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to exhaust his strength, enfeebled not his will to take an active part in deliberating upon topics connected with the domestic, colonial, and foreign policy of the kingdom.

Nor was all this insipid leaven of dry legislature without its sprinkling of salt; for, although Lord Brougham professed the utmost anxiety to consult the convenience of the House of Peers, and ascribed, with great truth we believe, any apparent neglect of duty to the multifarious avocations which weighed him down, the public was still occasionally reminded that the Lord High Chancellor was afflicted with many of the ills, if not blessed with the patience, of Job. In justice to all parties, however, let it not be forgotten that the period of his official career was an epoch of uncommon political excitement; and that the members of the House of Lords were all feverish. It was on the 21st of April, 1831, that the king went in state to prorogue Parliament. The Lord Chancellor withdrew from the woolsack in order that he might meet his majesty. In the mean time, the duke of Richmond having observed that the duke of Wellington had taken his seat next to Lord Lyndhurst, insisted that noble lords should occupy their proper places; and Lord Brougham, on his return, threw himself into the thick of an encounter which originated in "alarming" reports of an intended dissolution of Parliament. Within a few weeks after the House of Lords had met, another scene, more amusing than dignified, was unfolded to the public eye. The Lord Chancellor had no sooner begun to read the Address, than he was called to order amidst a volley of cross-fire which proved almost too loud and severe for the nerves even of Lord Brougham. Some exclaimed "Read," while others vociferated "No, no." He, at that time a novice to the forms of the Upper House, was perplexed; and this is the less wonderful, since those who had been born and bred peers were far from being harmonious in their views of what did or did not constitute "order.” His self-love was thus not unfrequently wounded by abrupt interruptions, and on such occasions he was insensibly betrayed into the expression of an egotism which a man endowed with his powers, accomplishments, and virtues, might have safely shunned. But he was not always successful in his attempts to justify his occasional devia

tions from the line of conduct prescribed by usage and precedent; although, no doubt, exceptions were, without much reason, taken to his forgetfulness of official etiquette. Whatever license, however, might be mutually arrogated by noble lords within the walls of Parliament, a respectful neutrality was to be enforced against all external intermeddlers, particularly if these happened to be at once ignorant and malicious. Lord Brougham had been on all occasions a warm advocate for the liberty of the press, and extremely lenient to its errors. No man, if such had been his disposition, might have more frequently and reasonably complained of its insolence; and yet he was always the first to forgive its offences. His forbearance in this respect was habitual, and spring not from caprice; he preferred living down any calumny to risking the dignity of Parliament by involving it in disputes with the organs of public opinion. His eyes and ears must have been sealed if he had not been fully aware that he was about this period, and indeed at all times, a mark for the poisoned arrows of political hatred. In silence, however, was he wont to shake off the fiery darts, and never was the slightest scar left behind. But this spirit of indifference which animated him in meeting all attacks upon his personal or political conduct was very naturally and very properly converted into mingled indignation and scorn when his integrity as a judge happened to be impugned. The Morning Post had dared to affirm that the Lord Chancellor had on one occasion garbled the minutes and falsified an entry of the judicial proceedings of the House of Lords. We disdain to attach even a shadow of importance to the vulgar and mendacious calumny by gravely vindicating Lord Brougham from so foul a charge. He chastised the open offender, and through him the secret traducer. His defence was, as a matter of course, triumphant; and, in an otherwise adverse assembly, he resumed his seat amidst cheers from even his political foes.

But Ireland was the rock on which the administration of Lord Melbourne was destined to be shipwrecked. Lord Brougham had fully concurred with Earl Grey in sanctioning certain remedial measures which appeared essential to the tranquillity of the

2 In the cause of Solarte v. Palmer, vide H. P. D. 3rd series, vol. xxiv. pp. 892, sqq.; and Annual Register, vol. lxxvi. pp. 318, 319.

