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International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, by Various

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THE INTERNATIONAL MISCELLANY

Of Literature, Art, and Science.

Vol. 1. NEW YORK, OCTOBER 1, 1850. No. 3.







[Illustration:
HENRY BROUGHAM, LORD BROUGHAM AND VAUX.
FROM A SKETCH BY ALFRED CROWQUILL, MADE IN JULY, 1850.]


LORD BROUGHAM.

It is generally understood that this most illustrious Englishman now
living, will, in the course of the present year, visit the United States.
Whatever may be the verdict of the future upon his qualities or his
conduct as a statesman, it is scarcely to be doubted that for the variety
and splendor of his abilities, the extent, diversity and usefulness of
his labors, and that restless, impatient and feverish activity which has
kept him so long and so eminently conspicuous in affairs, he will be
regarded by the next ages as one of the most remarkable personages in the
age now closing--the second golden age of England. Lord Brougham is of a
Cumberland family, but was born in Edinburgh (where his father had
married a niece of the historian Robertson), on the 19th of September,
1779. He was educated at the University of his native city, and we first
hear of him as a member of a celebrated debating society, where he
trained himself to the use of logic. He was not yet sixteen years of age
when he communicated a paper on Light to the Royal Society of London,
which was printed in their transactions; and before he was twenty he had
written discussions of the higher geometry, which, appearing in the same
repository of the best learning, attracted the general attention of
European scholars. In 1802, with his friends Jeffrey, Francis Homer, and
Sidney Smith, he established the Edinburgh Review. In 1806 he published
his celebrated "Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers,"
and soon after was called to the English bar, and settled in London,
where he rapidly rose to the highest eminence as a counselor and an
advocate. On the 16th of March, 1808, he appeared in behalf of the
merchants of London, Liverpool, Manchester, &c., before the House of
Commons, in the matter of the Orders in Council restricting trade with
America, and greatly increased his fame by one of the most masterly
arguments he ever delivered. In 1810 he became a member of Parliament,
and he soon distinguished himself here by his speeches on the slave trade
and against the Orders in Council, which, mainly through his means, were
rescinded. Venturing, at the general election of 1812, to contest the
seat for Liverpool with Mr. Canning, he was defeated, and for four years
he devoted himself chiefly to his profession. In this period he made many
of his most famous law arguments, and acquired the enmity of the Prince
Regent by his defense of Leigh Hunt, and his brother, in the case of
their famous libel in "_The Examiner_." In 1816 he commenced those
powerful and indefatigable efforts in behalf of education, by which he is
perhaps best entitled to the gratitude of mankind. As chairman of the
educational committee of forty, he drew up the two voluminous and
masterly reports which disclosed the exact condition of British
civilization, and induced such action on the part of government as
advanced it in ten years more than it had been previously advanced in a
century. In 1820 he displayed in their perfection those amazing powers of
knowledge, reason, invective, sarcasm, and elocution, on the trial of
Queen Caroline, which more than anything else have made
that trial so memorable among legal and forensic conflicts. In 1822 he
made his unparalleled speech in the case of the Dean and Chapter of
Durham against Williams, and in the following year was elected Lord
Rector of the University of Glasgow. On the downfall of the Wellington
administration, in 1830, and the consequent general election, he was
returned to Parliament as one of the members for Yorkshire, and a few
weeks afterward was made Lord High. Chancellor, and elevated to the
peerage under the title of Lord Brougham and Vaux. He continued in the
office of Lord Chancellor until the dissolution of the Melbourne cabinet,
in 1834. In 1823 he wrote his "Practical Observations on the Education of
the People," and was engaged with Dr. Birkbeck in the formation of the
first Mechanics' Institution. In 1827 he was one of the originators of
the London University, and in the same year he founded the Society for
the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, of which he was the first president,
and for which he wrote its first publication, the admirable "Treatise on
the Objects, Pleasures, and Advantages of Science." In 1830 he was
elected a member of the Institute of France, and about the time of his
resignation of the chancellorship he published his "Discourse on Natural
Theology." In 1840 he published his "Historical Sketches of the Statesmen
who flourished in the Time of George the Third;" in 1845-6, "Lives of Men
of Letters and Science who flourished in the Time of George the Third;"
and he has since given to the world works on "The French Revolution," on
"Instinct," "Demosthenes' Oration on the Crown," &c., &c. Collections of
his Speeches and Forensic Arguments, and of his Critical Essays, as well
as the other works above referred to, have been republished in
Philadelphia, by Lea and Blanchard.

