THERE is an incorrigible versatility about Lord Brougham. Finding the dull, decorous debates of the English Lords an insufficient excitement, he hies him off to the French Institute, where, in

French of Stratford atte Bow,

For French of Paris is to him unknowe,"

he restores the European balance, settles the true history of the Syrian campaign, interrupts the bore Charles Dupin a dozen times in as many minutes, and having taught Arago astronomy, Cordier mining, Civiale the manner of handling a catheter, he winds up the portion of the afternoon which remains to him before dinner by setting Lord Palmerston right with French politicians, French ministers, and last, though not least, with the "Lord" Harry's own illustrious and intimate friend the King of the French-Louis Philippe. Are these all this mighty man's labours in one solid day, in which "panting time toils after him in vain ?" By no means. He tutoyers Molé of an evening, helps him to point a sarcasm against Alfred de Vigny, tells him he will make the name of the President Molé and his descendant better known in England; and within an hour after is proclaiming to the severe Guizot himself that the Huguenot minister of foreign affairs is the most learned man in France, and that, as a statesman and a writer, there is but one man in Europe to compare with him. Who that man is we all know, though the Lord of Vaux pronounces not his name.

Lord Brougham's labours end not here. Before he retires to recruit himself with a small modicum of rest, he must see Dupin ainé, condole with him on the loss of his brother

Philip, and promise to write that brother's eulogy the moment he lands on the white cliffs of Albion.

Behold the ex-chancellor fairly landed within the harbour of Folke

stone, pied-à-terre. He finds every

Cinque port within the country resonant with the fame of the Lives of the Chancellors, written by his old opponent "plain John," who had been for the space of eighteen days chancellor in Ireland. This is too much for learned human flesh and blood to bear. Not only must the Lord of Vaux wag his loquacious tongue, but he must also wield his prolific pen, and against the three volumes of the Lives of the Chancellors he flings down into the literary market one volume (the 2d) of the Lives of Men of Letters and Science, which in specific heaviness certainly fairly outweighs the three volumes of his brother Scot. We say brother Scot, because Lord Brougham, though a borderer by birth, is yet by education, by adoption, by tone of thought and feeling, eminently and entirely

north British.

In delivering to the world this second volume of the lives of philosophers, Lord Brougham deems it his duty to acknowledge with "much thankfulness" the favour with which the former volume was received. Favour! Favour where? favour when? This is really as bad as Joseph Ady referring to Lord Brougham's canny countryman Peter Laurie for a character, when the cunning Quaker knows perfectly well that the city knight deems him an arrant impostor and cheat. The reference shall serve Brougham as little as Ady. We profess to be somewhat familiar with contemporary criticism, and, if our memory serves us rightly, newspapers, reviews, and magazines -the Morning Chronicle, the Quar· terly, and REGINA-all alike condemned the first volume of the Lives of Philosophers and Men of Letters. A small measure of praise was certainly, and deservedly, doled out to the life of Robertson in the Examiner; but, in speaking of the other lives in the book, it was plain that the generally ingenious writer treated of matters with which he was not familiar. As to the lives of Voltaire

and Rousseau there was and is but one opinion in England and France -that they are preposterous and unhappy failures. There are six lives in the present volume,-1. Johnson; 2. Adam Smith; 3. Lavoisier; 4. Gibbon; 5. Sir Joseph Banks and 6. D'Alembert. We confess it does seem to us one of the rashest of literary enterprises, to undertake in the month of May, in the year of our Lord 1846, the biographies of men in every respect so well known. There are but two considerations which could justify such a piece of literary impertinence, not to say impudence. The one an intimate friendship or personal familiarity with such men; the other, the having discovered fresh materials which had never been published. Now of the six eminent individuals of whom Lord Brougham would become the biographer, five of them he never saw, and with the sixth (Sir Joseph Banks) his intercourse must have been slight and casual. In his lordship's own account of his family in the Peerage, he makes the year of his birth 1779; but, admitting that he was born in 1777, as a Scotch friend who has known him for fiftynine years contends, he could have no acquaintance with Johnson, who died in 1784, when he was in his fifth year, according to his own account. None with Smith, who died in 1790, when he was eleven years old; none with Gibbon, who died in London in 1794, when he was fifteen; none with Lavoisier, who was guillotined in Paris in the same year; and none with D'Alembert, who died in 1783, when his lordship had attained the respectable age of four. With Sir Joseph Banks the ex-chancellor certainly might have had some acquaintance, for the baronet lived till the year 1820, a period when the name of Brougham was distinguished in the annals of party, and when it was not unknown either on the northern circuit or in Westminster Hall. there are but forty-five pages out of 516 in the book before us dedicated to the president of the Royal Society.

