Edward the Confessor. From him descended William de Burgham, who held his lands of Henry I. by the ancient tenure of drengage, a circumstance which, by legal antiquaries, will be accepted as a valid confirmation of the allegation that the Brougham stock dates from "before the Conquest." Coming a few reigns nearer our own time, we find a De Burgham, with knightly rank, "making fine to King John not to go to Normandy." In 1351 we find a De Burgham Sheriff of Westmoreland; and in 1383, another returned to Parliament as knight of the shire. An entry in the "Record of Assizes, and Gaol Delivery," still preserved in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, specifies a De Burgham, a contemporary of Henry VI., Jack Cade, and Joan of Arc, acting as one of the King's Justices for the northern counties. More than a century later, in 1553, Thomas Burgham married the heiress of John Vaux of Catterlen and Tryermayne, thus introducing into the veins of his progeny undoubted Norman blood. Coming yet further down, and remarking that longevity characterised most of the race, we read that Henry Brougham of Scales Hall died in 1789, ten years after the birth of his great-great-grandson, at the age of a hundred and six, and having lived as a subject of seven English sovereigns. This patriarch survived all his own sons, and was succeeded by his grandson, on whose death the father of Lord Brougham became the head of the family and the inheritor of the estates. It is a singular circumstance that, although public documents and the honourable pride of the family have preserved with such rare accuracy and unbrokenness so ample a record of ancestors and their doings, not one of the De Burghams and Broughams appears to have been a man of and

remarkable personal distinction of character. We read of none of them as noticeable in any by-nook of English history; they seem to have taken no leading, or even secondary, part in any of the great national struggles. Lord Brougham's own father, we are informed on good authority, was "a rather weak man." Lord Brougham himself was the first of some fifty ancestors whose Christian names are preserved, who won a reputation beyond the limits of the ancestral county. Doubtless, it was from his mother that he inherited the powers and perseverance which made him one of the foremost Britons of his time.

Henry Brougham, of Brougham Hall, in the county of Westmoreland, and of Scales Hall, in the county of Cumberland, was born in 1742. He seems to have followed no profession; and we have discovered no incident of his life until he was upon the eve of his marriage. There is a romantic story told about that important event. To what degree it is authentic we do not attempt to say; as we have received it, so do we reproduce it; our authority being Chambers's Traditions of Edinburgh. It is there narrated that he had been betrothed to a young lady whose parents resided in his own neighbourhood. Shortly before the approaching nuptials she sickened and died. Mr. Brougham was affected by such poignant grief that his friends feared for his sanity. They urged him to remove for a time from scenes every one of which recalled to him memories which were too cruel for endurance. He accepted their advice, and betook himself to Edinburgh. Having secured a temporary lodging at an inn, he sallied forth to walk through one of the most picturesque cities in the world. He ascended to the ancient castle,

and entered into conversation with a citizen, or a stranger better acquainted than himself with the neighbouring scenery. This person courteously pointed out to the Cumberland gentleman the leading points of the magnificent panorama that stretches within the gaze of him who stands upon the Half-moon, or the Mons Meg, Battery. Being impressed with the apparent respectability of his chance companion, Mr. Brougham requested him to inform him where he could find suitable apartments and accommodation while he remained in the Scottish metropolis. He was recommended to stay at a boarding-house kept by an estimable widow lady at the foot of the Grassmarket and head of the Cowgatethe latter being now the St. Giles's of Edinburgh. Mr. Brougham followed the stranger's advice, and took up his abode under the roof of the lady who had been recommended to him. It turned out that she was the widow of the Reverend James Syme, who had been the parish minister of Alloa, and the sister of no less a man than the very head of Edinburgh society, Dr. Robertson, the Principal of the University, and the wellknown biographer of Charles V. Whether the introduction was so casual and fortuitous we know not. This, at least, is certain, that Mr. Brougham did live for a time in the house of Mrs. Syme. Equally certain is it that the visit to Edinburgh, which had been recommended to him to obliterate the memory of his former passion, was entirely successful; for he fell in love with his landlady's only daughter, Eleanor, wooed her and married her, in the year 1777. He took up his permanent abode in Edinburgh. His position in life enabled him to select any place he chose for a residence. His bride, who was her mother's only surviving

child, may have influenced him to select the city where he had won her, and where her mother lived. Mr. Brougham himself was, doubtless, far from insensible to the advantages which would spring from the introduction to pleasant and profitable society which his wife's uncle could not fail to secure him. The lovely New Town of Edinburgh was just at the time beginning to be built, and Mr. Brougham chose as his residence the house at the north-west corner of St. Andrew's Square, the first square built in the New Town. In this house Henry, the eldest child born to Mrs. Brougham, first saw the light, on the 19th of September, 1778.

Hardly anything is more difficult than to estimate what may be designated by a metaphor, whose meaning is obvious, historical distance or perspective. Any one can think or say—and no one can fail instantaneously to think -when the time contained between 1778 and the date of Lord Brougham's death is presented as the term of one man's life-"What a long and momentous time to have lived!" But even the first vague astonishment far from approaches the wonder which dawns upon the mind when certain landmarks are suggested for the assistance of our retrospective vision, and for the more precise fixature of the actual distance of the date of Lord Brougham's birth from that at which these words are written or read. If we accept the legend of Mr. Brougham's courtship as correct -and we confess to a reluctance to reject it—we can very safely and naturally imagine him preferring the locality whence he was first accidentally directed to his wife, as a favourite scene of his rambles. Nor could he have found a more enchanting spot in all Edinburgh or its environs. Standing on the Castle Hill, or on the

higher altitude of Arthur's Seat, the wide and diversified scenes that met the gazer's eyes in the year of Mr. Brougham's marriage, or in that of the birth of his eldest born, were different indeed to those which the tourist or inhabitant beholds with admiration to-day. Different we mean only in respect of the changes which man has wrought. The grand features of Nature are the same to-day as when Mr. Brougham first gazed on the Firth of Forth-nay, as when the Romans first built their fort of Alata Castra on the summit of the rock which Wallace and the Black Douglas scaled, and in a narrow chamber of which the first Stuart king of England was born. They are the same as when the first colony of immigrant Celts gazed on the undulating plains of Lothian and the green hills of Fife. Man may scratch the sides of the everlasting hills, but he cannot root them up, or alter their magnitudes. Ever since the last glacier glistened and thawed in the bosom of a Caledonian valley

-ever since the floating icebergs whose course Hugh Miller has defined, ceased to rut the stones over which they rode with indentations as straight as those graven by the subtlest craftsman-the same prospect in all essential features has presented itself to the human gazer from any of the three overhanging heights which give to the Queen of the North more than half her picturesqueness. Inchkeith still lies imbedded in the billowy Forth, as she ever did; the Lomond hills look down upon Loch Leven as they did many thousand years ere their cliffs echoed the oars of the gallant gentlemen who rescued their lovely queen; Benledi still towers far beyond the Ochils, as it towerel ages before the Lady of the Lake so courteously entertained under its shadow the gallant ancestor of Quee