LORD CAMPBELL'S LIVES OF LYNDHURST AND BROUGHAM.*

LORD CAMPBELL has had his revenge—perhaps in the most curious form that revenge has ever been taken. It would not suggest itself at first sight to any one that the most efficient way to pay back old scores on your rivals, or rather those who were too far above you to be rivals, who eclipsed you altogether in the race of life, and hustled, oppressed, and ridiculed you in the obscurity to which you were relegated, is to write a biography of them which it would not be decent to publish while the subjects of it were living, but which is kept ready for their death, and may even do its work although you are dead before them. Yet this is what Lord Campbell has done, and the shaft, long prepared and polished, is at last driven home. The revenge is complete enough, although,

all concerned are in their graves when the last step is taken. It may be a weakness of humanity to value posthumous repute, but

so long as men do so, a posthumous vilification is as great an injury, or greater than a similar attack while in life. Besides, you

can give out while your victim is living the fate you have in store for him, and thus add a new terror to death, as Brougham said in jest, which perhaps would have been as bitter as it was actually good-humoured had he known beforehand all the truth.

It would have been indeed impossible to anticipate the sort of performance which Lord Campbell here calls a biography, though his taste and his unscrupulousness had been exhibited in previous works. Writing of contemporaries with whom he had been more in contact than all but one or two of his previous subjects, against whom without exception his grudges were more deep and lasting, he has contrived in the briefest possible compass to say everything that is ill of them which he knows, or which the veriest scandal of the time has invented or exaggerated. Nothing is omitted that can bring them into disrepute if it has the faintest colour of authority, and sometimes where there is no pretence of authority. There is an unconscious felicity in the form of the work, approaching closely a manifestation of genius, though that is the last quality one would be inclined to ascribe to the biographer. Nursing his revenge long, brooding over his subject for years, dealing with personal transactions in which he was himself concerned, possessed by a steady and malignant antipathy of which he was not fully aware, lie has brought every power to bear in the execution of the work ; and writing from the fullness of his heart, rushing on from topic to topic that really interested him, he has achieved a singular success as a literary artist. Instead of the two lives before us being mere loose heaps of gossip and anecdote, as previous lives from the same pen have been, they are sketches of character— character only imagined to a large extent, though that rather adds to their literary merit, which for compactness, and force of outline, and vivid colouring are rarely excelled by the cleverest novelist. As with artists of genius, Lord Campbell's greatest successes are often in the small touches, and nothing is more astonishing than the ingenuity with which the most damaging things are said in the most natural manner. Thus, describing a banquet at the Temple in 1846, he writes:—

" The Chairman, in proposing my health, called me his • noble and biographical friend,' and expressed great confidence in my discrimination and impartiality if I should live to delineate the virtues of Lyndhurst and Brougham. I said that my groat hope was yet to see Wetherell himself in the 'Marble Chair ;' and then, although I might not agree in all his opinions, I should be delighted to celebrate his honourable career, and to hold up for the imitation of posterity his chivalrous devotion to principle, at whatever sacrifice. Some said that I then maliciously looked askance at Lyndhurst ; but this is untrue, for I then had forgotten that his path had ever been otherwise than straightforward, or that he had not through life been disinterested and consistent."

Then we have many sentences like the following :— " Lyndhurst prudently abstained from objecting to the second reading, but before allowing it to be considered in the committee, ho delivered a very long and elaborate speech against it, giving a very favourable specimen of his powers of reasoning and misrepresentation."

"The eccentric Brougham occasionally discomposed our proceedings by coming in when the case was half heard, and putting questions without having listened to the argument ; but he was docile and manageable, and, when necessary, he could prepare himself and give judgment very creditably."

"Although tho new Lady Lyndhurst, like her predecessor, tried to become a leader of fashion, she preserved an unsuspected reputation, and took devoted care of her husband, who, notwithstanding the juvenility of his mind and habits, was now sinking into the vale of years."

