excel. of science, to the learned, or those who desire to learn, but to all mankind; and his purpose being to delight and to be praised, necessarily extends to all who can receive pleasure, or join in applause. It is strange, and somewhat humiliating, to see how great a proportion of those who had once fought their way successfully to distinction, and surmounted the rivalry of contemporary envy, have again sunk into neglect. We admit that nothing but what is good can be permanently have great deference for public opinion; and readily popular. But though its vivat be generally oracular, its and while we would foster all that it bids to live, we pereat appears to us to be often sufficiently capricious; would willingly revive much that it leaves to die. The very multiplication of works of amusement necessarily withdraws many from notice that deserve to be kept in remembrance; for we should soon find it labour, and not amusement, if we were obliged to make use of them all, or even to take all upon trial. As the materials of enjoyment and instruction accumulate around us, more and more must thus be daily rejected and left to waste : for while our tasks lengthen, our lives remain as short as time itself is flying swiftly away. This superfluity and ever; and the calls on our time multiply, while our abundance of our treasures, therefore, necessarily renders much of them worthless; and the veriest accidents may, in such a case, determine what part shall be preserved, and what thrown away and neglected. When an army | is decimated, the very bravest may fall; and many poets, Innumerable observations of this kind, remarkable for ease and grace, and for original reflection, may be found scattered through Lord Jeffrey's critiques. His political remarks and views of public events are equally discriminating, but of course will be judged of according to the opinions of the reader. None will be found at variance with national honour or morality, which are paramount to all mere party questions. In his office of literary critic, when quite impartial, Lord Jeffrey exercised singular taste and judgment in making selections from the works he reviewed, and interweaving them, as it were, with the text of his criticism. Whatever was picturesque, solemn, pathetic, or sublime, caught his eye, and was thus introduced to a new and vastly extended circle of readers, besides furnishing matter for various collections of extracts and innumerable schoolexercises. The chief defect of his writing is the occasional diffuseness and carelessness of his style. He wrote as he spoke, with great rapidity and with a flood of illustration. At the bar, Jeffrey's eloquence and intrepidity were not less conspicuous than his literary talents. In 1829 he was, by the unanimous suffrages of his worthy of eternal remembrance, have been forgotten, minister a sister of Dr Robertson the historian. merely because there was not room in our memories for all. By such a work as the Specimens, however, this injustice of fortune may be partly redressed-some small fragments of an immortal strain may still be rescued from oblivion—and a wreck of a name preserved, which time appeared to have swallowed up for ever. There is something pious, we think, and endearing, in the office of thus gathering up the ashes of renown that has passed away; or rather, of calling back the departed life for a transitory glow, and enabling those great spirits which seemed to be laid for ever, still to draw a tear of pity, or a throb of admiration, from the hearts of a forgetful generation. The body of their poetry, probably, can never be revived; but some sparks of its spirit may yet be preserved, in a narrower and feebler frame. When we look back upon the havoc which two hundred years have thus made in the ranks of our immortals—and, above all, when we refer their rapid disappearance to the quick succession of new competitors, and the accumulations of more good works than there is time to peruse-we cannot help being dismayed at the prospect which lies before the writers of the present day. There never was an age so prolific of popular poetry as that in which we now live; and as wealth, population, and education extend, the produce is likely to go on increasing. The last ten years have produced, we think, an annual supply of about ten thousand lines of good staple poetry-poetry from the very first hands that we can boast of-that runs quickly to three or four large editions-and is as likely to be permanent as present success can make it. Now, if this goes on for a hundred years longer, what a task will await the poetical readers of 1919! Our living poets will then be nearly as old as Pope and Swift are at present, but there will stand between them and that generation nearly ten times as much fresh and fashionable poetry as is now interposed between us and those writers; and if Scott, and Byron, and Campbell have already cast Pope and Swift a good deal into the shade, in what form and dimensions are they themselves likely to be presented to the eyes of their great-grandchildren? The thought, we own, is a little appalling; and, we confess, we see nothing better to imagine than that they may find a comfortable place in some new collection of specimens-the centenary of the present publication. There -if the future editor have anything like the indulgence and veneration for antiquity of his predecessor-there shall posterity still hang with rapture on the half of Campbell, and the fourth part of Byron, and the sixth of Scott, and the scattered tithes of Crabbe, and the three per cent. of Southey; while some good-natured critic shall sit in our mouldering chair, and more than half prefer them to those by whom they have been