Volume 3 > Half-Volume 6

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Corn-laws; A Letter on National Education to the
Duke of Bedford; and A Reply to Lord John Russell's
Letter to the Electors of Stroud on the Principles of the
Reform Act. For a few years afterwards his public
appearances were chiefly in reference to the great
anti-corn law agitation with which the whole country
was engrossed. On this occasion his conduct was
so independent, and so exclusively his own, as to be
characteristic of the man and no other; for while his
declarations and votes contributed to the final repeal
of the corn-laws in 1846, he denounced the league
itself as unconstitutional. But among the various
public measures which during these years he either
supported or condemned, the chief subject that inter-
ested him was the improvement of our legislation;
and in 1843 he published Letters on Law-reform,
addressed to the Right Hon. Sir James Graham; in
1844 he delivered in parliament, and afterwards
published, a Speech on the Criminal Code; and
in May, 1845, he delivered another great speech
on law-reform. Notwithstanding this continued
activity, a very inadequate idea would be formed
of the amount of work performed by Lord Brougham
were we to limit our views of it to the foregoing
statement. Hitherto we have contented ourselves
with a consecutive account of his public appearances,
and his publications in connection with them which
they originated. But during the whole course of his
public career his pen had never been idle, and
newspapers, reviews, magazines, and encyclopedias
abounded with his productions, some published
anonymously, and others with his name, but all of
them stamped with the impress of his own remark-
able genius, by which, during such a long course of
years, had there been nothing else, he would have
been constantly kept before the public gaze and the
public wonder. Even had he done nothing else,
the chief surprise would have been that one man
could write so much. After his early production on
Colonial Policy, in two volumes, in 1803, a long
interval succeeded in which his productions were
chiefly the fruits of temporary occasions, and appeared
in the form of Letters, Speeches, Essays, and Disserta-
tions. But in 1835 he resumed the work of author-
ship in its volume form by publishing a new edition
of Paley's Natural Theology, to which he appended a
preliminary discourse and notes. This work, on
which it was said Lord Brougham had been employed
for five years, went speedily through three editions�
a public favour which was owing to the celebrity of
his lordship's name, and to the fact that the "Dis-
course" was reckoned one of the most eloquent of
his writings. A few years later he added two sup-
plementary volumes to the work, under the title of
Dissertations on Subjects of Science connected -with
Natural Theology. In 1838 he published the Col-
lected Edition of his Speeches, in four volumes,
including his principal orations up to that date, with
historical notes and introductions, and a "Discourse
on the Eloquence of the Ancients." In 1839-43
appeared the first series of his Historic Sketches of
Statesmen who Flourished in the Time of George III.,
and in 1845 his Lives of Men of Arts and Science
who Flourished in the Time of George III. In 1842
he published his Political Philosophy, and in January,
1845, he brought out in French, Lives of Voltaire
and Rousseau, with some unedited letters of Hume
and Voltaire. In 1837 he published his Dialogue on
Instinct and his translation of the De Coron� of
Demosthenes. In 1849 he published a Letter to the
Marquis of Lansdowne on the Late Revolution in
France, which went through five or six editions. In
1855 he published, conjointly with E. J. Routh, an
Analytical View of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia,
which is now used in the university of Cambridge.
In 1857 he collected and published his contributions
to the Edinburgh Review, in three volumes 8vo. An
edition of Lord Brougham's works, entitled The Criti-
cal,  Historical, and Miscellaneous Works of Henry Lord
Brougham, F.R.S., Member of the National Institute
of France, and of the Royal Academy of Naples,
has been published in ten volumes, 1855-58;.
and on the I7th and 31st of May, 1858, Lord
Brougham read to the Academy of Science a very
interesting paper on the structure of the cells of bees,,
in a zoological and mathematical point of view..
It is published in the Comptes Rendus, &c., 31st
May, torn. 46, p. 1024, under the title of '' Recherches
Analytiques et Experimentales sur les Alveoles des
Abeilles. " To this long list, which only comprises
the chief of his productions, popular rumour attributed
to him the authorship of more than one novel. It
sounds like a joke upon the grave and earnest states-
man, or at least a satire upon his ambition of uni-
versal literary distinction. The rumour was chiefly
founded upon a novel published in the established
three-volume form in 1844, under the title of Albert
Limel, or the Chateau of Languedoc. But no sooner
was it printed than it was withdrawn, so that only
five copies are known to exist, while the suppressed
work was stated to be the production not of Lord
Brougham but of a lady.
Having purchased a property in the neighbour-
hood of Cannes, his lordship was in the practice,
during the latter period of his life, of there spending
the summer. This residence naturally brought him
into contact with the stirring political events which
were going on in France, and especially with the
great revolution in the beginning of 1848. Infected
by the general fever, or ambitious to take a share
in the new but short-lived government of liberty,
equality, and fraternity, he announced his intention
to the mayor of Cannes of standing as a candidate
for the department of the Var, and then wrote to M.
Cremieux, the minister of justice, requesting the
necessary certificates to be forwarded, and expressing
his wish that he should be naturalized as a French
citizen without delay. The French minister was
amazed at such an application, and warned him of
the consequences of its success. "If you become a
French citizen," Cremieux wrote in reply, "you
cease to be Lord Brougham. You lose in an instant
all your noble titles, all the privileges, all the advan-
tages, of whatever nature they may be, which you
hold either from your quality of Englishman or from
the rights which the laws and customs of your coun-
try have conferred upon you, and which cannot be
reconciled with our laws of equality amongst all
citizens." Becoming sarcastic, the minister added, 
"I certainly imagine that the late lord-chancellor
of England knows the necessary consequences of so
important a step; but it is the duty of the minister of
justice of the French republic to warn him of it
officially. When you shall have made a demand
including these declarations it will be immediately
examined." The merriment both of France and
England was raised at this application, and the
rebuff with which it was encountered; and as if to
protract the mirth of the two countries, Lord
Brougham repeated his appeal. "I never could
have supposed," he said in a second letter to M.
Cremieux, "that in getting myself naturalized as a
French citizen, I should lose all my rights as an
English peer, and an English subject in France. I
shall only retain all my privileges in England; in
France I should be all that the laws of France accord
to the citizens of the republic." To this strange
reason for urging his claim he added a still stranger