as I have to sketch ten, the greatest in the whole world."

The unhesitating manner of Brougham in selfapplause would alone make him wonderful. About one of his speeches he writes: "I was obliged to exert myself last night as I had not done for years. The speech has made a great noise; but, if it had one fault, there was no relief, no ordinary matter for the mind to rest upon. Every sentence was a figure or a passage. I marked that, for an hour and a half by the clock, I was speaking in tropes and allusions." He ratted from his party when not asked to join the Cabinet, and said he punished them daily. "Depend upon it," he writes, "there is no great comfort ever accrues to those who try their hands on my back.”

He did not hesitate to puff himself in articles published in the "Review," where he prints: "Of all the portentous signs of the times for the present Ministry, the most appalling is the nearly unanimous choice of Mr. Brougham to be member for Yorkshire. This is assuredly the most extraordinary event in the history of party politics."

But Brougham at last occupied one field of vanity, where he stands alone the unchallenged pioneer. He caused it to be given out that he had been killed in a carriage accident, merely to learn what eulogiums would be presented by the newspapers, and which it appears he enjoyed keenly. "A lie, daily repeated," as he wrote to Napier-but did not tell by whom it was concocted-"by two or three papers in London

and one in Edinburgh, has deceived you all; namely, that the people of this country no longer have any care about me. Is it so? Look at the last week and tell. Let this show the risk of men in a party giving up an old leader because another happened for the hour to be invested with office."

And yet Brougham, "the tremendous Harry," was for some years actually the most important person in the British Parliament.

When Brougham was made Lord Chancellor the following sarcasm, attributed to Baron Alderson, was set afloat: "What a wonderful, versatile mind has Brougham! He knows politics, Greek, history, science; if he only knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything."

B. 1605.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

D. 1682.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE says that "King Philip did not detract from the nation when he said he sent his Armada to fight with men, and not to combat with the winds.

"The success of that petty province of Holland (of which the Grand Seigneur proudly said, if they should trouble him as they did the Spaniard, he would send his men with shovels and pickaxes and throw it into the sea) I cannot altogether ascribe to the ingenuity and industry of the people, but to the mercy of God.

"Men are like ships, the more they contain, the lower they carry their head."

B. 1778.

WILLIAM HAZLITT.

D. 1830.

"HERE, too, I have written Table-Talks without number, and as yet without falling off, till now that they are nearly done, or I should not make this boast, I could swear (were they not mine) the thoughts in many of them are founded as the rock, free as air, the tone like an Italian picture."

It is related that John Lamb, the brother of Charles, once knocked down Hazlitt, who was impertinent to him; and on those who were present interfering, and begging of Hazlitt to shake hands and forgive him, Hazlitt said, "Well, I don't care if I do. I am a metaphysician, and do not mind a blow; nothing but an idea hurts me."

Hazlitt, in one of his essays, declares that "no great man ever thought himself so." He should at least have excepted himself.

In his "Table-Talk" he makes the following confession: "I feel the force of Horace's digito monstrari. I like to be pointed out in the street, or to hear people ask in Mr. Powell's Court, 'Which is Mr. H——— ?? This is to me a pleasing extension of one's personal identity. Your name so repeated leaves an echo like music on the ear. It stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. It shows that other people are curious to

see you; that they think of you, and feel an interest in you, without your knowing it. This is a bolster to lean upon; a lining to your poor, shivering, threadbare opinion of yourself. You want some such cordial to exhausted spirits, and relief to the dreariness of abstract speculation."

B. 1778.

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY.

D. 1829.

PERHAPS men who claim to have been self-taught are more apt to make that circumstance in their personal history known than are school-taught men to make known their "previous condition of servitude." It should be conceded, however, that no far-reaching education can be acquired where self does not play the leading part. Sir Humphry Davy, when at the height of his well-earned fame, declared, "What I am I have made myself." Here the personal pronoun, in the first person, singular number, is very prominent; and yet it may be that he only intended to have it understood that his great learning, researches, and experiments had been mainly pursued since he left school at the early age of fifteen.

B. 1780.

ROBERT EMMET.

D. 1803.

THIS great Irish orator and patriot had as sublime a confidence in future fame as that expressed by Bacon; and the last thing he said, just before the death-sentence was pronounced, was: "When my

country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written."

B. 1779.

THOMAS MOORE.

D. 1845.

MOORE said he had had great pleasure in complying with Lockhart's wish to give him his impression of Sir Walter Scott's ability as a poet and novelist, and had paid an ungrudging tribute to the great and good man's memory, though he owned to having been much mortified at being unable to find an excuse for introducing a word about himself.

It seems he had once visited Scott, and what he wanted to introduce was the unparalleled reception awarded to himself when accompanying Sir Walter Scott to the Edinburgh Theatre. "Although," he said, "I merely went under Scott's wing, and as his guest, and though Scott at the time was the national idol, the moment we appeared, I heard my name cried out. It spread like wildfire through the house. He was nowhere, and I was cheered and applauded to the very echo. When the Life, however, came out, I was rewarded for my self-denial by finding that Lockhart himself had done ample justice to the scene."

One day at Miss B. Coutts's he became taciturn and sulky when Dickens came in. After he had gone, Moore, evidently contrasting their respective reputa