WE confess that it is with regret that we have
come to the -end of Lord Broughton's Memoirs. They have been good reading ; they have been well edited (saving a few misprints in the present volumes); and they have revealed to us a man we bad scarcely suspected. Broughton, whom we had hitherto -regarded as a capable, pedestrian statesman of the type which the early nineteenth century bred, turns out to be a very distinct personality, full of odd loyalties and senti- ments, and magnificently sincere. No man has ever had a nicer sense of public and private honour. He was as stubborn as a mule and as tender-hearted as a woman. He is an excellent diarist, for his comments are so self-revealing. The curate remonstrates with him for not going to church, and, though he thinks the curate's sermons sad nonsense, he handsomely admits that he was in the wrong. He never got rid of his shyness in company. "Any man, and much more woman, can
disconcert me at once by a cold or equivocal look just as much -as when I was twenty." And he adds : " This deficiency makes .a man almost always either too reserved or too familiar, either too silent or too talkative, and generally both in the course of the same evening. At least it makes me so." But the most
characteristic entry is that setting forth his reasons for taking a peerage, he the old reformer and Jacobin :-
" I did not ask for this. I accepted it, not for the sake of being in the House of Lords, but of being in Parliament. I should not have secured this otherwise. I cannot stand for a county—I am a Free Trader ; I could not be a candidate for a large town con- -stituency—I am not a Radical ; nor for a small constituency, for I will not repeat my Nottingham delinquencies. . . . A dissolution would have left me in private life."
No wonder that a man so honest with the world and with himself was both respected and loved.
The present volumes carry us through some interesting political episodes. For most of the time (l834.1852) Broughton was in the Cabinet. The fiery reformer who had gone to prison for his principles was now a con- stitutional Whig. He was probably as Conservative as his friend Burdett, though he did not follow him to the Tory ranks. He was against the ballot, for example, _for the curious reason that, while he thought it would
have been valuable before the Reform Bill, it would make a reformed House of Commons " too democratic." He
-could make nothing of Lord Shaftesbury's social policy. "I heard he was certainly sincere, and concluded he must be mad." He seems for all his moderation to have hated what we call a "cross-bench " mind, and records with approval Canning's gibe at Wilberforce that " if one man said the -shortest way to Kensington was through the Park, and another man declared for the road, Wilberforce would say that the shortest way was along the top of the wall." Among
the interesting episodes recorded is the Reform dinner to Lord Grey in Edinburgh when Grey entered the city in state. There is a good account of the accession of • Recollections of a Long Life. By Lo-d Broughton (John Cam Hobhouse). .Edited Ly his daughter, Lady Dorchester. Vols. V. and VI. (1834-1862). London: Sohn Murray. (Ms. net] Queen Victoria and many pleasant pictures of the young Queen's Court. She began by detesting Peel and ended by weeping like a child at his heath. Broughton never professed to like him, and is always acid in his comments. Peel's greatest measure, the income-tax, he favoured on the whole, but he records that Lord Campbell was against it, and Mr. Baring considered that the nation would not endure it two years. Of how many measures has this forecast not been made by politicians who forget that our national fetish is the fait accompli? Broughton, being a man of calm nerves, was in no way alarmed by Chartism, but it is curious how little the Corn Laws agitation seems to have affected him. Possibly Peel's share in the repeal weakened his free-trade ardour. Certainly in his pages we find none of the pictures of national poverty and impending disaster with which most historians of the period stage the great measure. Broughton did not like heroics of any kind, and be confesses himself very uneasy when listening to some of the anti-slavery speeches. Sir George Strickland concluded a speech by weeping, and Broughton drily remarks that " there was nothing to call for tears in that part of his speech more than in any other portion of it, except that it was near the end." He thought Peel's famous peroration on the Corn Laws "egotistical in the highest degree."
For a diarist he tells few stories, and of some of those which he does tell he mentions that he is unable to see the point. He records a great deal of the small talk of Holland House—very small it often is—but the most valuable part of the volumes is to be found in his own notes on his famous con- temporaries. He was compelled to cover his face with a hand- kerchief when his old friend, Burdett, talked High Church Toryism and thanked God for the House of Lords. On Brougham, whom he regarded more as a phenomenon than as a rational being, there are many notes. Brougham fell out with the Duke of Wellington and said, " The Abbey yearns for him." "I told this to Russell, who added, ' And Bedlam for him." When be heard the story of the ex-Chancellor's death he at once concluded that Brougham had contrived a hoax. He records Brougham's view that Disraeli was " the greatest blackguard in England," and a still more remarkable opinion from the same source, that " Providence, who sent the potato disease, meant that many should be starved, and all attempts to prevent the inevitable result were foolish and futile." He describes Disraeli's maiden speech as " such an exhibition of insolence and folly as I never heard in my life before," but be made friends with the young Tory, had him to stay at Erie Stoke, and ended by considering him " very agreeable and very much like a gentleman." Disraeli once observed to him that the summit of Heaven's bliss was to be possessed of £300 a year and to live a retired life among books! Of Lord Grey he writes : " He was an extraordinary instance of what may be done by a talent for public speaking, independent of any other intellectual quality of a high order." Macaulay impressed and bored him. "Right or wrong, I had not much chance with Macaulay—who has ? " He gives a charming picture of Melbourne—his kindliness, his sagacity, his bluff crispness of speech. Here are two recorded sayings: " No Government can long maintain its popularity ; it must uphold authority." And this : "He disliked an appeal to the people when their passions were raised on any subject, but more especially on such a subject as food." How uncomfortable Melbourne would have been in these days ! But the figure which dominates these volumes, which fills, indeed, the part which Byron filled in the earlier "Recollections," is the I u'ce of Wellington. Broughton sincerely admired and respected him; the Duke is always to him, Whig as he is, the great figure of the age, the ultimate court of appeal. Here is the Duke's definition of booty, and a very good one : "What you can lay your bloody hand on and keep." The Wellingtons seem to have been, a candid family. Lord Wellesley told. Broughton that his brother was "a great officer but no statesman at all," adding that "be trusted his brother Arthur would plant his foot on the necks of those who were fools enough to help him to power, and then they would find his heel as hard as his heart." Lord Douro, whom Broughton calls a Tory- Radical, confessed that public life was impossible for him with such a father, "who, although he had no prejudice against persons, had the strongest attachment to old systems, and thought everything new must be bad, . . . thought a barrack
the perfection of all human dwelling-places, and the discipline .of a soldier the beau idial of human institutions."
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