sels which had been detained in port by contrary winds had set sail, all bound to different parts of the globe; and the gray man had disappeared like a shadow.

LORD CASTLEREAGH.

BY LORD BROUGHAM.

[HENRY PETER BROUGHAM, lawyer, agitator, M.P., lord chancellor, and miscellaneous writer, was grandnephew of Robertson the historian; born at Edinburgh in 1778, and died in 1868. He studied at Edinburgh University. He was one of the founders (in 1802) and a voluminous contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and wrote the famous criticism on Byron's "Hours of Idleness," which provoked "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." Always a Liberal, he fought the battles of that party in and out of Parliament with endless zeal and vigor for the long generation of its exclusion from power by the French Revolution; and plead tirelessly for political and legal reform, abolition of slavery, popular education, and the humanization of the laws. He was counsel for Queen Caroline in 1820 against George IV., and was a chief agent in carrying the Reform Bill of 1832. He was lord chancellor 1830-1834. His writings cover almost all possible subjects. The best are his biographical sketches of "Statesmen of the Time of George III.," and "Men of Letters and Science." His speeches were also collected, and he wrote an autobiography.]

OF THE "safe and middling men" described jocularly by Mr. Canning as "meaning very little, nor meaning that little well," Lord Castlereagh was, in some respects, the least inconsiderable. His capacity was greatly underrated from the poverty of his discourse; and his ideas passed for much less than they were worth, from the habitual obscurity of his expressions. But he was far above the bulk of his colleagues in abilities; and none of them all, except Lord St. Vincent, with whom he was officially connected only for a short time, exercised so large an influence over the fortunes of their country. Indeed, scarce any man of any party bore a more important place in public affairs, or occupies a larger space in the history of his times.

Few men of more limited capacity or more meager acquirements than Lord Castlereagh possessed, had before his time ever risen to any station of eminence in our free country; fewer still have long retained it in a state where mere court intrigue and princely favor have so little to do with men's advancement. But we have lived to see persons of even more obscure merit than Lord Castlereagh rise to equal station in

this country. Of sober and industrious habits, and become possessed of businesslike talents by long experience, he was a person of the most commonplace abilities. He had a reasonable quickness of apprehension and clearness of understanding, but nothing brilliant or in any way admirable marked either his conceptions or his elocution. Nay, to judge of his intellect by his eloquence, we should certainly have formed a very unfair estimate of its perspicacity. For, though it was hardly possible to underrate its extent or comprehensiveness, it was very far from being confused and perplexed in the proportion of his sentences; and the listener who knew how distinctly the speaker could form his plans, and how clearly his ideas were known to himself, might, comparing small things with great, be reminded of the prodigious contrast between the distinctness of Oliver Cromwell's understanding and the hopeless confusion and obscurity of his speech. No man, besides, ever attained the station of a regular debater in our Parliament with such an entire want of all classical accomplishment, and indeed of all literary provision whatsoever. While he never showed the least symptom of an information extending beyond the more recent volumes of the Parliamentary Debates, or possibly the files of the newspapers only, his diction set all imitation, perhaps all description, at defiance. It was with some an amusement to beguile the tedious hours of their unavoidable attendance upon the poor, tawdry, raveled thread of his sorry discourse, to collect a kind of ana from the fragments of mixed, incongruous, and disjointed images that frequently appeared in it."The features of the clause"-"the ignorant impatience of the relaxation of taxation"-"sets of circumstances coming up and circumstances going down" "men turning their backs upon themselves"-"the honorable and learned gentleman's wedge getting into the loyal feelings of the manufacturing classes" "the constitutional principle wound up in the bowels of the monarchical principle "—"the Herculean labor of the honorable and learned member, who will find himself quite disappointed when he has at last brought forth his Hercules" (by a slight confounding of the mother's labor which produced that hero, with his own exploits which gained him immortality) - these are but a few, and not the richest samples, by any means, of a rhetoric which often baffled alike the gravity of the treasury bench and the art of the reporter, and left the wondering audience at a loss to conjecture how any one could

VOL. XXI. - 14

ever exist, endowed with humbler pretensions to the name of

orator.

