ncyclopaedic ignorance, his
power, his great fame in the country, and the prestige which his
connection reflected on the Review, all made him a personage with whom
it would have been most imprudent to quarrel. Yet the position in
which Mr. Napier was placed after Brougham's breach with the Whigs,
was one of the most difficult in which the conductor of a great organ
could possibly be placed. The Review was the representative, the
champion, and the mouthpiece of the Whig party, and of the Whigs who
were in office. Before William IV. dismissed the Whigs in 1834 as
arbitrarily as his father had dismissed the Whigs in 1784, Brougham
had covered himself with disrepute among his party by a thousand
pranks, and after the dismissal he disgusted them by asking the
new Chancellor to make him Chief Baron of the Exchequer. When Lord
Melbourne returned to power in the following year, this and other
escapades were remembered against him. "If left out," said Lord
Melbourne, "he would indeed be dangerous; but if taken in, he would
simply be destructive." So Brougham was left out, Pepys was made
Chancellor, and the Premier compared himself to a man who has broken
with a termagant mistress and married the best of cooks. Mr. Napier
was not so happy. The termagant was left on his hands. He had to
keep terms with a contributor who hated with deadly hatred the very
government that the Review existed to support. No editor ever had such
a contributor as Brougham in the long history of editorial torment
since the world began. He scolds, he storms, he hectors, he lectures;
he is for ever threatening desertion and prophesying ruin; he exhausts
the vocabulary of opprobrium against his correspondent's best friends;
they are silly slaves, base traitors, a vile clique "whose treatment
of me has been the very _ne plus ultra_ of ingratitude, baseness, and
treachery." He got the Review and its editor into a scrape which shook
the world at the time (1834), by betraying Cabinet secrets to spite
Lord Durham. His cries against his adversaries are as violent as
the threats of Ajax in his tent, and as loud as the bellowings of
Philoctetes at the mouth of his cave. Here is one instance out of a
hundred:--

"That is a trifle, and I only mention it to beg of you to pluck up
a little courage, and not be alarmed every time any of the little
knot of threateners annoy you. _They want to break off all kind of
connection between me and the Edinburgh Re