heir mutual
hostility."

And if he was capable of equity, Brougham was also capable of hearty
admiration, even of an old friend who had on later occasions gone into
a line which he intensely disliked. It is a relief in the pages of
blusterous anger and raging censure to come upon what he says of
Jeffrey.

"I can truly say that there never in all my life crossed my mind
one single unkind feeling respecting him, or indeed any feeling
but that of the warmest affection and the most unmingled
admiration of his character, believing and knowing him to be as
excellent and amiable as he is great in the ordinary, and, as I
think, the far less important sense of the word."

Of the value of Brougham's contributions we cannot now judge. They
will not, in spite of their energy and force, bear re-reading to-day,
and perhaps the same may be said of three-fourths of Jeffrey's once
famous essays. Brougham's self-confidence is heroic. He believed that
he could make a speech for Bolingbroke, but by-and-by he had sense
enough to see that, in order to attempt this, he ought to read
Bolingbroke for a year, and then practise for another year. In 1838 he
thought nothing of undertaking, amid all the demands of active life,
such a bagatelle as a History of the French Revolution. "I have some
little knack of narrative," he says, "the most difficult by far of all
styles, and never yet attained in perfection but by Hume and Livy;
and I bring as much oratory and science to the task as most of my
predecessors." But what sort of science? And what has oratory to do
with it? And how could he deceive himself into thinking that he could
retire to write a history? Nobody that ever lived would have more
speedily found out the truth of Voltaire's saying, "_Le repos est
une bonne chose, mais l'ennui est son frere_." The truth is that one
learns, after a certain observation of the world, to divide one's
amazement pretty equally between the literary voluptuary or
over-fastidious collegian, on the one hand, who is so impressed by the
size of his subject that he never does more than collect material and
make notes, and the presumptuous politician, on the other hand, who
thinks that he can write a history or settle the issues of philosophy
and theology in odd half-hours. The one is so enfeebled in will and
literary energy after his _viginti annorum lucubrationes_; the other
is so accustomed to be content with the hurry, the unfinishe