lify himself for the English bar, and in 1808 he began to practise in the court of queen's bench and on the northern circuit. The eloquence and talent which he exhibited at the Scottish bar, found in the metropolis a nobler field for their development, and a year had hardly elapsed before he was returned to the house of commons for the burgh of Camelford. His maiden speech on the 5th March, 1810, when Mr. Whitbread brought forward his motion against the earl of Chatham, though able and eloquent, did not call forth his gigantic powers of debate; but they gradually unfolded themselves, and he soon became the rival of George Canning, and his most powerful opponent in the great political questions which then agitated the country. On the dissolution of parliament in 1812, Mr. Brougham failed in contesting with Mr. Canning the representation of Liverpool, and he was thus excluded from the house of commons during the long period of five years. In 1816, however, he was returned for Winchelsea, a borough which he represented till 1830, when he resigned it on account of some difference of opinion with its patron, the earl of Darlington. He was, however, immediately returned for Knaresborough; and on the death of George IV. he successfully contested the county of York, and thus occupied a position which added the influence of a great constituency to that which he already possessed in parliament. Mr. Brougham now stood forth the champion of parliamentary reform, and the house of commons had no sooner met than he announced, for the 16th November, his intention to bring in a bill embracing a comprehensive measure of reform—the enfranchisement of large towns—the reduction of rotten boroughs—the curtailment of the English and Irish representation—and the grant of the franchise to copyholders, leaseholders, and all householders whatever. A ministerial crisis, however, supervened. The duke of Wellington having been defeated on a government measure, resigned, and the formation of a new government under Earl Grey, including Lord Brougham and Vaux as lord chancellor of England, who had not previously filled any of the subordinate law offices of the crown, placed in the hands of the ministry the great question of parliamentary reform. But though no longer a representative of the people, and personally relieved from the charge of the reform bill, his best powers were called forth in support of it; and his speech on the 7th October, 1831, when the bill was read a second time in the house of lords, was a display of eloquence of the highest order. While Lord Brougham occupied the woolsack, from 1830 to 1834, he availed himself of his high position to perform services to his country which posterity alone can duly appreciate. As the only British minister who devoted his powers and used his influence in the promotion of national and general education—in the instruction of the working classes—in the establishment of unfettered universities—in the diffusion of useful knowledge by popular publications—in the improvement of the patent laws—and in obtaining for the higher classes of literary and scientific men the honours and emoluments so long and so unjustly withheld from them, his name will shine in the future history of learning with a brighter lustre than that of the Richelieus and Colberts of former days. ["In my opinion, the teachers of the age of George III. covered it with still greater glory than it drew from the statesmen and warriors that ruled its affairs."—Works, vol. i.] Nor did these various duties, when performed during his occupation of the woolsack, interfere with the onerous functions of his office. His activity as a judge was unexampled. In the course of a few months he decided 120 cases of appeal; and upon quitting office in 1836, he "did not leave a single case unheard or a single letter unanswered." As one of the most successful reformers and improvers of our laws, both civil and criminal, Lord Brougham earned the gratitude of his country. His bill for the establishment of law courts, and his exertions in abolishing imprisonment for debt, amending the criminal code, putting an end to capital punishment for various class s of crimes, and thus humanizing the bloody laws of his country, have justly endeared his name to the philanthropists of every clime. Wherever oppression, under the form of English law, str ck at an individual, or crushed a race, the heart and head of Mr. Brougham were combined to defend and relieve them. His defence in 1824 of Mr. Smith, a Wesleyan missionary, against the slaveholders of Demerara, and in 1825 of another missionary expelled from Barbadoes, had a salutary influence far beyond the localities of the oppression. His exertions, too, in the abolition of colonial slavery, and in suppressing the slave trade, which the rapacity of civilized nations so long permitted to exist, will ever be one of the brightest leaves in his chaplet. The same indomitable hatred of illegal power, whether exercised against the high or the low, was exhibited in 1820 and 1821 in his defence of Queen Caroline, when she laid claim to the honours of queen-consort on the accession of George IV. to the throne. As her attorney-general he pled her cause in the house of lords in the trial for her divorce, and before the privy council for her right to coronation, and by these two remarkable displays of forensic eloquence, his reputation and popularity were greatly extended. The labours of Mr. Brougham in promoting the various social and political reforms effected during the first half of the present century, can hardly be enumerated in the brief space allotted in our pages—his inquiry, through a commission, into the nineteen thousand charitable trusts in Great Britain; his labours in procuring catholic emancipation; in improving our municipal jurisprudence; in the complete reforms of the Scottish municipal corporations; in the settlement of the bank charter; in the radical reform of the poor-laws; in the partial reform of the Irish church by the suppression of ten bishoprics; and in the removal of the monopoly of the East India company and the opening of the East India trade.
In the year 1834, the reform government, under which Lord Brougham had done so much for his country, quitted office, and was succeeded by the short-lived ministry of Sir Robert Peel. In 1835 the whigs again returned to power, with Lord Melbourne as premier, and Lord John Russell as home secretary; but, from causes yet to be explained, and much to be deplored. Lord Brougham was excluded from the cabinet. The ties which bound him to the whigs as a party being now dissolved, he was at liberty to take an independent course in parliament, when he criticised the acts of both parties, and sometimes brought forward measures of his own. His conduct, in this respect, has been very unjustly blamed, and he has been charged with abandoning the whig principles which he maintained while in office. In political life, a member of a party, whether in or out of power, is sometimes obliged to support measures which he does not wholly approve; but when he has assumed an independent position, and thrown himself loose from all party ties, he may honestly oppose measures to which he formerly consented, and originate others to which he could not previously obtain the assent of his friends. When the conduct of public men shall be judged calmly, and uninfluenced by personal and party feeling, we have no doubt that Lord Brougham will be regarded as a consistent statesman, who occasionally modified his opinions when he was called to express them under altered circumstances and new conditions.
As a relief from his severe parliamentary duties, Lord Brougham purchased an estate about a mile to the east of Cannes, in Provence, where he built the beautiful chateau of Eleonore Louise, commanding a charming view of the Mediterranean, the Lerin isles of St. Marguerite and St. Honorat, and the grand range of the Esterel mountains, which terminate on the coast between Cannes and Frejus. In this delightful retreat, beloved by the French and English residents in his neighbourhood. Lord Brougham spent a portion of every year, pursuing undisturbed his literary and scientific studies, and adding to his high reputation as an orator and a statesman the more European fame of an author and a philosopher. Under the clear sky of Provence, and with a fine apparatus constructed by the late M. Soleil of Paris, he resumed his early researches on the inflexion and diffraction of light, and made some important discoveries which he communicated to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and to the Royal Society of London, in whose memoirs and transactions they are published. (A brief notice of them will be found in Sir David Brewster's Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, vol. i., pp. 208-210.)
Lord Brougham was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London on the 3d March, 1803. In 1825 he was appointed lord rector of the university of Glasgow. In 1833 he was chosen one of the five foreign associates of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in the Institute of France, and more recently a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Naples. His lordship was also president, and may be regarded as the founder, of University college, London. In 1819 he married Mary Anne, daughter of Thomas, son of Sir John Eden, hart., of Windleston, by whom he had two daughters, one of whom died in 1820, the other in 1839: Lady Brougham died 12th January, 1865. Besides his work on the "Colonial Policy of the European
