Rest at Cannes.
Before closing our chapter we take one more swift glimpse at that arch-plotter for Whiggism—in the early days of the Edinburgh Review—whom we left fidgetting in the House of Lords, on a May evening of 1845. He had a longer life by far than most of those who conspired for the maintenance of the great blue and buff forerunner of British critical journals. He was only twenty-three when he put his shoulder to the quarterly revolutions of the Edinburgh—youngest of all the immediate founders;[38] and he outlived them all and outvoiced them all in the hurly-burly of the world.
He survived Macaulay too—an early contributor of whom we shall have more to say—and though he was past eighty at the death of the historian, he was alert still, and his brain vagrantly active; but the days of his early glory and fame—when the young blusterer bolstered up Reform, and slew the giants of musty privilege and sent “the schoolmaster abroad,” and antagonized slavery, were gone;[39] so, too, were those palmy times when he made the courts at Westminster ring with his championship of that poor Queen (who, whatever her demerits—and they were many—was certainly abominably maltreated by a husband far worse than she); times when the populace who espoused her cause shouted bravos to Harry Brougham—times when he was the best known and most admired man in England; all these, and his chancellorship, and his wordy triumphs in the House of Lords, were far behind him, and the inevitable loss of place and power fretted him grievously. He quarrelled with old coadjutors; in Parliament he shifted from bench to bench; in the weakness of age, he truckled to power; he exasperated his friends, and for years together—his scoldings, his tergiversations, and his plaid trousers made a mine of mockery for Mr. Punch. As early as 1835-40, Lord Brougham had purchased an estate in the south of France, in a beautiful nook of that mountain shore which sweeps eastward from the neighborhood of Marseilles—along the Mediterranean, and which so many travellers now know by the delights of the Cornice Road and Monaco, and Mentone, and San Remo. The little fishing village where years ago Lord Brougham set up his Villa of Louise Eléonore (after a darling and lost child) is now a suburb of the fashionable resort of Cannes. At his home there, amongst the olives, the oleanders and the orange-trees, the disappointed and petulant ex-chancellor passed most of the later years of his life.
Friends dropping in upon him—much doubting of their reception—found him as the humors changed, peevish with strong regrets and recriminations, or placid under the weight of his years, and perhaps narcotized by the marvellous beauty of the scenes around him.
He was over ninety at his death in 1868. To the very last, a man not to be reckoned on: some days as calm as the sea that rippled under his window; other days full of his old unrest and petulancies. There are such men in all times and in all societies—sagacious, fussy, vain, indefatigable, immensely serviceable, cantankerous; we can’t get on without them; we are for ever wishing that we could.
In our next chapter we shall come upon a critic, who was a famous editor—adroit, strong, waspish, bookish, and ignoble. We shall encounter a king, too—of whom we have thus far only had glimpses—who was jolly—excellently limbed and conditioned physically—a man “of an infinite jest,” too, and yet as arrant a dastard—by all old-fashioned moral measures of character—as Falstaff himself. Again we shall follow traces of a great poet—but never a favorite one—who has left markings of his career, strong and deep; a man who had a Greek’s delight in things of beauty, and a Greek’s subtlety of touch; but one can fancy a faun’s ears showing their tips upon his massive head, and (without fancy) grow conscious of a heathenism clouding his great culture. Other two poets of lighter mould we shall meet;—more gracious, lighter pinioned—prettily flitting—iridescent—grace and sparkle in their utterances, but leaving no strong markings “upon the sands of time.”