In the language of the Editor of his "Opinions", Lord Brougham is
remarkable for uniting, in a high degree of perfection, three things
which are not often found to be compatible. His learning is all but
universal: his reason is cultivated to the perfection of the
argumentative powers; and he possesses in a rare and eminent degree the
gift of eloquence.

Of his learning it may be said that there is scarcely a subject, on which
ingenuity or intellect has been exercised, that he has not probed to its
principles, or entered into with the spirit of a philosopher. That he is
a classical scholar of a high order, is shown by his criticisms on the
internal peculiarities of the works of the ancients and their styles of
composition. They evince an intimate acquaintance with the great master
pieces of antiquity. The book-worms of Universities--those scholastic
giants who are great on small questions of quantity and etymology,--who
buckle on the ponderous armor of the commentators in the contest with
more subtle wits, on the interesting doubt of a wrong reading; such men,
in the spirit of pedantry, have refused to Lord Brougham the merit of
profundity, while they allow that he possesses a sort of superficial
knowledge of the classics; they say that he can gracefully skim the
surface of the stream, but that its depths would overwhelm him. Now,
while this may be true as regards the fact, we dissent from it as regards
the inference. It is a question to be decided between the learned drones
of a by-gone school and the quicker intellects of a ripening age, which
is the better thing,--criticism on words--on accidental peculiarities of
style--or a just and sympathizing conception of the feelings of the poet
or the wisdom of the philosopher. Men are beginning to disregard the
former, while they set a high value upon the latter: so much
laboriously-earned learning is at a discount, and allowance should be
made for the petty spite, the depreciating superciliousness, of
disappointment. Lord Brougham's classical knowledge partakes more of that
intimate regard and appreciation which we accord to the great writers,
than of this pedantry of the schools. Hence the cry of want of depth,
that has been raised against him. Like many other great men of his age,
he has read the authors of Greece and Rome in a spirit that has
identified him with their thoughts and feelings, by taking into account
the circumstances of their times; and the result has been, that he has
exchanged the formalities and critical sharp-sightedness of acquaintance
for the intimacy of friendship.

In point of general political knowledge, and particularly of that branch
called political economy, Lord Brougham stands prominently among his
contemporaries. In his speeches and writings will be found the first
principles of every new view of these subjects that has been taken by the
moderns. Of not a few he has himself been the originator. In the party
history of the last century he is well versed, as many of his speeches
show; and no public man of the present day is so well acquainted with the
theory and practice of the constitution, whether as regards the broad
principles of liberty on which it is based, or its gradual formation
during the different periods of our history. It may not be amiss here to
observe, that notwithstanding his long connection with the movement
party, and the countenance he has from time to time given to measures of
a decidedly liberal cast, he never was, and is still as far from being, a
Democrat. Throughout his career he has been a consistent Liberal: always
advocating such measures of reform as were calculated to remove abuses,
while they in no way affected the stability and integrity of the
institutions of the country. While, on the one hand, he has declared his
most unequivocal opposition to the ballot and universal suffrage, on the
other he has advocated popular education, as the ultimate panacea for all
the evils to be feared from the extension of popular influence.

