Sketches of Reforms and Reformers, of Great Britain and Ireland

by Henry B. Stanton

Turning from the matter to the manner of the orator, (if we have not already passed the boundary,) Brougham stood unrivaled as a debater in the House of Commons. For twenty years he swayed the intellect and passions of the House, by his muscular and courageous eloquence, whilst Castlereagh, Canning, and Peel controlled its majorities and dictated its measures, by the wave of their official wand. Castlereagh was more self-possessed and matter-of-fact than he; Canning more brilliant and classical; Peel more dexterous and plausible. But, in weight of metal, he surpassed them all. His oratory was not the brawl and foam of a dashing mountain torrent, but the steady roar of the deep, broad cataract. In ability to inflame friends and foes, and shake the House till it quaked, he equaled either Chatham or Fox. When thoroughly roused, with all his elements in full play, he thundered and lightened till the knights of the shire clung to the Benches for support, the Ministers cowered behind the Speaker's chair for shelter, and the voting members started from their slumbers in the side galleries, as if the last trump were ringing in their ears.

Chatham introduced the style of the House of Commons into the debates of the House of Lords. Brougham's appearance there constituted almost as new an era in its oratory as the advent of Chatham. It was my good fortune to hear him two or three times in the Lords, several years ago—once when his best powers were put in action for a brief hour.

We enter the House of Peers. The lions—Brougham, Grey, Wellington, Lyndhurst, Melbourne—are in their places. An exciting debate is going forward, which has taken rather a personal turn. Yonder is Brougham, stretched out half his length on one of the Ministerial benches; now listening to a clumsy Earl on the floor, whom he eyes with a portentous scowl; anon whispering a hurried word to the Peer at his elbow. What an ungainly figure! Those long legs and arms, loosely hung in their sockets, give him a slouching air. Human face could hardly look more ugly or intellectual. His iron-gray hair bristles over his forehead like the quills of the fretful porcupine. His restless eye peers through eyebrows that seem alive with nerves. He must be agitated with the debate, for he writhes as though his red cushion were a sheet of hot iron. He suddenly starts up, (who ever knew him to sit still five minutes?) walks with long strides toward the door, and while chatting with the ladies, his tormentor stops, and the ex-Chancellor cries, with startling emphasis, (lest some one get the floor before him,) "My Lords!" and slowly advances to the table in front of the woolsack. An audible hush runs round the chamber; for they had been anticipating a reply from the mercurial lord. Every whisper ceases, and all eyes are fixed on the towering intellect before them. The Peeresses leave their damask chairs, and approach the bar, to get a better view of the orator. Members of the House of Commons, till now chatting round the bar, lean forward in silence. The loungers in the lobbies enter the Hall, the word having passed out, "Brougham is up!" The untitled spectators rise from their seats on the carpet, where fatigue had sunk them, and stand on tiptoe, to catch every glance of the eye and wave of the hand of the scholar and statesman, whilst the crowded galleries forget their lassitude in listening to one whose name and fame are the property of mankind.

But to the speech. Listen to that first sentence! How it plunges into the very center of the subject. Every word is an argument—every period a demonstration. The first blow knocks the keystone from his last antagonist's speech, and tumbles the whole structure on his affrighted head and shoulders. And the dandy young Lord, over in the corner, who, in the puny oration he recited so prettily an hour ago, went out of his way to sneer at Brougham—see the blood fly from his cheeks when his nice little piece of rhetoric comes rattling in bits round his ears. As the lion fixes his eye on him, he would give his coronet and his curls if he could slink into a nutshell. A fiery glance or two having withered him, the monarch of the debate grapples with worthier antagonists. What a sweep does he give to the argument—what redundancy of facts—what fertility of illustration. How large the field of his comprehension—how exhaustless and varied its resources. What execution is done by those long-drawn sentences, with parenthesis within parenthesis, each a logical syllogism, or a home-thrust fact, or a blighting sarcasm, wound round and round his victims, till they are crushed in their folds! Great in matter, his speech is equally powerful in manner; violating every law of rhetoric and oratory promulgated by the schools, he is a law unto himself—original, commanding, majestic.

Brougham, having demolished his antagonists, took a seat at the clerk's table, and began to write a letter, when the Chancellor (Cottenham) rose and commenced a conciliatory speech. His calm, slow, cool manner contrasted strongly with the tempest which had just passed over our heads, reminding us of those dewy showers which follow smilingly in the trail of a dark cloud, after its thunder and lightning and torrent have raged and blazed and poured, and passed away.