But

If his lordship has no plea of personal knowledge to offer, as little can he justify himself on the score of having discovered fresh materials which had never been published. We have looked through this volume

of his with no unkind or hypercritical spirit, and we have been unable to discover a single new fact or an anecdote which has not been over and over again published.

The materials for writing or compiling a life of Johnson are indeed most abundant; but what need have we of any further life than the biography of Boswell-the credulous, gossiping, good-humoured, copious, and correct chronicler and reporter of all the sayings and doings of that literary idol, whom he held "above all Greek-above all Roman fame ?" The anecdotes and sayings of Johnson, his personal peculiarities and demeanour, are in Boswell faithfully and fully noted down; and now that Mr. Croker has added notes and illustrations from thirtythree distinct sources, and a volume has been published to match, entitled Johnsonia, gathered from nearly a hundred different publications, the elaborate effort of Lord Brougham's seems the less necessary. Within the last three years his lordship must have known (for he quotes from the book) that Madame D'Arblay, in her diaries, correspondence, and autobiography, has afforded us important additions to the abundant stores already in hand. So that, in truth, as to fact, and anecdote, and personal history, we have nothing left to wish for. A light is thrown on the habits and effects of a court life in Madame D'Arblay's pages, which is exceedingly welcome. Lord B. remarks on the dreadful prostration of the understanding which may be seen to arise among the subordinate figures of the courtly group, yet he takes care to tell us that his own experience and observation of many years passed in near connexion with our court leads him to conclude that the portrait of Madame D'Arblay is not a universally resembling picture. What Lord B.'s experience of a court life was we are at a loss to divine. We are aware that in 1827, when there was an approximation between Canning and the Whigs, he did his best, through the mediation of Sir William Knighton, to render himself acceptable to George IV.; but the great statesman having died in August 1827, and the prospects of the Whigs being in consequence clouded,

his note altogether changed. This we know may be denied by a man who puts forth in a preface that his Lives of Philosophers have been received with favour. But, to put an

"I have abstained," says Lord B., "from being mentioned a founder of the Useful Knowledge Society, because, from the place I hold in parliament, it might give the whole a party air. For the same reason, you have no occasion to drop the least hint, should you ever have an opportunity of turning his majesty's attention towards it, that I have any thing to do with it. But I see no reason why one of the cleverest, and quickest, and most accomplished men in the country, merely because he is at the head of it, should not look at our works, which he would comprehend and relish I am sure as thoroughly as any one in his dominions," &c.-Letter to Sir W. Knighton, York, April 4th, 1827.

Of the court of George IV. Lord B. knew nothing; of the court of William IV. he had four years' experience, and rewarded his master and sovereign, to whom he boasted at a public meeting in Scotland "he would write that very night," by the memorable words, "The queen has done it all." Of the court of our beloved sovereign now reigning (and long may she reign!) he knows nothing, and we take upon ourselves to prophesy never will know any thing more than he knows at present, notwithstanding the effort he is reported to have made to read the first proof-sheets of the Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire to her most gracious majesty. Why, then, should the man plume himself on many years' experience of court life? His whole experience was from 1830 to 1834, and we believe it is a notorious fact that during that period the monarch saw as little of his chancellor as possible. Apart, however, from this parade of knowledge of courts, to which the exchancellor has no pretension whatever, there is nothing to find fault with in the following general remarks. They are candid and they are dispassionate. That they might be expressed in racier and more idiomatic English, and with much less of circumlocution, all will allow; but we have before remarked

end to all argument, we shall here quote chapter and verse, in extenso— the letter to Knighton in April 1827, and the Brougham article in the Edinburgh Review for 1828:

"Our Louis (Geo. IV.), notwithstanding the lessons of Jackson and the fellowship of Thurlow and Sheridan, was a man of very uncultivated mind, ignorant of all but the passages of history which most princes read, with some superficial knowledge of the dead languages, which he had imperfectly learnt and scantily retained, considerable musical skill, great facility of modern tongues, and no idea whatever of the rudiments of any science, natural or moral, unless the very imperfect notions of the structure of governments, picked up in conversation, or studied in newspapers, can be reckoned any exception to the universal blank.❞—Art. "Aluses of the Press," Edinburgh Review for April 1828, p. 6.

that Lord B. is diffuse to tediousness, and his habits as a speaker, both forensic and parliamentary, have enforced a custom of repetition, which, however necessary orally, is very odious in a writer. We are by no means sure, indeed, that this may not in each separate biography have been spoken ore tenus to some favourite amanuensis.

The following is the passage to which we allude::

"In estimating the merits of Johnson, prejudices of a very powerful nature have too generally operated unfavourably to the cause of truth. The strongly

marked features of his mind were discernible in the vehemence of his opinions both on political and religious subjects; he was a bigh Tory and a high Churchman in all controversies respecting the state; he was under the habitual influence of his religious impressions, and leant decidedly in favour of the system established and protected by law. He treated those whose opinions had an opposite inclination with tolerance and no courtesy; and bence, while these undervalued his talents and his acquirements, those with whom he so cordially agreed were apt to overrate both."

After these general and just remarks Lord Brougham alludes to the hypochondria which fixed on Johnson in 1729, in his twentieth year. This unhappy malady seems to have seized him with such irritation and fretful

ness, such dejection and gloom, that he described his existence as a misery. What haunted him was the dread of insanity. He never believed himself actually deranged, nor indeed was his judgment ever clouded, nor did his imagination ever acquire any greater power over his reason than to fill him with fearful apprehensions. But he never hesitated to call his disease by the name of madness, though he only meant to express that it was a morbid affection.

We are

Of the early life of Johnson Lord B. tells us nothing that has not been told fifty times before. In alluding to his marriage, however, with Mrs. Porter he proves his unfitness for the office of biographer by a want of exactness. told she brought him a few hundred pounds' fortune; but, if the fact be worth mentioning at all, it is worth mentioning correctly. Three of Johnson's biographers have already mentioned that the sum was 800%., and it was with this money that he was enabled to open an academy at Edial near Lichfield.

In estimating the miseries of a literary life Lord B. is equally happy and exact, and he more skilfully than any other biographer of Johnson shews how these miseries were enhanced by the far worse suffering from his constitutional complaint weighing down the spirits and faculties of him whose mental labour was to contribute to the supply of his bodily wants. It was the ресиliar operation of Johnson's disease to render all exertion painful in the extreme, to make the mind recoil from it, and to render the intellectual powers both torpid and sluggish. The exertion, no doubt, was the best medicine for the disease; but what merit does not Johnson deserve for shaking off the lethargy which seized upon his active powers, rendering the exertions of his will painful and difficult? We agree with Lord B. in thinking that it is much to be lamented that no one examined Dr. J. more minutely respecting his complaint. He never shewed any disposition to conceal the particulars of it. Lord Brougham remarks, and we believe the remark is new, "The sad experience which he had of its effects appears frequently to have been in his

thoughts when writing, and it can, I conceive, be more particularly traced in the account of Collins, whose disease became so greatly aggravated that he was placed under restraint" To this Lord B. appends a reference, "See Lives of Poets, Vol. IV.," whereas Collins' life is found in Vol. III. of that work. This arises from that general carelessness and want of exactness of which we have had before occasion to complain.

We are, however, grateful to the noble lord, independently of these remarks, for having called public attention in this life to all the evils incident to a complete dependence on literary labour. Of these the principal, no doubt, is there being no steady demand for the productions of the pen. The author, by profession, is therefore perpetually obliged to find out subjects on which he may be employed and to entice employThus, as Lord B. well remarks, unlike most other labourers, stimulating the demand as well as furnishing the supply.

ers.

The account of Johnson's literary labours on his arrival in the metropolis is in the main correct. It is distinguished by shrewdness and discrimination. During the years 1740, 1741, and 1742, he carried on the Parliamentary Debates in the Gentleman's Magazine alone and unassisted, obtaining only such help or hints as he could pick up from frequenting a coffee-house in the neighbourhood of the two houses, and from original communications made by the speakers themselves.

