were to pass away as a scroll, and every visible glory which the finger of the Divinity has inscribed on it were extinguished for ever-an event so awful to us, and to every world in our vicinity, by which so many suns would be extinguished, and so many varied scenes of life and population would rush into forgetfulness-what is it in the high scale of the Almighty's workmanship? a mere shred, which, though scattered into nothing, would leave the universe of God one entire scene of greatness and of majesty. Though the earth and the heavens were to disappear, there are other worlds which roll afar; the light of other suns shines upon them; and the sky which mantles them is garnished with other stars. Is it presumption to say that the moral world extends to these distant and unknown regions? that they are occupied with people? that the charities of home and of neighbourhood flourish there? that the praises of God are there lifted up, and His goodness rejoiced in? that there piety has its temples and its offerings? and the richness of the divine attributes is there felt and admired by intelligent worshippers?

And what is this world in the immensity which teems with them; and what are they who occupy it? The universe at large would suffer as little in its splendour and variety by the destruction of our planet as the verdure and sublime magnitude of a forest would suffer by the fall of a single leaf. The leaf quivers on the branch which supports it. It lies at the mercy of the slightest accident. A breath of wind tears it from its stem, and it lights on the stream of water which passes underneath. In a moment of time, the life which we know by the microscope it teems with is extinguished; and an occurrence so insignificant in the eye of man, and on the scale of his observation, carries in it to the myriads which people this little leaf an event as terrible and as decisive as the destruction of a world. Now, on the grand scale of the universe, we, the occupiers of this ball, which performs its little round among the suns and the systems that astronomy has unfolded—we may feel the same littleness and the same insecurity. We differ from the leaf only in this circumstance, that it would require the operation of greater elements to destroy us. But these elements exist. The fire which rages within may lift its devouring energy to the surface of our planet, and transform it into one wide and wasting volcano. The sudden formation of elastic matter in the bowels of the earth-and it lies within the agency of known substances to accomplish this-may explode it into frag

ments.

The exhalation of noxious air from below may impart a virulence to the air that is around us; it may affect the delicate proportion of its ingredients; and the whole of animated nature may wither and die under the malignity of a tainted atmosphere. A blazing comet may cross this fated planet in its orbit, and realise all the terrors which superstition has conceived of it. We cannot anticipate with precision the consequences of an event which every astronomer must know to lie within the limits of chance and probability. It may hurry our globe towards the sun, or drag it to the outer regions of the planetary system, or give it a new axis of revolution -and the effect, which I shall simply announce without explaining it, would be to change the place of the ocean and bring another mighty flood upon our islands and continents.

These are changes which may happen in a single instant of time, and against which nothing known in the

present system of things provides us with any security. They might not annihilate the earth, but they would unpeople it, and we, who tread its surface with such firm and assured footsteps, are at the mercy of devouring elements, which, if let loose upon us by the hand of the Almighty, would spread solitude and silence and death over the dominions of the world.

Now, it is this littleness and this insecurity which make the protection of the Almighty so dear to us, and bring with such emphasis to every pious bosom the holy lessons of humility and gratitude. The God who sitteth above, and presides in high authority over all worlds, is mindful of man; and though at this moment His energy is felt in the remotest provinces of creation, we may feel the same security in His providence as if we were the objects of His undivided care.

It is not for us to bring our minds up to this mysterious agency. But such is the incomprehensible fact, that the same Being whose eye is abroad over the whole universe gives vegetation to every blade of grass, and motion to every particle of blood which circulates through the veins of the minutest animal; that though His mind takes into His comprehensive grasp immensity and all its wonders, I am as much known to Him as if I were the single object of His attention; that He marks all my thoughts; that He gives birth to every feeling and every movement within me; and that, with an exercise of power which I can neither describe nor comprehend, the same God who sits in the highest heaven, and reigns over the glories of the firmament, is at my right hand to give me every breath which I draw and every comfort which I enjoy.

