Sydney Smith, who once called Daniel Webster “a steam-engine in trousers,” thus disposed of a contemporary British statesman: “Lord Brougham’s great passions,” he said, “are vanity and ambition. He considers himself as one of the most wonderful works of Providence, is incessantly striving to display that superiority to his fellow-creatures, and to grasp a supreme dominion over all men and all things. His vanity is so preposterous that it has exposed him to ludicrous failures, and little that he has written will survive him. His ambition, and the falsehood and intrigue with which it works, have estranged all parties from him, and left him, in the midst of bodily and intellectual strength, an isolated individual, whom nobody will trust, and with whom nobody will act.”
The head of Brougham was of full size, but not unusual. A student of physiognomy, but not a student of the back numbers of the London Punch, who did not recognize the man in this cast, said of it that it was the head of a man more remarkable for vivacity and quickness of mind than for original and powerful thinking. George Combe, in the winter of 1838-39, exhibited in the United States a mask of Brougham, of course from life, for Brougham did not die until thirty years after that—and he was born in 1778—which is perhaps the mask here reproduced, as it is the face of a man in his prime, and his was a marvellous prime—not that of a nonogenarian. Brougham’s powers of activity and endurance were phenomenal. It is recorded of him that he went from the Law Courts to the House of Commons, from the House to his own chambers, where he wrote an article for the Edinburgh Review, then, without rest, to the Courts and the House again, sitting until the morning of the third day before he thought of his bed or his sleep; and that during all this time he showed no signs of mental or physical fatigue. Such continuous activity certainly did not shorten his days, even if it lengthened his nights.
LORD BROUGHAM
Probably no single facial organ in the world has been the subject of so much attention from the caricaturists as the nose of Lord Brougham. It is doubtful if any two consecutive numbers of any so-called comic or satirical journal appeared in England during Brougham’s time without some representation of Brougham’s nose. The author of Notes on Noses thus spoke of it: “It is a most eccentric nose; it comes within no possible category; it is like no other man’s; it has good points and bad points and no point at all. When you think it is going right on for a Roman, it suddenly becomes a Greek; when you have written it down cogitative, it becomes as sharp as a knife.... It is a regular Proteus; when you have caught it in one shape it instantly becomes another. Turn it and twist it and view it how, when, and where you will, it is never to be seen twice in the same shape; and all you can say of it is that it’s a queer one. And such exactly,” he added, “is my Lord Brougham.... Verily my Lord Brougham and my Lord Brougham’s nose have not their likeness in heaven or earth.... And the button at the end is the cause of it all.”
An interesting tribute to this remarkable organ is to be found in the printed Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley. Concerning Commemoration Day at Oxford he wrote, in 1860, “Nothing could be more absurd than Lord Brougham’s figure, long and gaunt, with snow-white hair under the great black porringer, and his wonderful nose wagging lithely from side to side as he hitched up his red petticoats [Commemoration robes] and stalked through the mud.”
There is no button on the end of the nose of the specimen of humanity whose mask forms a tail-piece to this volume. Cowper, Combe, and others believed that the brain of the native African is inferior in its intellectual powers to the brain of the man of European birth and descent, while a certain body of naturalists contend that the negro owes his present inferiority entirely to bad treatment and to unfavorable circumstances. The black boy, the cast of whose face was made for this collection at St. Augustine, Florida, by Mr. Thomas Hastings, the architect, a year or two ago, has undoubtedly been for generations the victim of unfavorable circumstances, and perhaps of bad treatment as well. He is, at all events, one of the lowest examples of his race, and his life-mask is only interesting here as an object of comparison. Whatever the head of a Bonaparte, a Washington, a Webster, or a Brougham is, his head is not. But whether his Creator or the Caucasian is responsible for this, the naturalists and experts must decide.