The legal knowledge of Lord Brougham has been questioned by the members
of the profession whose abuses he desired to reform. It was even said,
that while his elevation to the Chancellorship was the unjustifiable act
of a party to serve party purposes, it was at the same time desirable to
Mr. Brougham in a pecuniary point of view, from a falling off in his
professional practice, caused by his hostility to those abuses. Now,
although this is a question really of more interest to lawyers, than to
the public in general, and one which might, therefore, be left to their
decision, yet there was an _animus_ at the time among this class of men,
that rendered them not disinterested judges. Their opinion therefore must
be taken with a qualification, as well on the score of particular
immediate drawbacks, as on the score of their general professional
prejudices. Lord Brougham respected too much the principles of justice,
and he too little regarded the technicalities of law, to be agreeable to
that body. He had a faculty too, for giving speedy judgments, and a
determination to prevent unnecessary expenses, that were particularly
disagreeable to men imbued with a conscientious desire that justice
should not be prejudiced by an unprecedented and informal haste in its
dispensation, or by a reduction of the number of its advocates. The new
Lord Chancellor, too, thought that when one or two intelligent barristers
had been engaged at a large expense, and had well stated the case of
their client, it was quite unnecessary that the same ground should be
again gone over by juniors, whose arguments marred more than they helped
the interests of their employers. When, therefore, he either put them
down, or was droned into a short nap, while the industrious advocate was
earning his unnecessary fee, it was a specimen of "the arrogance of an
upstart wholly unacquainted with Chancery Law," or "of an eccentricity
bordering on insanity, and wholly unfitting its exhibitor for the high
and responsible situation he held." Posterity will do justice to Lord
Brougham in this respect. It will be felt to have been impossible that a
man of such vast acquirements, who had been so successful in his
profession, and who had, in all other branches of knowledge, evinced such
clearness of intellect, could have been the inefficient lawyer his
detractors have represented him to be.

There is another great department in which he has proved his
excellence--that of physical science. With the principles of all the
sciences, his works show him to be familiar. His treatise "on the
Objects, Pleasures, and Advantages of Science" is admirable, as a
bird's-eye view of the subject, while at the same time it is an enticing
stimulant to study. The work on "Natural Theology" necessarily touches
upon the physical sciences, and their connection with the great mechanism
of nature. The geometrical and optical papers, published in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, when he was only fifteen
years of age, show at least a firm groundwork of scientific knowledge.
And if it be said that Lord Brougham's attainments are superficial only,
we say that knowledge of detail does not of itself make a man competent.
The _principles_ of all sciences are a _sine qua non_.

Lord Brougham is eminently clear-headed; and he is distinguished for his
argumentative powers. He has peculiarly the faculty of analysis; that of
keeping in his own mind a comprehensive view of the whole bearings of a
question, even while running at large into the minutest details; no man
detects the fallacy of an opponent's argument more easily; nor can any
man be more skillful in concocting a fallacy to suit a temporary purpose.

Lord Brougham's eloquence most distinguishes him from his contemporaries.
Learning may be acquired; the habit of reasoning may be induced by
constant dialectic contest; but eloquence is far more than these the gift
of nature. Lord Brougham's eloquence savors of the peculiar constitution
of his mind. It is eminently adapted for educated men. He was never
intended for a demagogue; for he never condescends to the art of
pandering to the populace. His speeches are specimens of argumentative
eloquence; and their only defect arises from his fertility of
illustration. The extraordinary information he possesses has induced the
habit of drawing too largely upon it; and he is apt to be led aside from
the straight road of his argument, to elucidate some minor disputed
point. But the argumentative style of which we speak is almost peculiar
to himself. There is a ripeness, a fruitfulness, in his mind, that places
him above the fetters of ordinary speakers. Such men, from the difficulty
of clearing their heads for the contest, too often present a mere
fleshless skeleton, as it were, very convincing to the judgment, but
powerless over the feelings; so that no lasting impression is produced.
But Lord Brougham, from being a master in argument, is free to pursue his
bent in illustration, and thus conjures up a whole picture that dwells on
the mind, and is remembered for its effect on the feelings or the
imagination, even by men whose levity or dullness precluded their being
fixed by the argument. The very structure of his sentences is more
adapted for this kind of speaking than any other. They sometimes appear
involved, to an ordinary mind, from their length, and the abundance of
illustration and explanation which they embrace; but the extraordinary
vigor with which the delivery is kept up, and the liveliness of fancy or
of humor that flashes at every turn of the thought, soon dispel the
temporary cloud.