superseded! It is an hyperbole of good-nature, however, we fear, to ascribe to them even those dimensions at the end of a century. After a lapse of two hundred and fifty years, we are afraid to think of the space they may have shrunk into. We have no Shakspeare, alas! to shed a never-setting light on his contemporaries; and if we continue to write and rhyme at the present rate for two hundred years longer, there must be some new art of short-hand reading invented, or all reading must be given up in despair. HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM. Of the original contributors to the Edinburgh Review, the most persevering, voluminous, and varied was HENRY BROUGHAM, also, like Jeffrey, a native of Edinburgh. His family, however, belonged to the north of England. The father of the future Lord Chancellor came to reside in Edinburgh, and lodged with the widow of a Scottish This lady had a daughter, and Eleanora Syme became the wife of Henry Brougham, younger of Brougham Hall in Westmoreland. The first offspring of the marriage was a son, born September 19, 1778, and named Henry Peter. The latter name he seems early to have dropped. At an early age, Henry Brougham was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, and his contemporary, Lord Cockburn, in his Memorials of his Time, relates a characteristic anecdote, typical of Brougham's future career. Brougham,' he says, 'made his first public explosion in Fraser's (the Latin) class. He dared to differ from Fraser, a hot, but goodnatured old fellow, on some small bit of Latinity. The master, like other men in power, maintained his own infallibility, punished the rebel, and flattered himself that the affair was over. But Brougham reappeared next day, loaded with books, returned to the charge before the whole class, and compelled honest Luke to acknowledge he had been wrong. This made Brougham famous throughout the whole school. I remember having had him pointed out to me as the fellow who had beat the master.' From the High School, Brougham entered the university, and applied himself so assiduously to the study of mathematics, that in 1796 he was able to contribute to the Philosophi cal Transactions a paper on Experiments and Observations on the Inflection, Reflection, and Colours of Light. In 1798 he had another paper in the same work, General Theorems, chiefly Porisms in the Higher Geometry. Thomas Campbell, who then lived in Edinburgh, said the best judges there regarded these theorems, as proceeding from a youth of twenty, 'with astonishment.' Having finished his university course, Henry Brougham studied for the Scottish bar, at which he practised till 1807. In 1803, besides co-operating zealously in the Edinburgh Review, he published an elaborate work in two volumes, An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, in which he discussed the colonial systems of America, France, Spain, and England. His unwearied application, fearlessness, and vehement oratory made him distinguished as an English barrister, and in 1810 he entered the House of Commons, and joined the Whig opposition. There he rose to still greater eminence. His political career does not fall within the scope of this work, but it strikingly illustrates the sagacity of his friend, Francis Horner, who said of him in January 1810: 'I would predict that, though he may very often cause irritation and uncertainty about him to be felt by those with whom he is politically connected, his course will prove, in the main, serviceable to the true faith of liberty and liberal principles.' In the course of his ambitious career, Henry Brougham fell off from his early friends. We have no trace of him in the genial correspondence of Horner, Sydney Smith, or Jeffrey. Politicians neither love nor hate, according to Dryden; but though Brougham could not inspire affection, and was erratic and inconsistent in much of his conduct, amidst all his personal ambition, rashness, and indiscretion, he was the steady friend of public improvement, of slave abolition, popular education, religious toleration, free trade, and law reform. Here were ample grounds for public admiration; and when in 1830 he received the highest professional advancement, The discoveries already made in this branch of science are truly wonderful, and they proceed upon the strictest rules of induction. It is shewn that animals formerly still known; but it also appears that species existed, and existed on the globe, being unknown varieties of species even genera, wholly unknown for the last five thousand years. These peopled the earth, as it was, not before the general deluge, but before some convulsion long prior to that event had overwhelmed the countries then dry, and raised others from the bottom of the sea. In these curious inquiries, we are conversant, not merely with the world before the flood, but with a world which, before the flood, was covered with water, and which, in far earlier ages, had been the habitation of birds, and beasts, and reptiles. We are carried, as it were, several worlds back, and we reach a period when all was water, and slime, and mud, and the waste, without either man lions and elephants, and river-horses, while the water or plants, gave resting-place to enormous beasts like was tenanted by lizards the size of a whale, sixty or seventy feet long, and by others with huge eyes having shields of solid bone to protect them, and glaring from a neck ten feet in length, and the air was darkened by flying reptiles covered with scales, opening the jaws of the crocodile, and expanding wings, armed at the tips with the claws of the leopard. No less strange, and yet no less proceeding from induction, are the discoveries made respecting the