Francis Horner, a friend of Brougham from early childhood and a colleague on the Whig benches at Westminster, predicted in 1804, when Brougham was setting out on his legal and political careers, that if he failed in those ventures he might bury himself in retirement for the remainder of his life and occupy himself in "some vast scheme of literary ambition." As it turned out, Brougham combined the forensic, the parliamentary, and the literary. Indeed the reviewer of his Historical Sketches of Statesmen ... in the Time of George III for the Gentleman's Magazine (March 1840) described him as "one, who being one of the leading and most active statesmen of his day, has learned to soften the rugged path of politics with the elegance of literature." That judgment is, however, somewhat misleading. Brougham, indeed, published his first work, a paper on Sir Isaac Newton's optics, in Philosophical Transactions of the...