Brougham

“ Oh where, and oh where, does my Harry Brougham dwell?—
He dwells at Cannes in bonny France, and likes it very well;
But recollect ’tis not the Cann’s where gravy soup they sell.
In what clothes, in what clothes, is your Harry Brougham clad?—
His hunting coat’s of velvet green, his trowsers are of plaid;
And it’s oh! in my heart, he can’t look very bad.
Suppose, and suppose, that your Harry Brougham should die!—
Dog Toby would weep over him, and Punch himself would cry:
But it’s oh! in our hearts, that we hope he will not die. ”

“ No feeling in life was more deeply rooted in the heart of Lord Brougham than his intense affection and veneration for his admirable mother. He repaid her early care and judicious guidance by the most ardent and unvarying demotion. He will ingly laid all the triumphs of his career at her feet ; and she lived to see him attain the proudest heights of fame and power. ”

“ Brougham could tear a passion to tatters with any one, but he ranted. It is true that the post-boys used to drive the chaises of travellers in these regions somewhat out of the direct road, in order to glimpse the residence of Lord Brougham; but those travellers viewed the place, and Brougham himself, with curiosity, just as one might an Icelandic geyser, to which,165 indeed, he is not inaptly to be compared. ”

“ No character of Lord Brougham so striking and true as hers, has ever been drawn. Eminent biographers and critics, including Carlyle, have delineated him, but her portrait—drawn twenty years before theirs appeared—Professor Masson assured me her character of Brougham was the most perfect of all.
Her two-sided estimate gave discomfort to those content with obliqueness in knowledge, but those who have the impartial instinct seek reality, by which no one is deceived. The light and shade of character, like the light and shade of a painting, alone give distinctiveness and truth. ”

“ Lord Brougham is our best man now, the readiest—a great quality—and, strange as it may sound to those who know him not, the best-natured, with anecdote enough to point a moral, but no storyteller; using his wit as a skilful cook does lemon-juice—to flavour but not to sour the plat.
Painters and anglers, I have remarked, are always silent, thoughtful men. ”

“ Sometimes he would crouch in his chair, muffled in his wig and robes, like a man asleep ; at other times he would burst into restless activity, writing letters, working problems, interrupting counsel, Mortal offence he gave to Sugden, then the leader of the Equity bar, who detested his person and despised his law. But upon the whole Brougham was a just and able judge ”

“ Half leaning against the lowered window of the coach door, I never lost sight of the brougham. And I was saying to myself: "Perhaps she recognized me! Perhaps she is going to stop, get out of the carriage, appear in the street." Indeed, I was saying this to myself without the slightest notion of attempting a gallant conquest. I was saying that as if it were the simplest and most natural thing in the world. The brougham rolled on speedily, lightly, bounding on its springs, and my hackney coach followed it with difficulty.
"Faster!" ”

“ While you were in the Commons they did not dare. Harry Brougham was their master. So they lured you, poor fool, into the trap, into the Lords, where you may spout, and spout, and spout, and it will have as much effect as the beating of a bird’s wings against the bars of its cage!”
“They will not dare!” Brougham reiterated.
“You will see. They will throw you aside.”
Brougham walked up and down the room, his eyes glittering, his quaint, misshapen features working passionately.
“They will throw you aside,” Mr. Cornelius repeated, watching him keenly. “You are a man of the people. ”

“ Lord Brougham then rose, and delivered partly a written, partly an oral judgment—characterized by his lordship's usual vigour and felicity of reasoning and illustration. He entirely concurred with the Lord Chancellor, and assigned reasons, which certainly appeared of irresistible cogency, for adopting the opinion of the judges, whom, in a matter peculiarly within their province, their lordships had summoned to their assistance, who had bestowed such unexampled pains upon the subject, and were all but unanimous. ”

