BOOKS.
THE VICTORIAN CHANCELLORS.* WE congratulate Mr. Allay on the happy inspiration which has led him to continue—in effect, though not in name—Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors. The Victorian Chancellors demanded a biographer who should present their doings in some form less bulky than the usual three-volume memoirs which follow the death of an eminent man. And no great lawyer could desire a more competent chronicler than Mr. Atlay. As a lawyer himself, he can appreciate the value of judicial work; but he is equally good on the political side, and the currents and movements of political change in their influence upon the Woolsack are accurately described He is also a connoisseur of character, and a sympathetic critic of those other interests—social, literary, and scientific —which most eminent men reveal to their generation. His style is admirably fitted for the purpose, being always clear, graceful, and urbane,—the true style for history which could not properly be written in the grand manner. Finally, he has the supreme merit of accuracy and fairness. We are glad that he has dealt with Lyndhurst and Brougham, in spite of Lord Campbell's Lives, for that light-hearted writer was careless to a degree, and, in any case, lived under the shadow of contemporary prejudices. Mr. Atlay retraces the path with scrupulous care, and has given us satisfactory portraits of two of the most brilliant personalities in modern times. To lawyer, politician, student of manners, and lover of good stories alike his book will furnish the best of enter- tainment.
Of the four Chancellors dealt with in this first volume, two are already little more than names. Their doings are writ in the law reports rather than on the ampler page of history. Cottenham was born in the purple and had an easy path to success. He was a profound lawyer, an excellent Judge, and the best of husbands and fathers; and there we leave him. Truro is chiefly remarkable as an encouragement to the sons of solicitors. He amassed a large fortune, reached the Wool- sack, and as his second wife married a King's grand_ daughter. But the great twin brethren, Lyndhurst and Brougham, are figures of enduring interest. At the opposite poles of character, they were always friends even in their fiercest rivalry, and retained to the end of their long lives a great regard for each other's merits. Copley was the son of a noted portrait-painter, and after a brilliant career at Cam- bridge, settled down to make a living in the most uncertain of all professions. His rise was slow, and for many years he shut himself off from the world. His chance came when he for- swore the Whig principles of his youth and entered the House of Commons as the legal champion of the Tories. Thereafter his career was one long triumphal progress. He thrice occupied the highest legal office under the Crown, and it is possible that, like Mansfield, he might at one time have been Premier bad he pleased. If he was not one of the greatest of English lawyers, he was certainly one of the greatest minds that ever applied themselves to law. His intellectual vitality was such that no subject came under his cognisance which he did not master. He was earnest in the cause of law reform, however Tory might be his views on politics ; but the truth is that he probably did not care enough about political problems to trouble to have opinions. He shaped his course from day to day, asking only one thing,—the chance of exercising his superb powers of mind. " He played the game of life," wrote Bagehot, "for low and selfish objects, and yet, by the intellectual power with which he played it, he redeemed that game from its intrinsic degradation." He was a typical exponent of the " grand manner," a great Judge who liked to look like a cavalry officer, and preferred smart to legal society. He was completely successful, and for long he and his wife were the most brilliant figures in the fashionable world. In his attitude towards enemies and rivals in the Press and in Parliament he never • The Victorian Chancellors. By J. B. Allay. Vol. I. With Portraits. Landon: Smith, Elder, and Co. [146. nag lost the air of the grand seigneur. He disregarded abuse, and when fate put an opponent in his power went out of his way to treat him magnanimously. He retained to the end of a long life a boyish gaiety, and he bore his honours with the same lordly ease with which be had won them. His last words were : " Happy ? Yes, supremely happy." To such a man the world cannot grudge success, and jealousy among his contemporaries was soon lost in admiration. He was so amazingly competent that his colleagues both on the Bench and in the Cabinet got into the habit of deferring to him, and he was for long the real centre of the Tory Party. Lord Westbury, a man of a very different type, and one far from lavish in praise, once told Jowett that Lyndhurst's was the finest judicial intellect he had known. But to the earnest world of Reformers and Chartists and Benthamites he remained a mystery. They could not comprehend the mind which, seeing all sides of a problem, had no impulse towards any particular solution. The "pure" reason is not popular among devotees of the " practical." Hence, save by his intimate friends, he was never trusted. The man who made no concessions to popular sentiment, whose mind cut so cleanly through confused popular dogmas, could not be expected to win the admiration of the public. Lyndhurst's defence might well have been that which Stevenson puts into the mouth of another Judge. "I have no call to be bonny," said Weir of Hermiston. "I'm a man that gets through with my day's business, and let that suffice."