Chalmers's son-in-law, Dr Hanna, prepared the Memoirs (4 vols. 1849-52), with a Selection from his Correspondence (1853); and there are smaller books by Dr Fraser (1881), Mrs Oliphant (1893), and Professor W. G. Blaikie (1897).

Their

Lord Brougham was one of the most voluminous and versatile contributors to the Edinburgh Review. Like Jeffrey, he was born in Edinburgh; but his father was a north of England man, Henry Brougham of Brougham Hall in Westmorland, who, sojourning in Edinburgh, lodged with a widowed sister of Dr Robertson the historian, and married her daughter. eldest son, Henry, born 19th September 1778, was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, and his contemporary, Lord Cockburn, tells a characteristic story about him: 'Brougham made his first public explosion in Fraser's (the Latin) class. He dared to differ from Fraser, a hot but good-natured old fellow, on some small bit of Latinity. The master, like other men in power, maintained his own infallibility, punished the rebel, and flattered himself that the affair was over. But Brougham reappeared next day loaded with books, returned to the charge before the whole class, and compelled honest Luke to acknowledge he had been wrong. This made Brougham famous throughout the whole school.' From the High School, Brougham entered the University of Edinburgh, and applied himself so assiduously to mathematics that in 1796 he was able to contribute to the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Experi ments and Observations on the Inflection, Reflection,

and Colours of Light. In 1798 he published there a paper on porisms; and, as Campbell the poet recorded, the best judges were astonished at such papers from a youth of twenty. Brougham studied law, and was admitted in 1800 to the Scottish Bar, at which he practised till 1807. In 1803, besides co-operating zealously in the Edinburgh Review, he published an elaborate Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers, in which he discussed the colonial systems of America, France, Spain, and England. As a Whig he was debarred from hopes of promotion in Scotland, and he therefore went south and settled in London. After a diplomatic mission to Lisbon, he joined the English Bar, where he was soon distinguished for unwearied application, fearlessness, and vehement oratory; and in 1810 he entered the House of Commons.

In the course of his ambitious career Henry Brougham fell off from his early friends. We have no trace of him in the genial correspondence of Horner, Sydney Smith, or Jeffrey; but though Brougham could not inspire affection, and was erratic and inconsistent in much of his conduct, amidst all his personal ambition, rashness, and indiscretion he was the steady friend of public improvement, of slave abolition, popular education, religious toleration, Free Trade, and law reform. He carried a bill making the slavetrade felony, and another repealing the Orders in Council. He did much for the London University, Mechanics' Institutes, the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge, and the Social Science Association. His most famous professional appearance was his defence of Queen Caroline (1820), which lost him the favour of the Crown, but made him a popular idol. He was not loved by the aristocratic Whigs, who, however, found him indispensable; and in 1830 he was made a peer and Lord Chancellor, and assisted greatly in carrying the Reform Bill. But his arrogance, self-confidence, and eccentricity made him unpopular with his colleagues. He went out with the Whigs in 1834, and on their return was shelved, never holding office again. He still laboured unceasingly as a law reformer, and carried on an amazing industry in writing books on mathematics, physics, metaphysics, history, theology, and law. He wrote at least one novel (Albert Lunel, or The Château of Languedoc, a philosophical romance, designed as a monument to his dead daughter), which he soon carefully suppressed; there is hardly a department of science or literature into which he did not make incursions. But his works have little permanent value. critic he ranks below his associates Jeffrey and Sydney Smith. His liveliest contribution (which he never openly acknowledged) was his critique on Lord Byron's Hours of Idleness; in the first twenty numbers of the Review he wrote eighty articles. His style is generally heavy, verbose, and inelegant; and his time was afterwards too largely devoted to