The last extract is perhaps as perfect a specimen of a sentence

which hits all round as could be contrived,—the reputation of the first Lady Lyndhurst being sneered away, the second. Lady Lyndhurst being only credited with an attempt to become a leader of fashion, and Lord Lyndhurst depreciated for his juvenile habits in old age, all in a single sentence, not one word of which is probably true. But the biographer does not fail in longer flights. This is the picture of Lord Brougham's old age, from 1852-56 :— " If I were to continue any minuteness of detail, I should not only have to relate year by year how he left his château at Cannes in the middle of January, and, passing a few days in Paris, turned up in the House of Lords on the first night of the session to make some desultory observations in the debate on the Address, in answer to the Queen's Speech ; how he presented many petitions to the House every evening, taking the opportunity of reminding their Lordships of what he had done and what he still intended to do for law reform ; how he claimed the county courts as his creation, and attempted to give the countycourt judges unlimited jurisdiction over all matters civil and criminal, legal and equitable, military and ecclesiastical ; how he made repeated speeches on tho same subject when giving notice of a motion, when withdrawing the notice, and renewing the notice, as well as when the motion came on ; how he still made himself prominent in the House by a copious distribution of praise and censure among those he mentioned or alluded to ; how he was ever esteemed a delightful companion in private, flattering his friends to their face and laughing at them behind their back ; how he affected to attend judicially to the hearing of appeals when he was writing notes to his male and female acquaintances at the rate of a score in a morning; how he gave pleasant dinners, at which he loved to assemble those with whom he had had the bitterest quarrels, and charmed thorn all with his good-humour and kindness; how ho delivered speeches at the Law Amendment Society. exalting himself and vilipending all competitors in the race of law reform ; how he steadily made the Law Reciew a tiresome vehicle of solf-laudation and vituperation of others ; how he would get sick of such occupations about Easter, and run off for relief to tho rapid motion and the sight of the Mediterranean Sea; how at the end of a month he would return and resume his old course till the end of the session, having in the meantime published various speeches and pamphlets, and prepared now editions of some of his innumerable works ; how ho then retreated to Brougham Hall, where he hospitably entertained those whom in his writings ho had attacked, was attacking, and intended to attack ; how the unceasing rains and mists of Westmoreland drove him away in search of a more genial climate ; how in Paris he gave lectures on his philosophical discoveries to the members of the Institute, who, notwithstanding their natural politeness and respect for his energy and perseverance, experienced some difficulty in steadily preserving a countenance of admiration ; and how he again hybernated in the Château Eleanor Louise till awoke by the Queen's proclamation summoning another session of Parliament at Westminster."

The mingled cleverness and malevolence of all this writing excite a certain kind of admiration. It is impossible not to relish the entertainment, much as the author may be despised and his moral attitude arouse disgust. One reason for not turning away is the conviction that the victims are safe game. They may not be so black as they are painted, nor their demerits be precisely of the kind described, but there were self-seeking, and vanity, and recklessness of principle in their career sufficient to excuse a little grim pleasure in seeing them caricatured. Our feelings would be different if Lord Campbell's victims were men who had escaped suspicion and obloquy, and had in the main been disinterested. There is besides a peculiar quality, which we hardly know how to describe—a sort of mixture of bonhomie and sincerity—which makes a thorough hatred of the writer impossible. We relish the attack because the sufferers deserved some punishment, and we relish it all the more because it was the writer's nature to be unjust. He has evidently no suspicion that he is doing anything very atrocious. He is damaging his heroes, but how much he does not know. The gusto with which he fills in the darker traits, the candour with which he paints the hypocrisy of himself and his subjects in being amiable with one another and indulging in slander of any one of them who is absent, the descriptions of dinners to which they invited each other in the midst of their mutual hostilities, the constant assumption of low motives in every action as if the imagination of a high motive was absurd,—are all characteristic of a man who was himself hard if not unscrupulous, and whose conscience was more a sense of the feeling of the world on moral subjects than any internal power, which affected in any other than the most indirect and reflex manner his own habits and conduct. It is, perhaps, this assumption which is the most successful artistic element in Lord Campbell's portraiture ; we are introduced to a game of chicanery, and deceit, and intrigue, by one who was intimate and relished intimacy with the players, but who has an impression that the woild will not approve, and writing to secure that disapproval, produces a stronger impression by the peculiar tone of his disparagement.