“ After all Brougham is only a living and very remarkable instance of the inefficacy of the most splendid talents, unless they are accompanied with other qualities, which scarcely admit of definition, but which must serve the same purpose that ballast does for a ship. Brougham has prospered to a certain degree; he has a great reputation and he makes a considerable income at the bar; but as an advocate he is left behind by men of far inferior capacity, whose names are hardly known beyond the precincts of their courts or the boundaries of their circuits. ”

“ Brougham, tall, thin, and commanding in figure, with a face which, however ugly, is full of expression, and a voice of great power, variety, and even melody, notwithstanding his occasional prolixity and tediousness, is an orator in every sense of the word. Macaulay, short, fat, and ungraceful, with a round, thick, unmeaning face, and with rather a lisp, though he has made speeches of great merit, and of a very high style of eloquence in point of composition, has no pretensions to be put in competition with Brougham in the House of Commons. ”

“ Brougham afterwards put himself forward as the monitor and director of the education of Macaulay, and I remember hearing of a letter he wrote to the father on the subject, which made a great noise at the time; but he was like the man who brought up a young lion, which finished by biting his head off. Brougham and Macaulay disliked each other. Brougham could not forgive his great superiority in many of those accomplishments in which he thought himself unrivalled; and being at no pains to disguise his jealousy and dislike, the other was not behind him in corresponding feelings of aversion. ”

“ That blot on the scutcheon of England’s fair fame!
Will-o’-the Wisp, July 24, 1869. Lord Brougham.
“Now that the speedy ejection of the Whigs from office, is looked for on all sides and by all parties with a high anticipatory relish, the humane mind naturally turns with compassion to the fate of Lord Brougham, who is on the eve of losing that for which he staked and lost, all his once splendid popularity. He stands a detected apostate from the cause of liberality, and we can only pay to his deplorable condition the melancholy tribute of a commiserating melody.” ”

“ Lord Brougham's fame, as an orator, has filled two hemispheres. We will look at him in the two aspects of matter and manner.
The four volumes of his speeches, with others gleaned from the Parliamentary reports, prove that his reputation is well founded. Their leading characteristic is power—crushing power—as distinguished from beauty and grace. They are not so gorgeous as Burke's, nor so compact as Webster's. But they contain more information and argument, and less philosophy and fancy, than the former's—more versatility and vigor, and less staid grandeur and studied method, than the latter's. ”

“ When poor Edmund Kean was acting in barns to country bumpkins, and barely rinding bread for his wife and child, he was just as great a genius as when he was crowding Drury Lane. When Brougham presided in the House of Lords, he was not a bit better or greater than when he had hung about in the Parliament House at Edinburgh, a briefless and suspected junior barrister. When all London crowded to see the hippopotamus, he was just the animal that he was a couple of years later, when no one took the trouble of looking at him. ”

“ I incline to think that it was reserved for Brougham to illustrate the ancient custom, by the splendour of those who chose to be dutiful to the Lord Chancellor. The fashion of going to court is such, that it infers little personal respect to the individual monarch; but the practice of attending the levee of an inferior personage is to be ascribed to the respect which individual eminence commands. When Lord Brougham announced his levees, it could not be known whether he should receive the homage of the aristocracy, to whom it was not supposed that his lordship's politics were very amicable. ”

“ Peel was odd, in the contrast of a familiar first address, with slackness of manner afterwards. The Duke of Wellington took the greatest interest in the poor around him at Strathfieldsay, had all of eloquence except the words. Mr. Rogers quoted a saying about Brougham that he was not so much a master of the language as mastered by it. I doubt very much the truth of this. Brougham's management of his sentences, as I remember the late Lady Canning observing to me, is surely most wonderful. He never loses the thread, and yet he habitually twists it into a thousand varieties of intricate form. ”

“ He rebuked his Tory Lords the other night when they made a foolish attack on Melbourne about M’Hale signing himself John Tuam. Every day he appears a greater man.
I have read hardly anything all this time but two reviews in the ‘Edinburgh’—Brougham’s most remarkable paper upon Lady Charlotte Bury’s book, the composition of which I saw with my own eyes; the other is Stephen’s review of Wilberforce’s Life. Nothing can be more admirable than the characters which Brougham has given of the celebrated people of that day—George III., George IV., Eldon, Perceval, and others ”