As

public affairs to enable him to keep pace with the age either in scientific knowledge or literary information; though in his sketches of modern statesmen were sometimes found new facts and letters to which other writers had not access. Rogers said of him, 'There goes Solon, Lycurgus, Demosthenes, Archimedes, Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Chesterfield, and a great many more in one post-chaise ;' it was O'Connell who jeered, 'If Brougham knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything;' Mr John Morley has not scrupled to call him a man of encyclopædic ignorance.' He was a great orator and debater, but he carried declamation and invective beyond reasonable bounds. Brougham died at Cannes (where he had built a villa and lived part of every year) on the 7th of May 1868. Seven years before this, in his eighty-fourth year, the veteran statesman commenced writing notices of his Life and Times, which were published in three volumes in 1871. These volumes abound in errors and inaccuracies, easily accounted for by the great age of the writer; he actually caused to be printed in full there, as his own production at the age of thirteen, what was immediately recognised as a verbal translation of Memnon, ou la Sagesse Humaine, a characteristic work of Voltaire in his prime! His vanity and prejudices are very conspicuous; but the work discloses many of the springs of political movements and includes valuable letters and other papers. Some of his speeches were very carefully prepared the peroration of the speech at the end of Queen Caroline's trial he is said to have written and rewritten no less than fifteen times.

:

Peroration of the Last Speech for Queen Caroline. Let me call on you, even at the risk of repetition, never to dismiss for a moment from your minds the two great points upon which I rest my attack upon the evidence: first, that the accusers have not proved the facts by the good witnesses who were within their reach, whom they had no shadow of pretext for not calling; and, secondly, that the witnesses whom they have ventured to call are, every one of them, irreparably damaged in their credit. How, I again ask, is a plot ever to be discovered except by the means of these two principles? Nay, there are instances in which plots have been discovered through the medium of the second principle, when the first had happened to fail. When venerable witnesses have been brought forward—when persons above all suspicion have lent themselves for a season to impure plans-when no escape for the guiltless seemed open, no chance of safety to remain-they have almost providentially escaped from the snare by the second of those two principles; by the evidence breaking down where it was not expected to be sifted; by a weak point being found where no provision, the attack being unforeseen, had been made to support it. Your Lordships recollect that great passage-I say great, for it is poetically just and eloquent, even were it not inspired-in the sacred writings where the Elders had joined themselves in a plot which had appeared to have succeeded; for that,' as the Book says, 'they had hardened their hearts, and had turned away their eyes,

that they might not look at Heaven, and that they might do the purposes of unjust judgments.' But they, though giving a clear, consistent, uncontradicted story, were disappointed, and their victim was rescued from their gripe by the trifling circumstance of a contradiction about a tamarisk tree. Let not men call these contradictions or those falsehoods which false witnesses swear to from needless and heedless falsehood, not going to the main body of the case, but to the main body of the credit of the witnesses-let not men rashly and blindly call these things accidents. They are just rather than merciful dispensations of that Providence which wills not that the guilty should triumph, and which favourably protects the innocent.

Such, my Lords, is the case now before you! Such is the evidence in support of the measure-evidence inadequate to prove a debt-impotent to deprive of a civil right—ridiculous to convict of the lowest offencemonstrous to ruin the honour, to blast the name of an English queen! What shall I say, then, if this is the proof by which an act of judicial legislation, a parliamentary sentence, an ex post facto law, is sought to be passed against this defenceless woman? My Lords, I pray you to pause. I do earnestly beseech you to take heed! You are standing upon the brink of a precipice; then beware! It will go forth your judgment, if sentence shall go against the queen. But it will be the only judgment you ever pronounced which, instead of reaching its object, will return and bound back upon those who gave it. Save the country, my Lords, from the horrors of this catastrophe-save yourselves from this peril; rescue that country of which you are the ornaments, but in which you can flourish no longer when severed from the people than the blossom when cut off from the roots and the stem of the tree. Save that country, that you may continue to adorn it; save the Crown, which is in jeopardy; the Aristocracy, which is shaken; save the Altar, which must stagger with the blow that rends its kindred Throne. You have said, my Lords, you have willed-the Church and the King have willed—that the queen should be deprived of its solemn service. She has, instead of that solemnity, the heartfelt prayers of the people. She wants no prayers of mine. But I do here pour forth my humble supplications at the throne of mercy, that that mercy may be poured down upon the people in a larger measure than the merits of their rulers may deserve, and that your hearts may be turned to justice !