Such being the nature of the book, it would of course be out of place to discuss the character or career of either Lyndhurst or Brougham in connection with it. We have only their personal

careers viewed in the narrowest aspect. We see nothing of Lyndhurst but the self-seeking politician, in pursuit from the first of self-advancement, loving fashion and distinguished society and gay life, but with an ardent ambition to hold the most prominent place in the political scene, using all his knowledge, and learning, and varied accomplishments as mere counters in the personal game, careless even of the judicial fame that was in his power, in order that the real end of his life might be reached. The insinuations that he concealed his parentage, turned coat in politics, obstructed for personal ends measures which he believed of public advantage, and was ever stealthy and cunning, make the character Mephistopheliau or demonic. Lord Campbell, in fact, twice insinuates that such was the character he meant to delineate,—once, at a certain stage of Lyndhttrst's career, where he used the phrase "all is not lost," and his biographer parenthetically notes that he had the "courage never to submit or yield," and again, where he thus applies to Lyndhurst's rising in the House of Lords after a long abstention, Milton's description of Beelzebub in the Senate House of Pandemonium :—

"With grave Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed A pillar of State; deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat, and public: care ; And princely counsel in his face yet shone, Majestic, though in ruin,"

—adding, with reference to the dignified exordium of the speech which Lyndhurst delivered, "Such was the proemium to the most factious, the most democratical, and the most sophistical speech I ever heard in Parliament." Of course, Lyndhurst, with all his unscrupulousness and devotion to mean ends, does not answer to this picture. A man of his powers could not but leave a distinct intellectual mark of some sort, and his human qualities of generosity and good-nature deserved kindlier treatment. The caricature of Brougham is even more complete. The things which Campbell is concerned with,—his insatiable vanity, his escapades, his affectation of universality in literature and science,—were, after all, the smallest parts of a man who was full of intellectual force, who moved England for one generation as it has been given to few men to move it, and some of whose writings will live in spite of the eager voluminousness with which he wrote and spoke. We learn here all about Brougham's high jinks as a boy at Edinburgh High School, as a Scotch advocate, as a brieflless barrister, and restless member of Parliament, especially as Lord Chancellor, when his head was nearly turned, down to his proposal to the Provisional Government of 1848 to become a French citizen —how he was so untrustworthy that no colleague could trust him: and how cunninger men, like Lord Lyndhurst, could play upon his vanity for their own gain. But the political history of the agitator is wanting, or any account of his political philosophy, or any notion of the man who could sketch so vigorously the statesmen of his time. There is no real attempt even to describe what Lord Brougham's contribution to law reform came to, though it came strictly within the personal narrative, and could not wholly be left to a separate chapter at the close. Lord Campbell probably could not have written a real biography of Brougham, though he might perhaps of Lyndhurst ; but he has certainly done so of neither. His book may perhaps be resorted to by future biographers for the sake of personal reminiscences, if the taint of malicious exaggeration, and even malicious invention, will permit them to use it. In other respects, despite the entertainment it may give to those who yet remember something of Lyndhurst and Brougham and their relations to their biographer, it is a thoroughly bad book.

One of the oddest impressions derived from these biographies is their antiquity. The real interest in the lives of the men described not only ceased one or two generations ago, so that they belong to a past period, but the tone of the book is of that period too. It has not the atmosphere of the present day about it. Perhaps Lord Campbell's scurrilousness and total want of patience to write a real biography would have been less marked had he not written at a time when political struggles are less keen than they were, and the outward proprieties, marking some real advance in public morality, we hope, are more observed. We can hardly now imagine a generation which was so much harder than the present, less exacting in the public motives of its public men, and less surprised at the most audacious profligacy ; when the exploits of the men, too, from whom less was expected, filled the public eye more. The reader of the present day is apt to feel rather a contemptuous indifference towards the shameless political intriguers of a past generation, just as he feels towards the great commercial swindlers of his own time, or the men who now openly sacrifice principle for place ; but Lord Campbell had no suspicion that his scandalous narrative would not be of supreme interest,

that when it came to be published there would have been an improvement in the manner of party politics coincident with a diminution in their command of public attention. The base and libellous attacks on the Queen at the beginning of her reign, of which we get a glimpse in this volume, may show the breadth of the gulf which separates the two periods. We may not be much better in reality than our fathers and grandfathers were, but it is a large gain for the future to have a purer public life, so that a book out of the old period gives a disagreeable shock ; and to have established a habit of discussing broad questions and interests in which party politics occupy a small space, and the private personal element is as yet suppressed.