Both Lyndhurst and Brougham lived long, but Brougham outlived his reputation. That " surest and most voluminous among the sons of men," after a rise which for meteoric brilliance makes most careers pale, saw himself the most disliked, suspected, and unconsidered of public men. Few characters were more strangely compounded of strength and weakness. His mind was of the same stamp as Lyndhurst's, but lacked its critical and logical power. His reach per- petually exceeded his grasp, and he became that most trying of spectacles, an inaccurate polymath. All his great qualities were on the confines of vices. His courage became impudence, his impressive eloquence was on the edge of bathos, his industry was often in its results scarcely dis- tinguishable from indolence, and his immense knowledge had often from its curious gaps the effect of ignorance. His first impression upon acquaintances was overwhelming. " The first man this country has ever seen since Burke's time," wrote Gray as early as 1809. And bitterly though he offended every man who worked with him, there must have been a peculiar charm about his personality, for people like Gray and Melbourne and Queen Adelaide, who had every reason to hate him, all came under his spell again before their death. To a later generation Brougham is a pure enigma. We have no material to judge him by, since his judicial decisions are worthless, his writings reveal little but laboured inaccuracy, and his speeches, like most republished oratory, are, in Sir James Fitzjames Stephen's phrase, like " mouldy wedding cake." He will be remembered best as the hero of insane pranks and the subject of good stories. It is almost forgotten that he founded London University, inaugurated the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and did much to reform Chancery procedure. His solid work is cast into the shade by his colossal impostures. A man who circulated the story of his death in order to find out the view his contemporaries took of him, and, with scarcely a smatter- ing of Greek, published an edition of Demosthenes upon the Crown with variae lectiones, bad no common share of audacity. From his royal progress through Scotland to his speech on the Reform Bill, when he flung himself on his knees, and, having consumed much port, was unable to rise again, his career is starred with every form of absurdity. Once at Buckingham Palace he offered to carry to his friend the King of the French any letter with which her Majesty might entrust him. He told Cabinet secrets to the Times, and circulated amazing tales to his own credit, which apparently be persuaded himself in the long run to believe, for they appear in his Memoirs. According to Greville, he once conducted a party round Hanbury's Brewery, explaining minutely every detail of the operations, and causing the hair of the Scotchloreman to stand on end as he heard the words of the Lord Chancellor, without one "word o' truth frae beginning to en'." Yet, with all his faults, he is a figure of superb vitality, and behind his self-seeking burned a hatred of wrongs and a love of his
fellow-men which do much to redeem the follies of his life. In the circle of doctrinaire Whigs who were his con- temporaries he moves like a panther among seals, a dangerous, uncertain creature, but with a fierce life in him beyond his associates.
Who was the author of the famous mot that Lord Campbell by his biographies had added a fresh terror to death P Campbell makes Brougham quote it at a dinner at Stratheden House as a supposed speech of Sir Charles Wetherell, and Mr. Atlay thinks that Brougham actually made the speech himself in Sir Charles's character. But Lord St. Leonards in the examination which be published of Campbell's Lives of Brougham and Lyndhurst says that he heard the saying from Wetherell's own lips at a dinner at the Middle Temple. Lord St. Leonards was a careful man, and his evidence is at first hand.
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