“ The same disqualification attached to the oratory of Lord Brougham, whose speech at the bar of the House of Lords in defence of Queen Caroline had made so deep an impression. His extraordinary fierceness and even violence of nature pervaded his whole physical as well as intellectual being. When he spoke he was on springs and quicksilver, and poured forth sarcasm, invective, argument, and declamation in a promiscuous and headlong flood. ”

“ The public man who perhaps of all others earned and deserved Lord Brougham. his place in the pictorial satires of the nineteenth century was emphatically Brougham. The verdict of posterity on this restless but unquestionably brilliant man of genius must of necessity be a somewhat disappointing one; he aimed at being nothing less than an Admirable Crichton, and such a character in the nineteenth century, when every public man must be more or less talented, more or less brilliant, would be an impossibility even to a genius. ”

“ Nothing remarkably new. In the House of Commons the Poor Law Bill has been going on smoothly; in the House of Lords little of note but one of Brougham’s exhibitions. Old Wynford brought in a very absurd Bill for the better observance of the Sabbath (an old sinner he, who never cared three straws for the Sabbath) , which Brougham attacked with excessive virulence and all his powers of ridicule and sarcasm. His speech made everybody laugh, very heartily, but on a division, the Bishops all voting with Wynford, the latter carried the second reading by three in a very thin House. ”

“ DEAR MURRAY, I have to thank you for letting me see your two new cantos [the 3rd and 4th] , which I return. What sublimity! what levity! what boldness! what tenderness! what majesty! what trifling! what variety! what tediousness!—for tedious to a strange degree, it must be confessed that whole passages are, particularly the earlier stanzas of the fourth canto. I know no man of such general powers of intellect as Brougham, yet I think him insufferably tedious ”

“ The display of his power and the fertility of his mind amazes friend and foe; for the genius of his fervent intellect includes French cookery, Italian poetry, bees and cell building, and a host of subjects seemingly far removed from law and politics. This must have been knowledge gained at the cost of his profession, for an epigram has it that he knew a little of everything, even of law. “Brougham, though a Whig, is not a goose,” says the Noctes. ”

“ These words apply, with a painful degree of exactness, to the career of Lord Brougham. Few men have been more richly endowed by nature. Few men have exhibited a greater plasticity of intellect, a greater affluence of mental resources. He was a fine orator, a clear thinker, a ready writer. It is seldom that a man who sways immense audiences by the power of his eloquence attains also to a high position in the ranks of literature. Yet Brougham did this; while, as a lawyer, he gained the most splendid prize of his profession, the Lord Chancellorship of England ”

“ It is certainly of great service to a public man, and it largely increases the estimation in which he is held, to establish such a character. It is no small detriment to Brougham that he is accounted an arrant coward; and it is remarkable that Peel never was known to deal in the insolence, and bullying, and offensive personalities in which the other has so copiously indulged, both in Parliament and at the Bar. ”

“ BROUGHAM, HENRY (1665–1698) , divine, was one of the twelve children of Henry Brougham of Scales Hall, Cumberland, sheriff for the county in the 6th of William III, by his marriage with 'fair Miss Slee, daughter of Mr. Slee of Carlisle, a jovial gentleman,' who was a merchant in that city. In Midsummer term, 1681, when sixteen years old, Henry Brougham 'became a poor serving-child of Queen's College,' Oxford. ”

“ It was obvious that Lord Melbourne, Lord Althorp, and Lord John Russell would be invited to take office, but there was a certain difficulty about Brougham. The difficulty, however, was not about offering a place to Brougham; the only trouble was to find the place which would suit him, and his acceptance of which would also suit his leaders and his colleagues. Nothing could be more certain than the fact that Brougham must be invited to a place in the new Administration. He was a strong man with the country, and he now had a distinct following of his own. ”