In irony and in sarcasm, Lord Brougham is unrivaled among the public men
of the day. That his exuberant power of ridicule led him while Lord
Chancellor, into some excess of its use, cannot be denied, although a
ready excuse can be found in the circumstances of his situation. He might
be held to be the representative of liberal principles in a place where
almost the name of Liberal had, till then, been proscribed; and the
animosity toward the new Chancellor, evinced by many peers, was
calculated to induce reprisals. The eccentricities, too, of men of genius
are of such value that they may well be said to atone for themselves.

A quality of Lord Brougham's mind, that is almost as extraordinary as his
extent of information, is its singular activity. His energies never seem
to flag--even for an instant; he does not seem to know what it is to be
fatigued, or jaded. Some such quality as this, indeed, the vastness and
universality of his acquirements called for, in order to make the weight
endurable to himself, and to bear him up during his long career of
political excitement. Take the routine of a day for instance. In his
early life he has been known to attend, in his place in court, on
circuit, at an early hour in the morning. After having successfully
pleaded the cause of his client, he drives off to the hustings; and
delivers, at different places, eloquent speeches to the electors. He then
sits in the retirement of his closet to pen an address to the Glasgow
students, perhaps, or an elaborate article in the Edinburgh Review. The
active labors of the day are closed with preparation for the court
business of the following morning; and then instead of retiring to rest,
as ordinary men would, after such exertions, he spends the night in
abstruse study, or in social intercourse. Yet he would be seen as early
as eight next morning, actively engaged in the Court, in defense of some
unfortunate object of government persecution; astonishing the auditory,
and his fellow lawyers no less, with the freshness and power of his
eloquence.

A fair contrast with this history of a day, in early life, would be that
of one at a more advanced period; say in 1832. A watchful observer might
see the Lord Chancellor in the Court over which he presided, from an
early hour in the morning until the afternoon, listening to the arguments
of counsel, and mastering the points of cases with a grasp that enabled
him to give those speedy and unembarrassed judgments that have so injured
him with the profession. If he followed his course, he would see him,
soon after the opening of the House of Lords, addressing their Lordships
on some intricate question of Law, with an acuteness that drew
approbation even from his opponents, or, on some all-engrossing political
topic, casting firebrands into the camp of the enemy, and awakening them
from the complacent repose of conviction to the hot contest with more
active and inquiring intellects. Then, in an hour or so, he might follow
him to the Mechanics' Institution, and hear an able and stimulating
discourse on education, admirably adapted to the peculiar capacity of
his auditors; and, toward ten perhaps, at a Literary and Scientific
Institution in Marylebone, the same Proteus-like intellect might be found
expounding the intricacies of physical science with a never tiring and
elastic power. Yet, during all these multitudinous exertions, time would
be found for the composition of a discourse on Natural Theology,
that bears no marks of haste or excitement of mind, but presents as calm
a face as though it had been the laborious production of a contemplative
philosopher.

It would be a great mistake that would suppose the man who has thus
multiplied the objects of his exertion to be of necessity superficial;
superficial, that is, in the sense of shallowness or ignorance. Ordinary
minds are bound by fetters, no doubt. Custom has rendered the pursuit of
more than one idea all but impossible to them, and the vulgar adage of
"Jack of all trades, master of none," applies to them in full force. But
it must be remembered that a public man like Lord Brougham, who has
chosen his peculiar sphere of action, and who prefers being of general
utility to the scholar-like pursuit of any one branch of science
exclusively, is not bound to present credentials of full and perfect
mastership, such as are required from a professor of a university. His
pursuit of facts must of necessity be for the purpose of illustrating
general principles in political or moral science; and where more than a
certain amount of knowledge is not laid claim to, the absence of more is
no imputation.

