must have been some passage offensive to the feelings of the living and of the friends of the dead.  Would any mercy have been shown to Canning’s character and memory by any of the Whig party, either in society or in Reviews?  Would the line have been drawn of only attacking Canning’s executors, who published the papers, and leaving Canning himself untouched?  Clearly and certainly not, and yet I am putting a very much weaker case, for we had joined Canning, and all political enmity was at an end:  whereas the Tories and Romilly never had for an hour laid aside their mutual hostility.”

And if he was capable of equity, Brougham was also capable of hearty admiration, even of an old friend who had on later occasions gone into a line which he intensely disliked.  It is a relief in the pages of blusterous anger and raging censure to come upon what he says of Jeffrey.

“I can truly say that there never in all my life crossed my mind one single unkind feeling respecting him, or indeed any feeling but that of the warmest affection and the most unmingled admiration of his character, believing and knowing him to be as excellent and amiable as he is great in the ordinary, and, as I think, the far less important sense of the word.”

Of the value of Brougham’s contributions we cannot now judge.  They will not, in spite of their energy and force, bear re-reading to-day, and perhaps the same may be said of three-fourths of Jeffrey’s once famous essays.  Brougham’s self-confidence is heroic.  He believed that he could make a speech for Bolingbroke, but by-and-by he had sense enough to see that, in order to attempt this, he ought to read Bolingbroke for a year, and then practise for another year.  In 1838 he thought nothing of undertaking, amid all the demands of active life, such a bagatelle as a History of the French Revolution.  “I have some little knack of narrative,” he says, “the most difficult by far of all styles, and never yet attained in perfection but by Hume and Livy; and I bring as much oratory and science to the task as most of my predecessors.”  But what sort of science?  And what has oratory to do with it?  And how could he deceive himself into thinking that he could retire to write a history?  Nobody that ever lived would have more speedily found out the truth of Voltaire’s saying, “Le repos est une bonne chose, mais l’ennui est son frere.”  The truth is that one learns, after a certain observation of the world, to divide one’s amazement pretty equally between the literary voluptuary or over-fastidious collegian, on the one hand, who is so impressed by the size of his subject that he never does more than collect material and make notes, and the presumptuous politician, on the other hand, who thinks that he can write a history or settle the issues of philosophy and theology in odd half-hours.  The one is so enfeebled in will and literary energy after his viginti annorum lucubrationes; the other is so accustomed to be content with the hurry, the unfinishedness, the rough-and-ready methods of practical affairs, and they both in different ways measure the worth and seriousness of literature so wrongly in relation to the rest of human interests.