eration had no subject more fruitful than the vanity and restlessness of Lord Brougham. He was beyond doubt a great Parliamentary orator. His style was too diffuse and sometimes too uncouth to suit a day like our own, when form counts for more than substance, when passion seems out of place in debate, and not to exaggerate is far more the object than to try to be great. Brougham's action was wild, and sometimes even furious; his gestures were singularly ungraceful; his manners were grotesque; but of his power over his hearers there could be no doubt. That power remained with him until a far later date; and long after the years when men usually continue to take part in political debate, Lord Brougham could be impassioned, impressive, and even overwhelming. He was not an orator of the highest class: his speeches have not stood the test of time. Apart from the circumstances of the hour and the personal power of the speaker, they could hardly arouse any great delight, or even interest; for they are by no means models of English style, and they have little of that profound philosophical interest, that pregnancy of thought and meaning, and that splendor of eloquence, which make the speeches of Burke always classic, and even in a certain sense always popular among us. In truth, no man could have done with abiding success all the things which Brougham did successfully for the hour. On law, on politics, on literature, on languages, on science, on art, on industrial and commercial enterprise, he professed to pronounce with the authority of a teacher. "If Brougham knew a little of law," said O'Connell, when the former became Lord Chancellor, "he would know a little of everything." The anecdote is told in another way too, which perhaps makes it even more piquant. "The new Lord Chancellor knows a little of everything in the world-even of law."

Brougham's was an excitable and self-asserting nature.

He had during many years shown himself an embodied influence, a living, speaking force in the promotion of great political and social reforms. If his talents were great, if his personal vanity was immense, let it be said that his services to the cause of human freedom and education were simply inestimable. As an opponent of slavery in the colonies, as an advocate of political reform at home, of law reform, of popular education, of religious equality, he had worked with indomitable zeal, with resistless passion, and with splendid success. But his career passed through two remarkable changes which, to a great extent, interfered with the full efficacy of his extraordinary powers. The first was when from popular tribune and reformer he became Lord Chancellor in 1830; the second was when he was left out of office on the reconstruction of the Whig Ministry in April, 1835, and he passed for the remainder of his life into the position of an independent or unattached critic of the measures and policy of other men. It has never been clearly known why the Whigs so suddenly threw over Brougham. The common belief is that his eccentricities and his almost savage temper made him intolerable in a cabinet. It has been darkly hinted that for awhile his intellect was actually under a cloud, as people said that of Chatham was during a momentous season.

Lord Brougham was not a man likely to forget or forgive the wrong which he must have believed that he had sustained at the hands of the Whigs. He became the fiercest and most formidable of Lord Melbourne's hostile critics.

The other opponent who has been spoken of was Lord Lyndhurst. Lord Lyndhurst resembled Lord Brougham in the length of his career and in capacity for work, if in nothing else. Lyndhurst, who was born in Boston the year before the tea-ships were boarded in that harbor and their cargoes flung into the water, has been heard

addressing the House of Lords in all vigor and fluency by men who are yet far from middle age. He was one of the most effective Parliamentary debaters of a time which has known such men as Peel and Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, Bright and Cobden. His style was singularly and even severely clear, direct, and pure; his manner was easy and graceful; his voice remarkably sweet and strong. Nothing could have been in greater contrast than his clear, correct, nervous argument, and the impassioned invectives and overwhelming strength of Brougham. Lyndhurst had, as has been said, an immense capacity for work, when the work had to be done; but his natural tendency was as distinctly toward indolence as Brougham's was toward unresting activity. Nor were Lyndhurst's political convictions ever very clear. By the habitude of associating with the Tories, and receiving office from them, and speaking for them, and attacking their enemies with argument and sarcasm, Lyndhurst finally settled down into all the ways of Toryism. But nothing in his varied history showed that he had any particular preference that way; and there were many passages in his career when it would seem as if a turn of chance decided what path of political life he was to follow. As a keen debater he was, perhaps, hardly ever excelled in Parliament; but he had neither the passion nor the genius of the orator; and his capacity was narrow indeed in its range when compared with the astonishing versatility and omnivorous mental activity of Brougham. As a speaker he was always equal. He seemed to know no varying moods or fits of mental lassitude. Whenever he spoke he reached at once the same high level as a debater. The very fact may in itself, perhaps, be taken as conclusive evidence that he was not an orator. The higher qualities of the orator are no more to be summoned at will than those of the poet.