Lord Brougham is thoroughly individualized as regards his talents and all
that constitutes idiosyncratic difference, even while he is identified
with the political and moral advancement of the people. During all the
agitations of a period almost unparalleled, he has remained untainted by
the influence of party spirit. That he has entered, and hotly too, into
almost every question of any moment that has come before the Legislature
during many years is true; but he has never appeared in the character of
a partisan; he has always been the consistent supporter of liberal
measures _per se_, and not because they were the means adopted by a party
to gain political power. With his political steadfastness he has
preserved his intellectual integrity from profanation. For although, had
he early devoted his powers to the study of abstract or practical
science, as a leading and not a subsidiary pursuit, the acuteness of his
mind was such, that he must have risen to eminence upon the basis of
discovery, yet it is no slight proof how little the struggles of the
world affect superior intellects, that he has all along turned aside,
with a never cloying avidity, to the pursuits of mind--to science, to
literature, and to philosophy.

* * * * *


THE WHITE LADY.

The readers of _The International_ may have seen some account of an
apparition said to have been seen recently in the royal palace at Berlin,
and known under the name of the "White Lady." M. Minutoli, lately chief
of the Police at Berlin, has been amusing himself by looking up the
history of this visitant from the unknown world, and has published a
variety of curious particulars respecting her, drawn in a measure from
documents preserved in the royal archives, as well as from old-time
chronicles and dissertations, Latin and German middle age doggerel, and
the records of jurists, historians and theologists. Several persons are
designated in the early history of the family of Hohenzollern as that
unquiet soul who for some three hundred years has performed the functions
of palace-ghost. Many writers agree that she was a Countess named
Orlamuende, Beatrice, or Cunigunde, and that she was desperately in love
with Count Albert of Nuremberg, and was led by her passion to a crime
which is the cause of her subsequent ghostly disquiet. Mr. Minutoli
proves that this lady cannot be the same that alarms the palace with her
untimely visitations. The accounts of the White Lady ascend to 1486, and
she was first seen at Baireuth. Subsequently two ghosts were heard of,
one white and one black. They were several times boldly interrogated and
interesting discoveries arrived at. In 1540, Count Albert the Warrior
laid in wait for the apparition, seized it with his powerful arm and
flung it head over heels down into the castle court-yard. The next
morning the chancellor, Christopher Hass, was found there with his neck
broken, and upon his person a dagger and a letter proving him to have had
treasonable designs. Notwithstanding the spirit has several times been
thus compromised, it has maintained itself to the present day. It was
first seen in Berlin January 1, 1598, eight days before the death of the
Prince Royal John George. When the French invasion took place, it
returned to Baireuth and was patriotic enough to take up its abode in the
new chateau which had never been occupied before the arrival of the
French officer. Even Napoleon called the place _ce maudit chateau_, on
account of its mysterious inhabitant, and had to give up his lodgings
to the ghost. He stopped in the chateau on his way to Russia but when he
returned next year he avoided passing the night there. With regard to the
last appearance at the palace at Berlin just before the late attempt on
the life of the king, and which has been described as "a fearful
apparition of a White Lady dressed in thin and flowing garments, moving
slowly and silently around and around the fountain to the terror of a
corporal standing near the entrance to the silver chamber," M. Minutoli
proves it to have been an old woman once a cook at the chateau who has
since lived there and is known, by the nickname of Black Minna.

* * * * *

[Illustration: MRS. FANNY KEMBLE READING SHAKSPEARE AT THE ST. JAMES'
THEATER.]


MRS. FANNY KEMBLE'S "READINGS" IN LONDON.

MRS. KEMBLE has been giving a series of dramatic readings in London, and
her success in the scene of her early triumphs appears to have been as
decided as it was in New York. She was never in a situation more
agreeable to her temper and ambition than that represented in the above
engraving, which we have copied from one in _The Illustrated News_. She
is triumphant, and "alone in her glory."

Mrs. Kemble is now about forty years of age. Gentleness is acquired in
three generations; she is removed but two from the most vulgar condition;
and by the mother's side but one. The Kembles of the last age were
extraordinary persons. John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Siddons had both
remarkable genius, and Charles Kemble has been an actor of consummate
talent. Whatever intellect remains in the family is in his children; one
of whom is a man of learning and refinement, another a woman of some
cleverness in musical art, and Frances Anne, of whom we write more
particularly.

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