riously professed to be the friend of
his country, nor would his country have believed him if he had.
According to the shrewd remark of Fielding, the temporal happiness,
the civil liberties and properties of Europe, had been the game of his
earliest youth, and the eternal and final happiness of all mankind the
sport and entertainment of his advanced age. He would have fain
destroyed the freedom of his countrymen when in power, and their hope
of immortality when in disgrace. Neither can we find a parallel in the
history of that other Lord Chancellor of England, who has been
described by the poet as 'the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind.'
Two of the epithets would not suit Lord Brougham; and though he
unquestionably bore himself more honourably in the season of his
elevation than his illustrious predecessor, he has as certainly
employed himself to worse purpose in the time of his disgrace.

Unlike Lords Bolingbroke, Buckingham, or Bacon, Lord Brougham entered
public life a reformer and a patriot. The subject of his first
successful speech in Parliament was the slave-trade. He denounced not
only the abominable traffic itself,--the men who stole, bought, and
kept the slave; but also the traders and merchants,--'the cowardly
suborners of piracy and mercenary murder,' as he termed them, under
whose remote influence the trade had been carried on; and the
sympathies of the people went along with him. He was on every
occasion, too, the powerful advocate of popular education. Brougham is
no discoverer of great truths; but he has evinced a 'curious felicity'
in expressing truths already discovered: he exerted himself in sending
'the schoolmaster abroad,' and announced the fact in words which
became more truly his motto than the motto found for him in the
Herald's Office. He took part in well-nigh every question of reform;
stood up for economy, the reduction of taxes, and Queen Caroline;
found very vigorous English in which to express all he ought to have
felt regarding the Holy Alliance and the massacre at Manchester; and
dealt with Cobbett as Cobbett deserved, for doing what he is now
doing himself. There was always a lack of heart about Brougham, so
that men admired without loving him.

There were no spontaneous exhibitions of those noblenesses of nature
which mark the true reformer, and which compel the respect of even
enemies. Luther, Knox, and Andrew Thomson were all men of rugged
strength,--men of war, and born to cont