"The style of the whole," Lord B. remarks, "is plainly Johnson's own; and so was by far the greater part of the matter. The supposed speech of Lord Chatham in answer to Horatio Walpole's attack on his youth is entirely Johnson's, as every reader must perceive, and as he never affected to deny."

The critics of that day had the simplicity to praise Johnson for the success with which he had exhibited the manner of each particular speaker, yet there was no manner exhibited in any of the speeches, except one, and that the peculiar manner of Dr. Johnson.

Over the midnight revels and roamings of Johnson in company

with Savage, the peer passes in declamatory and sesquipedalian sentences, in which he dwells on the great lexicographer's wanderings with some severity, concluding thus:

"Surely we may be permitted to marvel at the intolerance with which the defects of others were during the rest of his days ever beheld by him as if he was making compensation for his own conduct by want of charity to his neighbours."

Immediately after this remark Lord B., who is a very indifferent story-teller on paper, though an excellent raconteur vivâ voce, spoils an excellent story told by Miss Reynolds, of how Johnson, to use his own phrase, had downed Miss Cotterell by passing for a working-man before a duchess (the Duchess of Argyle probably), saying to Sir Joshua, "How much he thought they could earn in a week if they wrought their utmost ?" Now wrought is an ugly, inelegant Scotch word, which never came out of the corner of Johnson's Saxon mouth. The phrase of Johnson was, "I wonder which of us two could get most money at his trade were he to work hard at it from morn to night?" It is recorded either of Hume or Lord Loughborough, by Lord B. in the previous series of these Lives, that as he grew older he spoke and wrote more Scotticisms and with a stronger Scotch accent, and it may be as truly remarked of the ex-chancellor himself. Lord B. states that Johnson received fifteen guineas for the Vanity of Human Wishes, 15751. for the Dictionary; but we wish he had gone on to state how much he had received for his other works, as for instance, 51. 5s. for the translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, 10l. for London, 100%. for Rasselas, with 251. for the second edition, for the Lives of the Poets 200 guineas, and afterwards 1001. All this, and much more, might have been stated by the exercise of a little patient industry had Lord B. postponed the publication of his work a little longer, or taken a little more pains; but as the delay of the Corn-bill in the Commons afforded him no opportunity of speaking, and as "plain John," the ex-Irish chancellor, had already launched his book it was ne

cessary that the ex-English should also be spoken of as an author in the same session.

From 1765 to 1781 Johnson was a frequent, indeed a most constant guest at Streatham, the house of Mr. Thrale. Loving the comforts of life, he had here the constant enjoyment of its luxuries, an enjoyment that continued till the death of the master of the house.

The second marriage of Mrs. Thrale with an Italian teacher," says Lord B. (which would lead to the inference that Piozzi was a teacher of the language, and not of the music of his country), "cut Johnson to the heart, and was resented by himself and all his friends as an act of self-degradation that deservedly put Mrs. Thrale out of the pale of society. Her fate, her fall, her sad lot, the pity of friends and exultation of foes, are the terms applied to the widow of a wealthy brewer, son of a common porter, because she had lowered herself to contract a second marriage with a well-educated gentleman, whose circumstances led him to gain an honest subsistence by teaching the finest music in the world."

This is a manly and sensible observation. We have always ourselves considered that Johnson's indignation at this marriage arose from disappointment, and that he looked to the charming widow himself with something more than Platonic affection. This was also the view taken so long back as 1784 by Anna Seward, who says that "his last and long-enduring passion for Mrs. Thrale was composed of cupboard love, Platonic love, and vanity tickled and gratified." It is a view strengthened, too, by Johnson's perpetual abuse of Piozzi as an ugly dog without particular skill in his profession. Now Piozzi was a handsome man, in middle life, with pleasing and unaffected manners, and eminent skill in his profession. Though his voice was neither powerful nor of the finest tone, he is reported to have sang with exquisite grace and expression; and we know that he made the lady an excellent husband. That she might have married a man of higher rank and greater worldly consequence we will not deny; but in contracting such marriage, or in allying herself with Johnson, she ran a greater risk

a