On Law Reform.

The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to

run.

You have the power of sending your name down through all times, illustrated by deeds of higher fame and more useful import than ever were done within these walls. You saw the greatest warrior of the ageconqueror of Italy-humbler of Germany-terror of the North-saw him account all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you are now in a condition to win-saw him contemn the fickleness of Fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his memorable boast: 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my hand.' You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in arms you overcame ! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign.

The praise which false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the Justinians of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and the good to that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking shall be accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most chiefly to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus conquering and ruling. 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 a great prince, and to which the present also has its claims. But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when he shall have it to say that he found law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book, left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich, left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the twoedged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence !

(From Speech in Parliament in 1828.) Amongst his one hundred and thirty-three works (11 vols. 1855-61, without the Autobiography, 1871; 2nd ed. 1873) are a Discourse on Natural Theology; an edition of Paley; a translation of Demos. thenes' Peri tou Stephanou; Historical Sketches of Statesmen of the Time of George III.; Political Philosophy; Lives of Men of Letters and Science of the Time of George III.; History of Eng land and France under the House of Lancaster; besides select cases, speeches, and tracts on scientific subjects and law reform.

John, Lord Campbell (1779-1861), Lord Chancellor of England, was a son of the parish minister of Cupar - Fife; but he could trace his descent from the Earl of Argyll who fell at Flodden, and, through his mother, from the fourteenth-century Regent Albany. He studied for the ministry at St Andrews University, became (1798) a tutor in London, joined Lincoln's Inn (1800), read law and acted as reporter and dramatic critic to the Morning Chronicle, and was called to the Bar in 1806. His nisi prius 'Reports' (1808) brought him into notice, and by 1824 he was leader of the Oxford circuit. A King's Counsel in 1827, Whig M.P. successively for Stafford and for Dudley, he was made Solicitor-General and knighted in 1832. Attorney-General in 1834, he was defeated at Dudley, but returned for Edinburgh. Created Lord Campbell (1841), he was for six weeks Lord Chancellor of Ireland; and became successively Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1846), Chief-Justice of the Queen's Bench (1850), and Lord Chancellor of England (1859). A courteous and painstaking judge, as a legislator he carried through Parliament statutes on defamation, compensation for death by accident, and against obscene publications. His Lives of the Chief-Justices (1849-57) and of the Lord Chancellors (1845-47) have become, in spite of their notorious faults, a part of English literature; though readable and full of novel and entertaining matter and good stories, they are disfigured by the obtrusion of himself, and in the later volumes by ungenerous misconstruction, the assignment of base motives, and an inaccuracy convenient for his own arguments. He borrowed freely without acknowledgment; what looks like malice is probably at times only carelessness; and

it has been argued in palliation of his unkindest cuts that he had become blunted in his own feelings. Professor Gardiner and Mr Bass Mullinger, speaking with deliberation in their Introduction to English History, say the Lives of the Chancellors is throughout wanting in a due sense of the obligations imposed by such a task, is disfigured by unblushing plagiarisms, and, as the writer approaches his own times, by much unscrupulous misrepresentation.' No doubt the uncomplimentary anecdotes and stinging remarks added to the vivacity of the Lives. Repeating Arbuthnot's bon-mot on Curll's biographies, Sir Charles Wetherell declared of Campbell that 'his noble and biographical friend had added a new terror to death.' the supplementary volume of the Chancellors (vol. vii.), published after Campbell's death, his characteristic faults are seen at their worst.