This great man has been described so often, that not only his public history and mental character, but his personal peculiarities—yea, the nervous twitching of his eyebrows—are as familiar to Americans as to the reporters in the gallery of the House of Lords. As an orator or debater, he is sometimes compared to Webster. The very attempt is unjust to both. You might as well compare the repose of Lake Erie to the thunder of Niagara. Each has his own sphere of greatness. The Bostonian rarely enters the arena of debate, unless clad in mail to his fingers' ends—a safe and strong debater. Not so the Londoner. He sometimes rushes, sword in hand, without scabbard or shield, into the thickest of the fight, and gets sorely galled. Little arrows do not pierce Webster, nor do ordinary occasions summon forth his heaviest weapons. But Brougham, why, he will fight with anybody, and on any terms. The smallest Lilliput in the House can sting him into paroxysms with his needle-spear. But wo to the assailant! The bolt which annihilates the Earl of Musketo is equally heavy with that which strikes down the Duke of Wellington. As a whole, Brougham is unlike any of our public men. Could we mix into one compound the several qualities of Webster, Clay, Choate, Benton, and the late John Quincy Adams, and divide the mass into four or five parts, we might, by adding a strong tincture of John C. Calhoun, make four or five very good Henry Broughams.

I have spoken of the versatility of Brougham's talents and acquirements. Sir E. B. Sugden was arguing a cause before him in chancery. The Chancellor was not very attentive to the argument, employing part of the time in writing letters. This greatly piqued Sugden; and on retiring from the court, he drily said to a friend, "If Brougham only knew a little of Chancery law, he would know a little of everything." Undoubtedly he knows something about everything, and much about most things. Somebody has compared him to a Scotch Encyclopedia, without alphabetical arrangement. If he has not reached the highest place in any department of knowledge, it is because, in traversing so vast a field, he must here and there be necessarily only a gleaner. His success in so many departments proves that had he cultivated but one or two, he might have surpassed all cotemporary competition. Looking to the variety and extent of his acquisitions and labors, posterity will regard him as one of the most extraordinary men of his time. He reached his eminent position by no royal road. He is among the most laborious and diligent of men. Well known facts attest his wonderful activity.

His able work, "Practical Observations upon the Education of the People," published in 1825, was composed, he says, during hours stolen from sleep. Combe states of him, that he was once engaged in a court of law all day, from which he went to the House of Commons, and mingled in the debate till two o'clock in the morning; he then retired to his house, and wrote upon an article for the Edinburgh Review till it was time to go to the court, where he was actively employed till the hour for the assembling of the Commons; thither he went, and participated in the discussion as vigorously as usual till long after midnight—taking no rest till the morning of the third day! The witty Hazlitt, alluding, at the time, to his speeches on commercial and manufacturing distress, said, "He is apprised of the exact state of our exports and imports, and scarce a ship clears out its cargo from Liverpool or Hull, but he has a copy of the bill of lading." It will be remembered, that while performing his political and miscellaneous labors, he was surrounded by a large circle of professional clients. His inaugural discourse, as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, thickly strown with Greek and Latin quotations, was, as the preface informs us, written during the business of the Northern Circuit. Sydney Smith says, in one of his graphic Reform speeches, "See the gigantic Brougham, sworn in at twelve o'clock, [as Chancellor,] and before six, has a bill on the table abolishing the abuses of a Court which has been the curse of the people of England for centuries."

A full share of the preparation and defense of the measures of Earl Grey's Administration devolved on him; while at the same time he did the work of an ordinary man in writing rudimental articles for the Penny Magazine, and scientific tracts for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, lecturing to Mechanics' Institutes, and contributing essays to the Edinburgh Review. An English friend informed me that during one of the busiest periods of his official life, a fatal accident happened to some laborers in excavating a deep well. Forthwith, out came a tract from the Lord Chancellor, on the best and safest mode of digging wells! Though his numerous publications and addresses on learned subjects, and his participation in the proceedings of the Royal Society and French Institute showed their author to be a scientific man, his later Lives of Men of Letters and Science exhibited an acquaintance with the sciences in his old age, for which his friends were hardly prepared. In the particulars here mentioned, no public man of our country can be compared with him, except the late John Quincy Adams, for whose wonderful exploits in his declining years Lord Brougham expressed the highest admiration.

The great political error of his life was his acceptance of the Chancellorship, and consequent removal from the House of Commons. It may be remarked, in passing, that it is a mistake to suppose he diminished his reputation as a lawyer by his judicial administration. He was never a first-rate technical lawyer. His mind was too broad, his ambition too high, to be a mere lawyer, tied down with red tape to nisi prius precedents and the dicta of cases. The profession to him was not an end, as it was to Scarlett and his school, but a subsidiary means to attain political eminence and influence. A great cause, like that of Queen Caroline, or of Williams, indicted for a libel on the Durham clergy, showed what he could accomplish when he bent his powers to professional work. His speeches on Law Reform prove his minute acquaintance with and utter contempt for the great body of the common law, as administered by the courts; and when presiding in a tribunal whose currents had been brought to a dead stand by the "everlasting doubts" of Lord Eldon, the best service he could render suitors and the country was to clear out the channels, and set the streams flowing, even though he might make mistakes in acting on the expedient maxim, that "it is better to have a case decided wrong, than not at all."