soon broke out with uncontrolled vehemence. Throughout the session of 1835 his activity was undiminished. .Bills for every imaginable purpose were thrown by him on the table of the House, and it stands recorded in Hansard that he made no less than 221 reported speeches in Parliament in that year. But in the course of the vacation a heavier blow was struck. Lord Cottenham was made Lord Chancellor. The breach had manifestly become irrepar able. Even Lord Brougham s buoyant and daring spirit sunk for a time under the shock. A dreadful period of depression succeeded to the wild frenzy of the preceding years, and during the year 1836 the voice of Lord Brougham was unheard. He passed the spring and summer in AYest- moreland, and avoided all political conversation and corre spondence. Fifty-six years of his life were spent, and not much more than twenty of them had been spent in Parlia ment, where he had earned the most prodigious reputation and influence of modern times. " What is the House of Lords without Brougham 1 " we have heard Lord Lynd- hurst say " Brougham is the House of Lords." For more than thirty years after his fall he continued to take an active part iu its judicial business and in its debates. There was still a power in the tone of that voice, raised as it always was in the cause of peace, humanity, and freedom ; but it would have been better for his fame if he had died in the midst of his glory His reappearance in Parliament on the accession of Queen Victoria was marked by sneers at the Court, and violent attacks on the Whigs for their loyal and enthusiastic attachment to their young sovereign; and upon the outbreak of the insurrection in Canada, and the miscarriage of Lord Durham s mission, he overwhelmed his former colleagues, and especially Lord Glenelg, with a torrent of invective and sarcasm, equal in point of oratory to the greatest of his earlier speeches. But why pursue the painful narrative of these writhings of a wounded spirit and a broken ambition 1 Without avowedly relinquish ing his political principles, Brougham had estranged him self from the whole party by which those principles were defended. Flattered, and not unwilling to be flattered, by the Tories, he fought side by side with Lyndhurst, and paid the most fulsome court to the duke of Wellington and
a long train of women of quality and men of fashion.Amongst the humorous expedients resorted to in order to keep his name before the public, a false report of his death was sent up from Westmoreland in 1839, which obtained credence from the persons to whom it was addressed, The newspapers published articles on the melancholy event, and in the Morning Chronicle Mr Sheil exclaimed—
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" The extravagant and erring spirit hies To his confine," whilst he paid a just tribute to the splendid talents and services of the deceased.
It is more agreeable to dwell on the judicial services he continued assiduously to render in the Privy Council and the House of Lords. The Privy Council, especially when hearing appeals from the Colonies, India, and the courts maritime and ecclesiastical, was his favourite tribunal. He had practised a good deal before it (or, as he always called it, " the Cock-pit," so named because the cock-pit of Henry VIII. was the site of the present council chamber) when a young man, before he was called to the English bar ; its vast range of jurisdiction, varied by questions of foreign and international law, suited his discursive genius. He had remodelled the judicial committee in 1833, and it still remains one of the most useful of his creations ; and he at one time aimed at making himself the president of this committee. To this board Lord Brougham devoted for about sixteen years a very considerable amount of time and labour, and many of his most able and elaborate judgments are recorded in the Privy Council reports which have contributed to build up and perfect the modern jurisprudence of India, and to main tain principles of toleration in the Church of England.[1] He ceased to attend the Privy Council in 1850. But he continued to the close of his life to hear appeals in the House of Lords, where his early knowledge of Scotch law was of peculiar value.
In the year 1860, a second patent was conferred upon him by Her Majesty Queen Victoria, with a reversion of his peerage to his youngest brother William Brougham. The preamble of this patent stated that this unusual mark of honour was conferred upon him by the Crown as an acknowledgment of the great services he had rendered, more especially in promoting the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the negro race. The peerage is thus perpetuated in a junior branch of his family. Lord Brougham s marriage with Mrs Spalding had given him no male heirs, and his only daughter died in early life unmarried.
Upon the portal of one of those delightful villas which nestle amongst the olive trees and the carob trees at Cannes, along the shores of the Mediterranean, are inscribed the lines—
Inveni portura : spes et fortuna valeto.
Sat me lusistis ; ludete mine alios."
Such was the haven, such the abode, in which Lord Brougham found repose from the triumphs and the dis appointments of his agitated existence. The pure and genial air of the South calmed his nerves and perhaps prolonged his life. There he returned with uudiminished pleasure to the head-springs of science, philosophy, and literature. His spirits were more equable ; his mind more calm ; his society charming. There, then, he spent a con siderable part of the later years of his life ; and there, when the hour of departure came, his remains mingled with the dust. An accident had attracted his attention to the spot about the year 1838. He bought a tract of land ; he built on it ; and the Villa Louise Eleonore recalled by its name the adored memory of his lost and only child. Cannes, when he first visited it, was little more than a fishing village on a picturesque coast. His choice and his example made it the sanatorium of Europe.
the frontiers of his native land. The generous and lofty sentiments which he clothed in forcible language touched the heart of mankind. But there was something peculiarly congenial to his own mercurial temperament in the life and genius of France. In 1833 the Academy of Moral and Political Science had conferred upon him the high rank of an associate of the Institute. The Academy of Science did not disdain to listen to his demonstrations. The French, with their lively sympathy for brilliant intellectual power, forgave him all his eccentricities. He has been known to tutoyer M. Guizot. He once asked the French Government to give him an island with a state prison on it. He would drop in to tea at the Tuileries in his checquered trousers, and sometimes bring a friend with him, utterly regardless of social usages and etiquette. His French, though fluent enough, was as barbarous and dissonant a brogue as ever tortured the ears of a Parisian. Nobody knew what he would do next. After the revolution of 1848 he asked M. Cremieux (in utter forgetfulness of French law) to have him made a French citizen. But friendship in France is warm and tenacious. Lord Brougham had contributed as much as any man to efface old hatreds and to establish a lasting alliance between France and Great Britain. He judged even her faults in a kindly and indulgent spirit ; and of all the tributes to his memory which have issued
from the press, none is at once more truthful and more- ↑ Thus the judgment on the case of Escott v. Martin, which estab lished the validity of baptism administered by a Wesleyan minister or a layman, was prepared and delivered by Lord Brougham.