State, and the prosperity, nay, the safety, of the Church in that part of the empire. Disease was eating into the very vitals of the establishment; and to soothe, if not to heal the sore, the Church Temporalities Bill was proposed by the minister. The views of the Chancellor were on this subject simple and distinct: excrescences were to be lopped off that defects might be supplied : any unappropriated surplus of revenue ought, he maintained, to be, above every other consideration, made available for enlarged efficiency within the circle of operation which the establishment itself embraced; and he conceived it to be perfectly consistent with strict adherence to this principle, that the cause of education according to the principles of the Church should not be forgotten. But Ireland, on the one hand, refused to be thus gonciliated, and Lord Brougham, on the other, while anxious to extend to her all the privileges of the British constitution, firmly opposed any measure the tendency of which was not merely to endanger the stability of the monarchy but to menace the very existence of the United Kingdom. He scorned the idea of dissolving the union between England and Ireland, and exposed the baseness of those agitators who, instead of pursuing the path of honourable ambition, courted notoriety by inflaming the passions of the ignorant, and stooped to pick up a subsistence by personal and political mendicancy. In short, the language and acts of the Irish people had risen to so outrageous a height, that when, at the beginning of the year 1833, Earl Grey intimated his intention to submit for the consideration of the Legislature a bill, the object of which should be the effectual repression of disturbances in Ireland, the Chancellor, while he regretted that any necessity for the adoption of severe and stringent measures should exist, forgot not that, duties between the subject and the Government being reciprocal, protection afforded to life, liberty, and property, is the only ground upon which a State can claim obedience to the law, or the Crown assert its right to a due allegiance. He admitted that the Act, which he hoped might be soon rescinded, involved a suspension of the Constitution, and a temporary infraction of the rights of the Irish people; and being such, he would not exempt from its operation parties who might organize resistance

to the laws: he would not "press with the whole weight of his loins upon the ignorant peasant," and, "at the same time raise not his little finger" against selfish and crafty men, who, day after day and year after year, were striving to construct out of the elements of local and partial discontent one universal system of political agitation. Negotiation upon this point between the Government in London, the Lord-lieutenant in Dublin, and Mr. Littleton, then Secretary for Ireland, led to mutual misapprehension and ministerial confusion. Distrust and dissensions crept even into the secret places of the cabinet: disclosures of confidential communications were demanded, and, the documents being withheld, the ministers of the Crown exposed themselves to suspicion and severe reprimand. The Government had been already weakened by the secession of some of its members and by the apathy or aversion of others who still reluctantly adhered to it. Earl Grey, too, bending under the weight of three score years and ten, as well as the burden of public affairs, was anxious to retire from public life; and we cannot help even now feeling regret that the close of so'protracted and brilliant a career should have been hastened by causes extraneous to himself. That Lord Brougham was a party to any cabal which had for its object the quiet expulsion of Earl Grey from office we do not believe; and we allude to the subject chiefly because it afforded to Lord Brougham an opportunity of passing a high and wellmerited eulogy on the character of the retired minister, towards whom he had uniformly displayed the most unfeigned respect and esteem. But the Chancellor might probably have more successfully consulted his personal and political reputation by withdrawing along with his acknowledged chief than by consenting to serve under Lord Melbourne, whose bland and hollow courtesy could not commend itself to the masculine and virtuous, though somewhat rugged mind of Lord Brougham. He ought to have spurned connection with a minister who, notwithstanding all his fascinations, was possessed of neither moral weight nor intellectual power. The result of various negotiations was, that, instead of a premier being selected to construct a Cabinet, those members who had not resigned, and who constituted the body of a ministry, simply looked out for a new

& have

head. The lot fell to the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne ; Lord Brougham continuing to hold the Great Seal. The first act of the re-modelled ministry was ominous of its speedy downfall; for it was inaugurated by one of those anomalous movements which occasionally occur in public life, when the recognition of a new political opinion, or the renunciation of an old one, happens opportunely to be coincident with the retention of office and the enjoyment of power. The minister announced to the House of Lords that the Irish Coercion Bill, as sanctioned by Earl Grey and the Chancellor, had been thrown aside, and was to be replaced by another measure from which the objectionable clauses were to be excluded. This change of ministerial action appeared, to simple minds uninitiated in the mysteries of party, to be a very audacious stroke of policy. Certain members of the cabinet, and in the very front of them Lord Brougham, threw themselves open to a charge of gross inconsistency; and the only explanation offered by him was founded on the assumption that the measure, as originally framed, could not be carried through the House of Commons. His vindication amounted to neither more nor less than that the Government had no option in the matter; and he went so far as to affirm, that if Earl Grey had continued at the head of affairs, he certainly would have, under the altered circumstances of the case,1 adopted the course which Viscount Melbourne had been compelled to pursue. He, at the same time, positively denied that any bargain had been struck, or even contemplated, between the Government and the party of which Mr. O'Connell was the acknowledged representative; and avowed that not the contents of the letter written to Earl Grey by the Lordlieutenant, but the discovery of those contents, was the reason for omitting the clause relating to public meetings—a lame

1 The expression of Earl Grey was, that he would have "advised it ;" and Lord Brougham inferred that "what Earl Grey would have advised he would have done." That, however, was only a moral, not a logical conclusion. Fearless though he was, Earl Grey shrunk from the discredit which could not but attach to inconsistency so gross. The difficulty of his position was, in all likelihood, his chief motive for retirement at that critical juncture from public affairs; although it must be admitted that he had, in the course of the preceding year, expressed a wish to resign office.