Wherefore, when the Tory party, "having a devil," preferred him to Mr. Canning for their leader, all men naturally expected that he would entirely fail to command even the attendance of the house while he addressed it; and that the benches, empty during his time, would only be replenished when his highly gifted competitor rose. They were greatly deceived; they underrated the effect of place and power; they forgot that the representative of a government speaks "as one having authority, and not as the Scribes." But they also forgot that Lord Castlereagh had some qualities well fitted to conciliate favor, and even to provoke admiration, in the absence of everything like eloquence. He was a bold and fearless man; the very courage with which he exposed himself unabashed to the most critical audience in the world, while incapable of uttering two sentences of anything but the meanest matter, in the most wretched language; the gallantry with which he faced the greatest difficulties of a question; the unflinching perseverance with which he went through a whole subject, leaving untouched not one of its points, whether he could grapple with it or not, and not one of the adverse arguments, however forcibly and felicitously they had been urged, neither daunted by recollecting the impression just made by his antagonist's brilliant display, nor damped by consciousness of the very rags in which he now presented himself-all this made him upon the whole rather a favorite with the audience whose patience he was taxing mercilessly, and whose gravity he ever and anon put to a very severe trial. Nor can any one have forgotten the kind of pride that mantled on the fronts of the Tory phalanx, when, after being overwhelmed with the powerful fire of the Whig opposition, or galled by the fierce denunciations of the Mountain, or harassed by the splendid displays of Mr. Canning, their chosen leader stood forth, and presenting the graces of his eminently patrician figure, flung open his coat, displayed an azure ribbon traversing a snow-white chest, and declared "his high satisfaction that he could now meet the charges against him face to face, and repel with indignation all that his adversaries were bold and rash enough to advance.'

Such he was in debate; in council he certainly had far more resources. He possessed a considerable fund of plain sense not to be misled by any refinement of speculation, or

clouded by any fanciful notions. He went straight to his point. He was brave politically as well as personally. Of this, his conduct on the Irish Union had given abundant proof; and nothing could be more just than the rebuke which, as connected with the topic of personal courage, we may recollect his administering to a great man who had passed the limits of parliamentary courtesy. "Every one must be sensible," he said, "that if any personal quarrel were desired, any insulting language used publicly where it could not be met as it deserved, was the way to prevent and not to produce such a rencounter." No one after that treated him with disrespect. The complaints made of his Irish administration were well grounded as regarded the corruption of the Parliament by which he accomplished the Union, though he had certainly no direct hand in the bribery practiced; but they were entirely unfounded as regarded the cruelties practiced during and after the rebellion. Far from partaking in these atrocities, he uniformly and strenuously set his face against them. He was of a cold temperament and determined character, but not of a cruel disposition; and to him, more than perhaps to any one else, was owing the termination of the system stained with blood. It is another topic of high praise that he took a generous part against the faction which, setting themselves against all liberal, all tolerant government, sought to drive from their posts the two most venerable rulers with whom Ireland had ever been blessed, Cornwallis and Abercromby. Nor can it be too often repeated that when his colleagues, acting under Lord Clare, had denounced Mr. Grattan, in the Lords' Report, as implicated in a guilty knowledge of the rebellion, he, and he alone, prevented the Report of the Commons from joining in the same groundless charge against the illustrious patriot. An intimation of this from a common friend (who communicated the remarkable fact to the author of these pages), alone prevented a personal meeting between the two upon a subsequent

occasion.

Lord Castlereagh's foreign administration was as destitute of all merit as possible. No enlarged views guided his conduct; no liberal principles claimed his regard; no generous sympathies, no grateful feelings for the people whose sufferings and whose valor had accomplished the restoration of the national independence, prompted his tongue, when he carried forth from the land of liberty that influence which she had a right to exer

cise she who made such vast sacrifices, and was never in return to reap any the least selfish advantage. The representative of England among those powers whom her treasure and her arms had done so much to save, he ought to have held the language becoming a free state, and claimed for justice and for liberty the recognition which he had the better right to demand, that we gain nothing for ourselves after all our sufferings, and all our expenditures of blood as well as money. Instead of this, he flung himself at once and forever into the arms of the sovereigns-seemed to take a vulgar pride in being suffered to become their associate appeared desirous, with the vanity of an upstart elevated unexpectedly into higher circles, of forgetting what he had been, and qualifying himself for the company he now kept, by assuming their habits and never pronounced any of those words so familiar with the English nation and with English statesmen, in the mother tongue of a limited monarchy, for fear that they might be deemed lowbred, and unsuited to the society of crowned heads, in which he was living, and to which they might prove as distasteful as they were unusual. . .

As a friend of the Catholic question, it must be admitted that Lord Castlereagh ranks much above Mr. Canning. Indeed, as a statesman he may be regarded as his superior in all but the narrow and illiberal views which guided his conduct, and from which Mr. Canning shook himself free during the last years of his life.

THE DEMORALIZATION AFTER WATERLOO.

BY MARIE-HENRI BEYLE.

(From "La Chartreuse de Parme": translated by E. P. Robins.)

[MARIE-HENRI BEYLE, "Stendhal: " A French novelist, biographer, and art critic; born at Grenoble in 1783. A considerable portion of his life was spent in Italy, from which country he was finally banished for political intrigue. He died in Paris in 1842. He wrote the lives of Haydn, Mozart, Napoleon, and Rossini, and his fiction includes "La Chartreuse de Parmé" and "The Red and the Black." He also wrote a "History of Painting in Italy."]

NOTHING had power to wake him-neither the sound of the firing that surrounded them on every side nor the trot of