In

The following from his Life of Brougham will show the tone which irritated the subjects of his biographies and their friends :

As a specimen of his 'Introductions,' I give an extract from that to his 'Speech at the Liverpool Election in 1812. [In the extract a parliamentary colleague of Brougham's is said to have abhorred the spirit of intrigue which not rarely gave some inferior man or some busy meddling woman, probably unprincipled, a sway in the destiny of the party fatal to its success and all but fatal to its character.']

If all this were true, it surely comes very ungraciously from one who had been a member of the Whig party above twenty years, and who, within two years, had passionately wished to continue in it. The lady he so uncourteously refers to is evidently Lady Holland, the wife of his friend Lord Holland, his early patron on his first coming to London-at whose hospitable board I have often met him. Although Lady Holland certainly had considerable influence in Whig councils, I do not believe that it was ever exercised against Brougham. But he was of a different opinion, and he would never afterwards speak to her, for although he could forgive Lord Melbourne, he could not forgive her, who was supposed to have been Lord Melbourne's adviser in excluding him. In the session of 1838 Brougham carried on very active hostilities against Lord Melbourne's Government, still showing Radical colours, but more and more sympathising and coming to an implied understanding with the Duke of Wellington, Lord Lyndhurst, and the Tories. They accused us of a disposition to revolutionise both Church and State from the proposed measure about Church Rates, and the practical admission of Roman Catholics to a fair share of power and patronage in Ireland, whereas Brougham still denounced us as Reactionaries, Finalists, and Mock Reformers because we resisted for the present any further organic change. Being taunted by Lord Melbourne for his bitter opposition to those with whom he had so long acted, and whom he had so zealously patronised in the year 1835, when he was no longer in office and they were pursuing the same policy as at present, he insisted that they had diverged, while he was marching straight forward.

It is possible that he had worked himself into the belief that he was acting consistently and from purely disinterested motives; but, if so, he stood alone in this

belief, for all the rest of mankind agreed that revenge was the mainspring of his conduct, and that his only consideration was how he might most spite and damage those by whom he had been ill-used. The Radicals making great play against the Government by the opposition which Ministers offered to the ballot - although he was one of the framers of the Reform Bill who had peremptorily objected to the proposal of his colleagues Lord Durham and Sir James Graham to admit the ballot, and so late as his famous Scottish Progress,' complaining of the unreasonable Radicals, he had intimated an opinion that rather too much had been done in the way of innovation—he now expressly recommended the ballot, and told the Lords that unless their Lordships made up their minds either to this measure or some measure of this sort for the protection of electors, it would be carried against them. The time appeared to him to be come when something must be done. The sooner, therefore, their Lordships made up their minds to some such measure as this, the better it would be for them.' The Tories did not vocally cheer, but they showed by their radiant countenances and sparkling eyes with what delight they heard observations which had such a tendency to disparage the Whigs, to deprive the Govern ment of Liberal support, and to accelerate their own return to power. Although they and their irregular ally appeared on opposite sides of the House, there was between them during the debate a quick interchange of nods and winks and wreathed smiles, followed by much approving raillery and cordial gratulation when the debate was over.

The great practical measure of this session was the Bill for the Better Government of the Canadas. There had been an open rebellion in Lower Canada, and its Legislative Assembly had thrown off allegiance to the English Crown. The insurgents had been defeated, and tranquillity had been restored; but a change in the mode of ruling the colony was universally allowed to be indispensable, and there was a necessity for conferring extraordinary powers on Lord Durham, who in the emergency had patriotically agreed to go out as Governor. Even the Duke of Wellington and Lord Lyndhurst concurred in the principle of the bill, although they censured some of its details. But Brougham furiously opposed the bill, and every clause of it-his animosity on this occasion being sharpened by a special grudge fostered by him against Lord Durham, who in the year 1834 had charged him with having become a very cool Reformer, and 'little better than a Conservative.' In a great speech upon the subject which, according to his custom, he published as a pamphlet, with a Preface praising himself and vilifying others, he gave a narrative of the measures of the Government at home to meet the spirit of insubordination in Canada, and he thus censured their inaction in the summer of 1837. . . . This somewhat cumbrous jocularity may have been produced by pure patriotism, but I must confess it seems to me rather an ebullition of envy, and that the pseudo-patriot was resenting his own exclusion from the luxurious banquet spread for the famished Whigs at the accession of Queen Victoria.

