nature of the soil, that we are to attribute the varying result. The productions of genius differ from those of talent in kind rather than in degree; though nothing is more common than to see referred to the former that which happens to be merely larger in quantity than the ordinary effects of the latter. To Lord Brougham I should ascribe little genius, in the proper acceptation of the word; but vast natural powers highly cultivated, and a mighty talent for continuity and concentration of effort and attention. Some would say that this is genius,—adopting the accepted theory of a writer of our own times who would have it that this quality consists, first of all, in a grand capacity for taking trouble; than which no definition could be more erroneous and deceptive. Labour is the midwife of genius; not itself, or its mother. If many of the most laborious works are the least informed by genius, the converse is no less true.
How fine is the description of Brougham by Sydney Smith:—
"Look at the gigantic Brougham, sworn in at twelve o'clock, and before six p.m. he has a bill on the table abolishing the abuses of a court which has been the curse of England for centuries. For twenty-five years did Lord Eldon sit in that court, surrounded with misery and sorrow, which he never held up a finger to alleviate; the widow and the orphan cried to him as vainly as the town-crier, when he offers a small reward for a full purse! The bankrupt of the court became the lunatic of the court. Estates mouldered away, and mansions fell down, but the fees came in and all was well; but in an instant the iron mace of Brougham shivered to atoms the House of Fraud and Delay. And this is the man who will help to govern you, who bottoms his reputation on doing good to you, who knows that to reform abuses is the safest base of fame, and the surest instrument of power, who uses the highest gift of reason and the most splendid efforts of genius to rectify all those abuses which all the genius and talent of this profession have hitherto been employed to justify and protect. Look you to Brougham, and turn you to that side where he waves his long and lean finger, and mark well that face which nature has marked so forcibly, which dissolves pensions, turns jobbers into honest men, scares away the plunderer of the public, and is a terror to him that does evil to the people!"
But on the same subject, Brougham's own words are still finer, in the peroration of his magnificent speech on "The Present State of the Law," February 7th, 1828:—
"It was the boast of Augustus,—it formed part of the glare in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,—that he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble,—a praise not unworthy of a great prince, and to which the present reign has its claim also. But how much nobler will be our sovereign's boast when he shall have it to say that he found law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book, and left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich, left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence."
It was said of Brougham that though he was in the head and front of the movement, he was behind the Times,—this in allusion to his supposed editorship, as indicated, truthfully or not, beneath the sketch of Maclise. He was also said to be at the "top and bottom of the law;" for he happened to hold at the same time the highest position in that
