honor, wearying his associates by incessant bickering and scolding, picking flaws in everything not entirely his own; jealous, suspicious, conceited to the last degree; never generous in praise of one living beside him; an enormous worker, with sinews of iron, and on occasions (which are of record) speaking and wrangling in the House of Commons until two of the morning, and then going home - not to sleep - but to write a thirtypage article for the Edinburgh Review. Such men make a place for themselves, and keep it. He was an acrid debater, but a most thorough one holding all aspects of a case in view; never getting muddled; ready with facts; ready with fallacies (if needed); ready for all and any interruptions; setting them on fire by the stress of his argumentation-like carbons in an electric circuit; ready with storms of irony and running into rough-edged sarcasm with singular ease and sharpest appetite.

On a May evening of 1845 the present writer had the pleasure of watching him for an hour or more in the House of Lords. He was lank, as I have said; awkward, nervous, restless; twisting the

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great seals at his watch-chain; intent upon everything; now and then sniffing the air, like a terrier that has lost the scent; presenting a petition, in the course of the session, in favor of some Newfoundland clients who were anxious for more direct postal communication—who objected that their mails were sent in a roundabout way via Halifax. Whereupon Lord Stanley (afterward Earl Derby), then Secretary for the Colonies, rose in explanation, "regretting that his Lordship had not communicated with the Colonial Office, which had considered the question raised; there was no communication by land; the harbor was often closed by ice; therefore present methods were followed," etc. All of which was set forth with most charming grace and suavity; but Lord Stanley was no sooner ended than the irascible Scotch peer, nettled, as would seem, by the very graciousness of the explanation, was upon his feet in an instant, with a sharp "M' Lards," that promised fun; and thereafter came a fusillade of keenest, ironical speech-thanking the honorable Secretary for "the vera impartant information, that as St. John's was upon an island, there could be no com

munication by land; and perhaps his learned Lardship supposes, with an acumen commensurate with his great geographic knowledge, that the sending of the mails by the way of Halifax will have a tendency to thaw the ice in the Harbor of St. John's," and so on, for a ten minute's storm of satiric and witty banter. And then- an awkward plunge backward into his seat a new, nervous twirling of his watch-seals, a curious smile of self-approval, followed by a lapse into the old nervous unrest.

There was no serenity in Brougham—no repose

scarce any dignity. His petulance and angry sarcasm and frequent ill-nature made him a much hated man in his latter days, and involved him in abusive tirades, which people were slow to forgive.

Francis Jeffrey.

As for Mr. Jeffrey, his associate on the Review, and for many years its responsible editor, he was a very different man of easy address, courteous, gentlemanly—quite a master of deportment. Yet it was he who ripped open with his critical knife Southey's Thalaba and the early

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poems of Wordsworth. But even his victims forgot his severities in his pleasantly magnetic presence and under the caressing suavities of his manner. He was brisk, débonnaire, cheery-a famous talker; not given to anecdotes or storytelling, but bubbling over with engaging booklore and poetic hypotheses, and eager to put them into those beautiful shapes of language which came as easily as water flows- to his pen or to his tongue. He said harsh things, not for love of harsh things; but because what provoked them grated on his tastes, or his sense of what was due to Belles Lettres. One did notafter conversing with him- recall great special aptness of remark or of epithet, so much as the charmingly even flow of apposite and illustrative language-void of all extravagances and of all wickednesses, too. Lord Cockburn says of his conversation:

"The listeners' pleasure was enhanced by the personal littleness of the speaker. A large man [Jeffrey was very small] could scarcely have thrown off Jeffrey's conversational flowers without exposing himself to ridicule. But the liveliness of the deep thoughts and the flow of bright expressions that animated his talk, seemed so natural and

appropriate to the figure that uttered them, that they were heard with something of the delight with which the slenderness of the trembling throat and the quivering of the wings make us enjoy the strength and clearness of the notes of a little bird."*

The first Mrs. Jeffrey dying early in life, he married for second wife a very charming American lady, Miss Wilkes; † having found timenotwithstanding his engrossment with the Review

- for an American journey, at the end of which he carried home his bride. Some of his letters to his wife's kindred in America are very delightful setting forth the new scenes to which the young wife had been transported. He knew just what to say and what not to say, to make his pictures perfect. The trees, the church-towers, the mists, the mosses on walls, the gray heather all come into them, under a touch that is as light as a feather, and as sharp as a diamond.

* Life and Correspondence of Lord Jeffrey, by Lord Cockburn, p. 283, vol. i., Harper's edition.

† A grandniece of the great marplot John, Wilkes of George III.'s time, and a near connection (if I am not mistaken) of Captain Wilkes of the South Sea Expedition and of the Mason and Slidell seizure.