to Parliament for Winchelsea, a borough of the carl of Darlington, and he instantly resumed a commanding position in the House of Commons. He sueeecded in defeating the continuance of the income tax; ho distinguished himself as an advocate for the education of the people ; and on the death of Komilly he took up with ardour the great work of the reform of the law. It has taken half a century to workout the plans of these early law reformers, and the last year or two have given us a national system of education and a new judicature with an entirely new form of procedure. But not the less glorious and valuable were the services of those who first engaged in these great tasks. Nothing exasperated the Tory party more than the select committee which sat, with Mr Brougham in the chair, in 1816 and the three following years, to investigate the slate of education of the poor in the metropolis. The inquiry w.i.s extended so far as to include the great collegiate foundations of Eton, Winchester, and the Charter House ; and the report of the committee was attacked with great virulence by Bishop Monk in the Quarterly Review and by Sir Robert Peel in the House of Commons. In time, however, the exposure of abuses bore fruit, and we owe to it some of the most important improvements of the age. Brougham, however, was as far as ever from obtaining the leadership of the party to which lie aspired. Indeed, as was judiciously pointed out by Lord Lansdowne in 1817, the opposition had no recognised ellicient leaders ; their warfare was carried on in separate courses, indulging their own tastes and tempers, without combined action. Nor was Brougham much more successful at the bar. The death of George III. suddenly changed this state of things. Queen Caroline at once, in April 1820, appointed Mr Brougham to be Her Majesty s attorney -general, and Mr Denman her solicitor- general. They immediately took their rank in court accordingly ; and, indeed, this was the sole act of royal authority which marked the queen s brief and unhappy reign. In July Her Majesty came from St Omer to England ; ministers sent down to both Houses of Parliament the secret evidence which they had long been collecting against her ; and a bill was brought into the House of Lords for the deposition of the queen and the dissolution of the king s marriage. The long repressed spirit of opposition in the nation against a bigoted and tyrannical Government was inflamed to a conflagration by the sense of the queen s wrongs. Guilty or innocent (and no one could dispute the excessive levity of her conduct), she was regarded by the people of England as a persecuted woman, a deserted wife, an outraged mother ; and these charges were brought against her by those who were guilty of far greater offences. "My mother would not have been so bad," the Princess Charlotte is reported to have said, " if my father had not been much worse." Themes such as these, worked upon by the eloquence of Brougham and the activity of the queen s friends, produced a popular commotion, which in any other country would have caused bloodshed, and perhaps revolution.
The defence of the queen was conducted by Brougham, assisted by Denman, Lushingtou, and Wilde, with equal courage and ability. He hurled back defiance on the prosecutors, and threatened, if driven to the last extremity, to retaliate on the person of the sovereign ; though if he had set up the marriage of the Prince with Mrs Fitzherbert as a valid marriage (which it certainly was not), he would thereby have annulled the subsequent marriage of his royal client. He demolished piece by piece with merciless severity the whole fabric and tissue of Italian evidence, raked together and paid for by the Milan commission; and he wound up the proceedings by a speech of extraordinary power and elfort. The peroration was said to have been written and rewritten by him seventeen times. At moments of great excitement such declamation may be of value, and in 1820 it was both heard and read with enthusiasm. But to the calmer judgment of another generation this celebrated oration seems turgid and overstrained. The truth is, that there were moments in the course of the trial when the evidence pressed so hardly on the queen that her counsel were on the point of throwing up the case. But a generous feeling, impelled by an immense popular sympathy, prevailed. It was certain the bill could never pass the Hoxise of Commons, where the same appeals might be made to a less judicial assembly. The final majority in the Lords dwindled to nine ; and Lord Liverpool announced that he should not proceed with the bill.
This victory over the court and the ministry raised Henry Brougham at once to the pinnacle of fame. He shared the triumph of the queen. His portrait was in every shop window. A piece of plate was presented to him, paid for by a penny subscription of peasants and mechanics. With his wonted disinterestedness in money matters, he refused to accept a sum of 4000 which the queen herself placed at his disposal. He took no more than the usual fees of counsel, while his salary as Her Majesty s attorney-general re mained unpaid, arid was discharged by the Treasury after her death. But from that moment his fortune was made at the bar. His practice on the northern circuit instantly quintupled. One of his finest speeches was a defence of a Durham newspaper which had attacked the clergy for refusing to allow the bells of the churches in Durham to be tolled on the queen s death ; and by the admis sion of Lord Campbell, a rival advocate and an unfriendly critic, he rose suddenly to a position which no man has before or since attained to in the profession. The meanness of George IV. and Lord Eldon refused him the silk gown to which his position at the bar entitled him, and for some years he led the circuit as an outer barrister, to the great loss of the senior members of the circuit, who could only be employed against him. His practice rose to about 7000 a year, but it was again falling off before he became Chancellor.
The death of Lord Castlereagh in 1822, and the advance ment of Canning to the office of Foreign Secretary, materi ally changed the character of Lord Liverpool s Govern ment. Canning and Brougham sat on opposite benches the one a follower of Pitt, the other of Fox ; and they were constantly pitted against each other. Sometimes their rhetorical conflicts assumed an intense violence, as when Brougham accused the minister of " the most monstrous truckling for the purpose of obtaining office that the whole history of political tergiversation could furnish." Canning indignantly exclaimed, "It is false ;" and the quarrel was with some difficulty appeased, though Brougham was not supposed to be very ready to employ any weapon sharper than his tongue. But Canning and Brougham were in truth rivals rather than antagonists ; and the more liberal influence of the former in the ministry had almost brought them into union upon the leading questions of the day, always excepting that of parlia mentary reform. Had Canning lived and maintained himself in power, it might have fallen to his lot to carry Catholic Emancipation and a more moderate measure of parliamentary reform. But if, as is believed, Earl Grey was excluded from Mr Canning s Government by an ex press stipulation of the king, it follows a fortiori that the attorney-general of Queen Caroline could never be a minister of George IV. That sovereign had shown on several occasions that the attacks made on him by Brougham were never forgotten or forgiven; and Canning, whose own position at court was difficult enough, had certainly not the power to overcome the king s resentment. Brougham, however, promised and gave his shortlived administration an independent support unlike Lord Grey, who fiercely and ungenerously attacked it.
cannot be passed over in silence. In 1825 the first steps were taken, under the auspices of Brougham, for the establishment of a university in London, absolutely free from all religious or sectarian distinctions, a scheme which has grown and ripened in half a century into no unworthy rival of the other universities of northern and southern Britain. In 1827 Brougham contributed to found the " Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," an S. D. U. K. association which gave an immense impulsion to sound popular literature. Its first publication was an essay on the " Pleasures and Advantages of Science," written by himself. One can hardly imagine at the present time with what avidity this paper was read, for it had no novelty of substance and no great merit of style. But a thirst for knowledge seemed suddenly to have seized the nation. It broke forth in mechanics institutes and every form of instruction. To use his own language on a cele brated occasion " the schoolmaster was abroad ;" and the excitement he had contrived to kindle on these subjects tended to hasten a great crisis in our political life. In the following year (1828) he delivered his great speech on " Law Reform," which lasted six hours in the delivery in a thin and exhausted House, a marvellous effort, which embraced every part of the existing system of judicature, and concluded with one of his noblest perorations. " It was the boast of Augustus," he said, " and it formed part of the glory in which his early perfidies were lost, that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble, a praise not
unworthy of a gre^t prince, and to which the present reign