The Lives have passed through many editions both in Britain and in America. Lord Campbell's wife, a daughter of Lord Abinger, was created Baroness Stratheden (1836). There is a Life of the Chancellor by his daughter, the Hon. Mrs Hardcastle, containing autobiographical materials, diary, and letters (1881).

Henry Hallam (1777-1859), son of the Dean of Wells, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the Bar by the Inner Temple. He was early appointed a Commissioner of Stamps, a well-paid office which, with his private means, secured him a sufficient income and allowed him to withdraw from legal practice and prosecute those studies on which his fame rests. 'Classic Hallam, much renowned for Greek,' as Byron called him, was an early and important contributor to the Edinburgh Review. His View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818), a series of dissertations on European history from the fifth to the end of the fifteenth century, at once gave him a front rank amongst English historians, and procured for him the honours of D.C.L. and F.R.S. In 1827 he published The Constitutional History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II.; and in 1837-38 an Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. With vast stores of knowledge and indefatigable application, Hallam possessed a clear and independent judgment, and a style grave and impressive, though somewhat lacking in vivacity, colour, warmth, and sympathy. His Introduction to the Literature of Europe is a great monument of his erudition, though it is impossible for any man to be infallible on such a wide field; and his judgments on literature were less original and less permanently valuable than his epoch-making work in constitutional history. He insisted on the necessity of studying the original sources of history, and helped to found an English historical school. His works must still be consulted by the student, though they can hardly be popular with the general reader. His views of political questions were those generally adopted by the Whig party; but though stated with calmness and moderation, they provoked Southey and all Tories and HighChurchmen to wrath, and, on the other hand, secured Macaulay's enthusiastic laudation. He was peculiarly a supporter of principles, not of men, and was eminently judicial and judicious in his estimates, though somewhat insular in his sympathies and outlook. In the Literature of Europe, though there too we seem to deal with shades rather than with living men of like passions with ourselves, there is at times something more of feeling and imagination, a more sympathetic tone, than could have been anticipated from the calm, unimpassioned tenor of Hallam's historic style. Hallam, like Burke, in his latter years 'lived in an inverted order they who ought to have succeeded him had gone before him; they who should have been to him as posterity were in the place of ancestors.' His eldest son, Arthur Henry Hallam--the subject of Tennyson's In Memoriam-died in 1833; and another son, Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, was taken from him, shortly after he had been called to the Bar, in 1850. Hallam wrote a memoir of his eldest son, prefixed to a collection of his literary remains

science and art, and the constellation of scholars and poets, of architects and painters, whose reflected beams cast their radiance around his head. His political reputation, though far less durable, was in his own age as conspicuous as that which he acquired in the history of letters. Equally active and sagacious, he held his way through the varying combinations of Italian policy, always with credit, and generally with success. Florence, if not enriched, was upon the whole aggrandised during his administration, which was exposed to some severe storms from the unscrupulous adversaries, Sixtus IV. and Ferdinand of Naples, whom he was compelled to resist. As a patriot, indeed, we never can bestow upon Lorenzo de' Medici the meed of disinterested virtue. He completed that subversion of the Florentine republic which his two immediate ancestors had so well prepared. The two councils, her regular legislature, he superseded by a permanent senate of seventy persons; while the gonfalonier and priors, become a mockery and pageant to keep up the illusion of liberty, were taught that in exercising a legitimate authority without the sanction of their prince, a name now first heard at Florence, they