sound teaching
that is, upon evidence, judicial establishments and codification.
Brougham thanks his 'dear grandpapa,' and Bentham offers further
supplies to his 'dear, sweet little poppet.'[337] But when the orator
had spoken Bentham declares (9th February 1828) that the mountain has
been delivered of a mouse. Brougham was 'not the man to set up' simple
and rational principles. He was the sham adversary but the real
accomplice of Peel, pulling up lies by the root to plant others equally
noxious.[338] In 1830 Bentham had even to hold up 'Master Peel' as a
'model good boy' to the self-styled reformer. Brougham needs a dose of
jalap instead of pap, for he cannot even spell the 'greatest happiness
principle' properly.[339] Bentham went so far as to write what he fondly
took to be an epigram upon Brougham:

'So foolish and so wise, so great, so small,
Everything now, to-morrow nought at all.'[340]

In September 1831 Brougham as Chancellor announced a scheme for certain
changes in the constitution of the courts. The proposal called forth
Bentham's last pamphlet, _Lord Brougham displayed_.[341] Bentham laments
that his disciple has 'stretched out the right hand of fellowship to
jobbers of all sorts.'[342] In vain had Brougham in his speech called
Bentham 'one of the great sages of the law.' Bentham acknowledges his
amiability and his genius; but laments over the untrustworthy character
of a man who could only adopt principles so far as they were subservient
to his own vanity.

Another light of the _Edinburgh Review_, who at this time took Brougham
at his own valuation, did an incidental service to Bentham. Upon the
publication of the _Book of Fallacies_ in 1825, Sydney Smith reviewed or
rather condensed it in the _Edinburgh Review_, and gave the pith of the
whole in his famous _Noodle's Oration_. The noodle utters all the
commonplaces by which the stupid conservatives, with Eldon at their
head, met the demands of reformers. Nothing could be wittier than
Smith's brilliant summary. Whigs and Radicals for the time agreed in
ridiculing blind prejudice. The day was to come when the Whigs at least
would see that some principles might be worse than prejudice. All the
fools, said Lord Melbourne, 'were against Catholic Emancipation, and
the worst of it is, the fools were in the right.' Sydney Smith was glad
to be Bentham's mouthpiece for the moment: though, when Benthamism was
applied to church reform, Smith began to perce