The "Brazen Peer" to term Lord——.
QUEEN CANUTE REPROVING HER COURTIERS
The snobbishness of Brougham's arguments on behalf of royal princes in his Debtors' Bill again infuriates the democratic Punch, who in 1849 was even more disgusted by Brougham's fulsome championship of Radetzky and the Austrians when they defeated the Piedmontese. But Punch's hostility reaches its height in the verses (accompanying a cartoon which represents Brougham standing on his head) describing the amazing farrago of inconsistencies which composed the mind of one who was at once a charlatan and encyclopædist, a reformer and a courtier. In the same year Punch suggests a Bill should be promoted for "the better behaviour of the erotic and learned lord,"
Who'd rather mount the mountebank's stage than be laid on the shelf,
Who does with ease the difficult task of turning his back on himself.
Brougham's perversely obstructive attitude towards the Exhibition of 1851 excited Punch's wrath, when he himself had become converted to the scheme, but already the tone of the paper had changed; and the turning point was reached on the occasion of Brougham's visit to America in 1850, when Punch printed the following unofficial letter of introduction to the President of the United States:—
To General Taylor, President of the United States,
Favoured by Henry Lord Brougham, Member of the French Institute.
"Dear Taylor,
"I have much pleasure in making yourself and my friend Brougham—the Brougham whose fame is not European but world-wide—personally acquainted. With all his little drolleries, he is an excellent fellow; and with all his oddities, he has worked like a Hercules stable-boy at our Augean Courts of Law. He has cheapened costs; he has well-nigh destroyed the race of sharp attorneys. Indeed, if you would seek Brougham's monument, look around every attorney's office; and you will not see Brougham's picture."
Punch had already welcomed Brougham's espousal of the anti-Sabbatarian cause, but the full avowal of reconciliation is to be found in the following graceful verses printed in 1851:—