Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/422

374 hearing a &quot; paraphrase,&quot; by his great kinsman, sung in Glasgow cathedral, the authorship of which was probably known only to himself. His parentage on his mother s side being Scotch, and Scotland the place of his birth and education and, indeed, of his entry into life he naturally retained many Scottish peculiarities of manner and intona tion ; yet Brougham was not a Scotchman, he was some what eager to throw off his Scottish character, and he said in after life that there was no place he should visit so unwillingly as Edinburgh.

From his earliest age Brougham showed signs of extra ordinary talents and energy. His mother averred that he spoke distinctly several words when he was eight months and two weeks old. In his cradle he was the terror of his nurses, and as he grew older his grandmother compared him to the admirable Crichton from his excelling in every thing he undertook. When barely seven he was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, where he gained a triumph over Luke Eraser, his tutor, by successfully justifying the use of some Latin words which Eraser had condemned in an exercise, and in August 1791, when he was not yet thirteen, he left the school as dux, or head of the fifth form, taught by the headmaster, Dr Adam. He entered the university of Edinburgh in the winter of 1792, and in addition to the study of Greek under Professor Dalzell, he applied himself to the natural sciences under Professor Playfair, and especially to mathematics. At twelve one of his cousins met him with a huge quarto under his arm, which turned out to be Laplace s Mecanique Celeste, in French. In the mathematical class he hit upon the binomial theorem before he had been taught it ; and he was soon conversant with the Principia of Newton. It was characteristic of his astonishing memory that he carried with him through life all he had learned in boyhood. We have seen him in later years vary the monotony of a legal argument by working a problem in algebra, or exchanging a Greek epigram with .Lord Wellesley, in the midst of grave debates of politics or of laws. In 17.94 he set to work to master the fluxional calculus ; and in the following year he sent a paper to the Royal Society on some new phenomenon of light and colours, which was printed in the Transactions of that learned body. A paper on porisms was published in the same manner in 1798, and in 1803 his scientific reputation was so far established that he was elected a fellow of the society. But these efforts were more remarkable for their precocity than for their novelty. In spite of his taste for mathematical reasoning Brougham s mind was not an accurate or exact one and his pursuit of the physical sciences was rather a favourite recreation than a solid advantage to him. He continued his experiments in optics through life, however, and would sometimes impart observations, which he took for discoveries, to the French Academy of Science. An enthusi astic discourse on Newton and the Newtonian philosophy was written by him in his eighty-fifth year, when a statue of the great philosopher was erected at Grantham, and at that age he was still fond of commenting upon the Principia. But whilst Henry Brougham was following lectures in every branch of knowledge at the university, his inherent animal spirits and sociable nature made him the ring leader of the gayest and wildest youths of the time. Practical jokes, wrenching knockers, braving the watch, and wasting the small hours of the night, were pastimes as familiar to him as the gravest discussions. &quot; Looking back,&quot; says he, in his Memoirs, &quot; to these pranks reminds me of the inexhaustible fund of spirits one possessed, and how that capital foundation of never- tiring energy and endless restlessness enabled some of us to work on with unfailing strength to the end of life ; and even now, writing at nearly ninety years of age, I can recall them not boys but young men s freaks with pleasure and even exulta tion ; yet I agree with the old beggar Ochiltree, in the best of all Scott s works, saying Aye, aye ! they were daft days thae, but they were a vanity and waur. &quot; The spirit of these &quot; daft days,&quot; these mad-cap hours, clung to Brougham through life; and long after he had held his great seal of England, perhaps while he held it, he was just as ready to play his part in scenes of the wildest merriment as he had been at the university.

As early as 1792 he founded a debating society of a very juvenile character, to which several persons afterwards distinguished in life belonged. This society, however, sub sequently merged in the &quot; Speculative Society,&quot; which had a hall and library of its own in the college. Here Brougham, Horner, Jeffrey, Cockburn, Murray, and Moncreiff tried their early powers, and gave the promise of that eloquence which eventually placed them all in Parliament or on the bench of justice. Brougham surpassed them all, not, indeed, in depth of knowledge or soundness of reasoning, but in the astonishing flow of his language, his readiness in reply, the grace of his elocution, and his withering gift of sarcasm and ridicule, Of all the remarkable powers he possessed that of oratory was unquestionably the first. Conscious of his natural strength and of the advantages to be derived from this faculty in a country which is largely governed and swayed by rhetoric, he applied himself with peculiar zeal to the art of public speaking. He made himself perfectly conversant with the great masterpieces of ancient eloquence, which he knew to a great extent by heart ; he ever maintained that the highest effects of the orator could only be achieved by diligent preparation and constant study ; he bestowed extreme care upon the modulation of his voice, which was one of extraordinary compass and strength ; even his gestures and attitudes were the result of thought, and it was remarked that in concluding thg elaborate peroration of his speech on the queen s trial, he assumed the majestic bearing with which a minister of the Scottish Church invokes the blessing of God in dismissing his congregation. Both by study and by practice, then, oratory was his chief art, and he con tinued through life to cultivate it with the enthusiasm of an actor, who never entirely attains to the fulfilment of his own ideal. No doubt, in the resistless torrent of his invective, in appeals to the passions of his audience, in the rapid and lucid exposition of facts, in the skilful arrange ment of his discourse, which was highly artificial, and in the power of wielding enormous and intricate sentences, Brougham was unrivalled. He entered the House of Commons, as we shall presently see, soon after the voices of Pitt and Fox had been hushed for ever. Except Canning, there was no one in Parliament who could be compared to Brougham, and he rapidly rose to a height of distinction which became at one moment supremacy. Yet on looking back, even to the most celebrated and successful of his efforts, subsequently revised and published by himself, little remains which can lay any claim to the dignity of classic eloquence. Notwithstanding Lord Brougham s study arid enthusiastic admiration of Demosthenes, nothing was more unlike the stern simplicity and grandeur of the great Athenian &quot; Densiis, et brevis, et semper iastans sili &quot; than the declamation of Lord Brougham. The force of the current was wasted in a flood which overleapt its banks and broke its barriers. The effect was more intense than permanent. Even in the judgment of his own con temporaries, Canning surpassed him in wit ; Plunket in felicity of diction ; Lyndhurst in terseness, policy, and cogency of argument ; Ellenborough in dignity : but none of them possessed his marvellous versatility, arid it seemed as if he had borrowed from each of these great speakers a share in some gift, which they possessed in higher perfec- 