CHIAPTER IIL

LEGAL STUDIES AND LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS.

A.D. 1797-1807.

Legal Studies-Contemporary History-Brougham visits the Continent-Publishes his First Book-Debating Societies: "The Speculative "-Political Excitement-Brougham declares for Liberalism-Robert Emmet-Brougham's Youthful Contemporaries-Called to the Scottish Bar-Social Tyranny -Poor Professional Prospects-Dundas-Brougham's Studies-The Erudition of Public Men-Sir Walter Scott-The Edinburgh Review.

THE Scottish University system resembles, not that of the sister country, but that which prevails in France, Germany, Italy, and other countries of the Continent. In Scotland, as all over Continental lands, the pupil's tie is rather to the University than to the College. Instruction is given in the public class-room of the professor, not in the private apartment of the college tutor. There is no relic of the seclusion and severance from the world which, in England, is the remnant of ante-Reformation habits. In Scotland, the students live in the houses of their parents, or in private lodgings over which no proctor or bedell exercises any control. The distinction between the Scottish and the English University and Collegiate systems, is precisely the distinction between a day-school and a boarding-school. Each system has its own advantages and counterbalancing disadvantages. The English system is more

successful in giving to the student the tone and style of learning and literate associations; it is detrimental in so far as it weans the susceptible youthful mind from those commonplace and every-day associations of citizenship and business life, from which it is against the general interests of the body politic to dissociate the best educated and the most refined portion of its members. The Scottish system, though more favourable to citizenship, is less favourable to learning. The Scottish student is never abstracted from the ordinary sympathies of the man of the world. In Edinburgh, at least, with which alone we have to do, the students do not even wear a gown or other badge of their studentship, and you can barely distinguish them, by their talk and tone, from other youths resident in the city. These characteristics of their condition are further fostered by the almost total absence of collegiate endowments and foundations for fellowships. What slender funds exist for the furtherance of learning are distributed to eke out the emoluments of professors, and to assist the studies of poor lads while they are undergraduates. The moment the curriculum of study has been achieved, no further tie, save that of grateful recollection, connects the pupil with the quadrangle and class-room. To this there is but one exception, and an important one. The Scottish universities furnish the professional, as well as the liberal or literary, education of Scotchmen. In each there is a faculty of law, of medicine, and of theology. In Scotland there are no Inns of Court for the law student. In Brougham's time, at least, no licence for medical practice could be acquired otherwise than by attendance at the lectures and demonstrations of the Gregories and Monroes

of the medical faculty; and the only channel to ordination in the Established Church was the reception of the polemical and theological instructions of the Robertsons, Bruntons, and Hunters, who taught Divinity, Church History, and Hebrew to the future clergymen of the land.

Brougham, then, who had chosen the profession of the law, continued for three more years to be a student of the University, studying the civil law, which is the basis of that of Scotland, conveyancing, and the laws of Scotland-the latter under Baron Hume, as distinguished as a jurist as his uncle, David Hume, had been as a philosophical inquirer. After the expiry of his three years' professional studies, Brougham was called to the Bar by the Faculty of Advocates, donned his maiden wig and gown, and commenced to perambulate the oak pavement of the Parliament House, the Westminster Hall of the North, or legal cab-stand where pleaders ply for fares.

The period of Mr. Brougham's college studentship had been almost exactly co-incident with the duration of the first cycle of the great French War. Just about the time of his matriculation, the Duke of York started upon his fruitless expedition to the Low Countries. He was not an advocate of a twelvemonth's standing when the Ministers of France, Spain, Holland, and England, concluded at Amiens the short-lived treaty which took its name from the city at which it was signed. Stirring times were those, during which Mr. Brougham had been engaged in the work of a philosophical and legal student -times so startling by the promulgation of new doctrines, as to uproot men's faith in systems which had been for ages preached by schoolmen and professors

times which seemed to shake the fabric of all law, and tc start the rivets which, ever since the origin of government, had held society together. When Brougham heard Dalzell's inaugural lecture in October, 1793, the world was yet appalled by the recent execution of King Louis. Ere he had listened to the annual farewell which Dugald Stewart took of his students, the Reign of Terror had been put down, Howe had gained his great victory, Buonaparte had fought his first battles in Italy, and the English fever for blood had attained its height. Strange accompaniments these to communion with Socrates in the market-place and Plato in the grove! While Brougham was studying law, Jervis was routing the Spaniards off their own shore, and Nelson was shattering the French fleet in sight of the land where Cæsar and Pompey strove for empire. In the year in which Brougham finally left college, a momentous dispute-that of the sovereignty of the seas -arose, in which England took one side, and all the world the other. This question was an old one, having been as keenly disputed in the seventeenth century by the seventeenth century's best jurisconsults, the English Selden and the Dutch Grotius, as it was in 1801, or, more recently, in 1856, when it was definitively settled at Paris, by England conceding much of what she had maintained for ages. We shall ere long discover that this matter was the first means of prominently introducing Brougham to public notice in England.

Brougham was one of those many Englishmen who took advantage of the lull in hostilities to visit the Continent, every part of which under French occupation had been for years shut up to British travellers. He

journeyed to Holland and Prussia along with Mr. Stuart, afterwards Lord Stuart de Rothsay, whom he probably accompanied in the capacity of tutor.

After his return home, Brougham was engaged in the preparation for the press of his first published work. In 1803 appeared his "Enquiry into the Colonial Policy of European Powers." This work is in two volumes octavo, and may be read with profit this day; indeed, as long as Britain is a colonial power. In the most masterly and exhaustive manner, the systems of government of all colonising powers, ancient and modern, are reviewed and contrasted. Its literary merits are very great, and by means of it Brougham procured the friendship of many eminent men. One special feature of interest there is in this book. He expresses himself decidedly against slavery and the slave-trade, although not with the same uncompromising demand for their immediate abolition that he shortly after so indignantly and eloquently insisted on.

We must here retrace our steps a few years, that we may not omit, ere we enter with Mr. Brougham the hard business of his energetic life in the world, certain passages of his training which were most influential upon his own career, and are most interesting to those who trace and study it.

To our enumeration of the salient points of difference which distinguished, at the close of the last century, the Scottish and English university systems, we might have added what was, perhaps, the chief peculiarity of the former the college debating societies in which the students held discussions, with no control or hindrance save what was imposed by their self-elected presidents