public charity opens to them asylums; where, thanks to the unremitting care, inexhaustible benevolence, and superior abilities of the directors, the light of intelligence frequently rekindles, or where, at least, the sufferings of the inmates are not aggravated by want, insult, and tortures. But, as in physical, so in moral discases and deformities, there is a second class. It is composed of men, whose minds are depraved without being sensibly impaired; whose hearts are callous to all kind, honourable, and virtuous feelings; whose inveterate habits of vice and wrong-doing have so completely obliterated all notion of decency, all sense of shame, that they can no longer distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong, or virtue from vice, but even go so far as generally to mistake the one for the other. Nay, more: some of them, the worst of all, take their stand in the highest ranks of society, rave in the senate, bluster in the council of the nation, shine at courts, and everywhere proclaim falsehood to be truth, vice to be virtue, apostacy to be consistency, populicide to be patriotism; and, while devoting the whole of their energies to blind, corrupt, and enslave mankind, they pretend to be the instructors, the monitors, the benefactors of the human race! And as there is no sound flogging now, as there was twenty-five years ago, there are no treadmills for these bare-faced incurables in corruption! So that society is left unprotected against their revolting exhibitions and their satanic propagandism!!

Such were our reflections after reading the volume before us; the most complete compound we have ever met with, of all the vile passions that can fill a human breast, and of all the malignant instincts that can derange a man's mind. We have long been prepared for this performance of Henry, now Lord Brougham; and this is not yet the climax he is doomed to attain; it is but another stone added to the monumental pillory which he is erecting to himself, and on which he must ere long finish his mischievous career, amidst the scorn of his fellow-men.

The people, so long deceived as to the character of this man, notwithstanding the warnings of one of their best friends, honest Major Cartwright, and of the sincere, though vain, Jeremy Bentham, have at last found out their crror, and now despise the trickster who advocated their cause, and declaimed in favour of liberty, only so far and so long as it suited his own purposes, and was conducive to his own elevation. Lord Brougham, therefore, hates the people, from whom he has now nothing to hope and everything to fear; he is foremost among the enemies of reform, of any extension of electoral privileges, and of freedom in any shape, since all these would enable the people to avenge their wrongs, and to inflict severe but just penalties upon the wrongdoers.

The Whigs, for their party purposes, had the bad taste and the misfortune to introduce Brougham into political life; to cherish with fostering cheers his parliamentary essays; to applaud his energetic invectives, which they called eloquence and patriotism; to place him in the front line of their ranks, in their struggles for power. They had no sooner raised him to office than they had cause to repent and to distrust him; his blundering, imperious, and meddling disposition, and his vulgarity, made them ashamed of their creation. As a member of the ministry, his double dealings, his violence of temper, and his absurd pretensions, disgusted his own colleagues, who unceremoniously discarded him. Lord Brougham, therefore, hates the Whigs, and, above all, his late co-partners in the ministry.

The public press has mainly been influential in bringing him into notoriety, in over-estimating his abilities, and in establishing his reputation for patriotism. Thanks to the press, and to the press alone, Henry Brougham was the most accomplished scholar, the most complete linguist, the most acute philosopher of his age. Henry Brougham was a profound mathematician: mechanics, engineering, astronomy, had no mysteries to his comprehensive mind. The fine arts, music, and painting, were quite familiar to him; had he but condescended to enter into rivalship with Rossini or Lawrence, he would have completely eclipsed their fame. Henry Brougham was a light of jurisprudence: the Cicero of the bar, the Demosthenes of the senate. But, above all, Henry Brougham was the uncompromising and undaunted champion of the people. Now that the spirit of the dream is over, and that every one sees him as he really is, and as, if we can believe him, he has always been, the whole of the press is unanimous in branding with infamy the political renegade, in spurning his proffered allegiance, in blazoning his ludicrous antics and his rabid vindications of himself, and in laughing down the demi-god of a former time. Lord Brougham, therefore, holds the press in utter detestation.

After the many examples of apostacy recorded during the last sixty years, the people are no longer disposed to be deceived by the semblance of patriotism, by which the leaders of the two political factions that have so long misruled and plundered the country, have hitherto succeeded in keeping themselves alternately at the head of affairs. The middle and the working classes, now equal in intelligence and education, and frequently superior, to most of the upper and aristocratic classes, and made wiser by a dearly bought experience, no longer lend their confidence and support to the scions or protegès of the nobility, on the pledge of their attachment to popular rights. They rely upon themselves; they look for champions and for leaders among

themselves; among those who have with them a community of principles, of feelings, and of interests. They trust in them, not for the violence of their language, but for their carnestness in the application of a few political principles, now well understood. The Burdetts, the Lambtons, the Broughams of old, are now replaced by a Cobden, a Bright, a Thompson, and a Sturge, who think, speak, and act like the people, for the sole advantage of the people, and with the unanimous approbation of the people. Of course, while the former were styled patriots, the latter are nothing but demagogues; and Lord Brougham detests demagogues!

Hatred of the people, hatred of the Whigs, hatred of the late ministers, hatred of the press, and hatred of the demagogues, are the five inspiring genii who have dictated this volume; and we cannot wonder, if, written under such inspiration, every page is full of malice, ignorance, misrepresentation, and falsehood; the whole seasoned with the superlative vanity of the author, which, however, does not sufficiently conceal his catch-penny propensities.

