ROUGHAM._]

Brougham was called to the Scottish bar at the age of twenty-one, having
already given proof of brilliant ability and rare versatility at the
University of Edinburgh. He was the youngest and most prolific of the
original writers in the _Edinburgh Review_, then a very powerful organ
of whig opinion, and his contributions to it ranged over some thirty
years after its first appearance in 1802. He was already twenty-nine
when he joined the English bar in 1808, and though he never rivalled
Eldon as a lawyer or Scarlett as a persuasive advocate, he soon became
an acknowledged master of the highest forensic eloquence. His fame was
already established by his argument before parliament against the orders
in council when he entered the house of commons in 1810. There his
passionate oratory and power of invective made him the most formidable
of party speakers, and it was said that Canning alone could face him on
equal terms in debate. Except during four years, 1812-16, when he was
out of parliament, his prodigious energy and versatility were the
greatest intellectual force on the liberal side throughout all the
political conflicts under the regency and the reign of George IV. His
speeches embraced every question of foreign, colonial, or domestic
policy, and it may truly be said that no salutary reform was carried
during that period of which he was not either the author or the active
promoter. The suppression of the slave-trade which had revived after the
great war, the liberty of the press, the cause of popular
education--these were among the almost innumerable objects, outside the
common run of politics, and largely philanthropic, to which he devoted
his restless mind, before it was engrossed for a while by parliamentary
reform. There, as we have seen, he showed a moderation which had not
been expected of him, nor is it too much to say that, both as a leader
of the bar and as chancellor, he made good his claim to be the greatest
of law reformers.

His famous speech of February 7, 1828, had quickened the germs of many
legal improvements carried out in a later age, and the four years of his
chancellorship actually produced great constructive amendments of the
law, such as the institution of the central criminal court and the
judicial committee of the privy council. Other reforms, in bankruptcy,
criminal law, and equity, were mainly due to his initiative, and it was
he who originated the county courts, though his bill w