former state of the earth, the manner in which those animals, whether of known or unknown tribes, occupied it, and the period when, or at least the way in which, they ceased to exist. by his elevation to the office of Lord Chancellor, its viscera, and its general habits. Sometimes the inand the name of the great commoner, Henry vestigation in such cases proceeds upon chains of reasonBrougham, was merged in that of Lord Brougham ing where all the links are seen and understood; where and Vaux, the nation generally felt and acknow- the connection of the parts found with other parts and ledged that the honours were well won, and with habitudes is perceived, and the reason understood worthily bestowed. Lord Brougham held theas that the animal had a trunk, because the neck was Great Seal for four years, retiring with his party because its teeth were imperfect for complete masticashort compared with its height; or that it ruminated, in November 1834. This terminated his official tion. But frequently the inquiry is as certain in its life, but he afterwards laboured unceasingly as a results, although some links of the chain are concealed law reformer. His withdrawal from office also from our view, and the conclusion wears a more empirleft him leisure for those literary and scientific ical aspect-as gathering that the animal ruminated, pursuits which he had never wholly relin- from observing the print of a cloven hoof; or that he quished. Subsequent to that period he brought had horns, from his wanting certain teeth; or that he out a variety of works-Memoirs of the States- wanted the collar-bone, from his having cloven hoofs. men of the Reign of George III.; Lives of Men of Letters and Science in the Reign of George III.; Political Philosophy; Speeches, with Historical Introductions, and Dissertation upon the Eloquence of the Ancients; Discourse on Paley's Natural Theology; Analytical View of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia; Contributions to the Edinburgh Review; and several pamphlets on Law Reform. A cheap collected edition of these works, in ten volumes, was issued in 1855-6. In his youth, Brougham is said to have written a novel, and to have tried his hand at poetry! There is, perhaps, no department of science or literature into which he did not make incursions. He only, however, reaped laurels on the fields of forensic and senatorial eloquence. As an essayist or critic, he must rank below his youthful associates, Francis Jeffrey and Sydney Smith. His liveliest contribution (which he never openly acknowledged) was his critique on Lord Byron's Hours of Idleness. In the first twenty numbers of the Review he wrote eighty articles! Brougham's style is generally heavy, verbose, and inelegant; and his time was, during the better part of his life, too exclusively devoted to public affairs to enable him to keep pace with the age, either in exact scientific knowledge or correct literary information. In his sketches of modern statesmen, however, we have occasionally new facts and letters, to which ordinary writers had not access, illustrative of interesting and important events. Lord Brougham died at Cannes (where he had built a villa, and resided part of every year), on the 7th of May 1868. Seven years before this, in his eighty-fourth year, the veteran statesman commenced writing notices of his Life and Times, which were published in three volumes, 1871. These volumes abound in errors and inaccuracies, easily accounted for by the great age of the writer; his vanity and prejudices are also very conspicuous; but the work has the merit of disclosing many of the springs of political movements, and includes a number of valuable letters and other papers. Studies in Osteology. From Discourse on Natural Theology. A comparative anatomist, of profound learning and marvellous sagacity, has presented to him what to common eyes would seem a piece of half-decayed bone, found in a wild, in a forest, or in a cave. By accurately examining its shape, particularly the form of its extremity or extremities (if both ends happen to be entire), by close inspection of the texture of its surface, and by admeasurement of its proportions, he can with certainty discover the general form of the animal to which it belonged, its size as well as its shape, the economy of Peroration of the Speech at Conclusion of the Trial of Let me call on you, even at the risk of repetition, never to dismiss for a moment from your minds the two great points upon which I rest my attack upon the evidence: first, that the accusers have not proved the facts by the good witnesses who were within their reach, whom they had no shadow of pretext for not calling; and, secondly, that the witnesses whom they have ventured to call are, every one of them, irreparably damaged in their credit. How, I again ask, is a plot ever to be discovered, except by the means of these two principles? Nay, there are instances in which plots have been discovered through the medium of the second principle, when the first had happened to fail. When venerable witnesses have been brought forward-when persons above all suspicion have lent themselves for a season to impure plans-when no escape for the guiltless seemed open, no chance of safety to remain-they have almost providentially escaped from the snare by the second of those two principles; by the evidence breaking down where it was not expected to be sifted; by a weak point being found where no provision, the attack being unforeseen, had been made to support it. Your Lordships recollect that great passage-I say great, for Lord Brougham is said to have written this peroration fifteen times over, in order to render it as perfect and effective as possible. |