The first part of the volume is devoted to the French revolution, and to some of the French revolutionists. For its want of good faith and of truth, it is equal to any essay on the same subject in the Quarterly Review, though vastly inferior in knowledge of the matter and in arrangement. Lord Brougham's performance will not materially assist in its designs the oligarchic faction, who, for want of all arguments in favour of their encroachments on the liberties and property of the people, endeavour to place their usurpations under the protection of terror, and threaten universal pillage and revolutionary massacre as the consequence of any attempt, on the part of the people, for the recovery of their rights. Burke succeeded, more than fifty years ago, in playing this game; but the people know that the consequences were an addition of seven hundred millions sterling to the national debt; the death, in battle, of three hundred thousand of their fellow-subjects; the abridgment and suspension of their natural and constitutional rights; and the increase in wealth, authority, and strength of the oligarchy. The people, therefore, will not again be caught in the same trap. DIEU ET MON DROIT is their motto, as well as that of the crown; and, notwithstanding the bloody phantoms raised by daily, monthly, quarterly, or lordly showmen, they are determined to have it as a fact.

The obstinate resistance of the ruling powers to the legitimate demands of the people, has at all times, and everywhere, been the real cause of revolutions. History has unquestionably established this truth. Lord Brougham, however, chooses to

look for other causes of the French revolution. He might have been enlightened on the subject had he condescended to study the Collection des mémoires relatifs à la révolution Française ;' all of them published by remarkable personages, who took

an

active part in that revolution; but the result of his investigations would have baffled his purpose. He therefore adopted another plan. He first takes for authorities, on the causes of the French revolution, the Abbé Baruel and M. Mounier. According to Baruel, every thing was exceedingly well regulated in France; and the only causes of the revolution were the philosophers, the encyclopædists, the free-thinkers, the illuminati, and the freemasons. Mounier, on the contrary, maintains that they had no share in bringing about that event; which was, according to this well-meaning, but weak-minded man, the result of comparatively trivial and accidental circumstances, and principally of the derangement of the finances; and of the vacillating conduct of the court and the ministers, after the convocation of the States-General. Having thus selected, among the most despised of the French writers, the two champions of opposite parties, Lord Brougham chooses for umpire, Mr., now Lord Jeffrey, and the decision is to be found in an article of that gentleman's in the Edinburgh Review, which our author proclaims the best authority upon the subject.

An honest writer, unless grossly ignorant, as Lord Brougham scems to be, in investigating the causes of the French revolution, would have consulted and mentioned Rabaud St. Etienne, Thouret, Necker, Grégoire, Puisaye, Bertrand de Molleville, Du Mouriez, Mde. de Stael, Gohier, and many others of all parties; but these authors would have led the inquirer to a conclusion which would have defeated the wicked object of the newly-made oligarch. Mignet, whom his lordship calls his honorable friend, and Thiers, both his worthy colleagues in the class of 'sciences, morales, et politiques' of the French Institute, have written histories of the French revolution, which, however one-sided they may be, would have enlightened him a little, if that were possible, after his discovery that 'the peasant felt more vexed at seeing the lord's pigeons trespassing on his crops, without the power of destroying them, than he did from paying a tithe of that crop to the church, and a third to the landlord,' (p. 8,) and that this was a principal cause of the French revolution. No wonder that, after this extraordinary discovery, the prime minister of England, taking the hint, should have resolved to maintain the corn laws, and issued a decree of extermination against the hares.

Lord Brougham explains, with the same sagacity and justice, how the revolution soon assumed a character of violence, con

stantly increasing, until at last it merged into republican anarchy, pillage, massacre, and civil war. It was, according to him, the influence of the clubs, the weakness of the Constituent Assembly; the resolution, 'unexampled in human folly, that no one of the members of the first assembly should be capable of being elected to the second;' (p. 15;) 'the consequent election of unknown, inexperienced, untried men, who were more subservient to the club of Jacobins, and the mere instruments of a few agitators who had borne sway in the former assembly, and were acting through the mob of Paris;' (p. 17;) then, the greatest outrages committed with the money, and under the dictation of the Jacobins, by the affiliated societies, not in the capital at first, but in the south of France, at Nismes;' and the assembly, acting under the control of the mother club, did not bring to punishment some atrocious miscreants, whose cannibal ferocity had been proved before it ;' (p. 19-20;) * finally, the establishment of a system of intimidation and terror, the destruction of the monarchy, the imprisonment of the Royal family, and the calling of the National Convention.

The twenty pages devoted by Lord Brougham to the reign of that assembly, are not new to us. We have repeatedly read them in the Quarterly, and in Blackwood's Magazine; and the editors would have had a right to bring an action for piracy against his lordship, had he not so garbled their statements, so coloured their prints, added so many inaccuracies of his own, and filled the whole with such startling contradictions, that, notwithstanding the monopoly they have long enjoyed in misrepresenting and abusing revolutions, they would be ashamed to claim, as their own, the second-hand goods hawked by their new competitor. Lest our readers should believe that we deal unfairly with our author, here are our proofs: The party of the Gironde, the earliest to declare for a republic, were all along conscious of their weakness in point of numerical strength, and the necessity of preserving the majority by strong demonstrations of physical force.' (p. 20.) The Gironde, composed chiefly of deputies from that district, and [who] thence derived their name, were men of respectable characters, averse, for the most part, to violent proceedings.' (p. 22.) The convention was the governing body of the state; but the number of its members was wholly incompatible with the function of a body which possessed the executive as well as

* In 1816 and 1817, a man of the name of Froment sued the Comte d'Artois (afterwards Charles the Tenth) in the courts of justice of Paris for payment of the sums of money he had expended, by order of His Royal Highness, in provoking those outrages; he afterwards, being nonsuited, dared to petition the Chamber of Deputies to obtain payment. So much for the veracity of Lord Brougham!