ttended with
manifest advantages, and promises of still greater benefits to the
nation. Only such as are accustomed to the cares of office can form
but a faint idea of the perplexities which beset the Lord Chancellor
on the recent dissolution of parliament; yet in this arduous scene
Lord Brougham is believed by all but the bitterest of his political
opponents, to have comported himself with becoming equanimity. A
political contemporary observes, upon his recent appointment--"There
is no instance in modern times of an elevation marked with the same
characters. Lord Brougham had never before been in office; he had
passed through none of the degrees which for the most part, lead
to the proud eminence where he now stands. We have had learned
Chancellors, and political--or, we would rather say, politic
Chancellors--but never before Lord Brougham (with, perhaps, the
exception of Erskine), have we had what may be justly called a popular
Chancellor. * * The consideration which he disdained to accept from
party or from power in the House, his conduct has won from the great
mass of his countrymen out of it. We speak the plain and simple truth
when we say--and that not for the first time--that at no period of
our history since the era of the Commonwealth has any one Englishman
contrived to fix so many eyes upon him as Lord Brougham has for the
last few years."[4]

Of Lord Brougham's qualifications as a barrister we have already
spoken. To the hearing of appeals in the House of Lords, an important
section of the public business, his Lordship brings qualifications
not possessed by any of his predecessors. Seven years' practice at
the Scotch bar, and a very extensive employment in appeals from that
country (for he has been engaged in almost every case of importance
for the last ten years) have made him familiar with the machinery of
the law on which his decisions bear; and he therefore undertakes his
judicial task with professional confidence.

Besides contributing to the _Edinburgh Review_, as we have noticed,
Lord Brougham is the author of several papers in _Nicholson's
Journal_, and in the Transactions of the Royal Society, of which his
Lordship is a distinguished member. The chief entire work which bears
his name is entitled, "An Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the
European States," 2 vols. 8vo. 1828; and a masterly pamphlet "On the
State of the Nation," which has run through many editions. Several of
his speeches have lik