When the Whigs carried the Reform Bill he was made Lord Chancellor, -- unfortunately for himself, for be had not all the qualities necessary to make a dignified and a wise supreme judge in a great country with such complicated interests.His predecessor, Lord Eldon, had hesitated and delayed in his judgments, so that there was an immense accumulation of undecided cases; and Brougham cleared them all off in an amazingly brief time.Many of his decisions were reckoned rash by the wisest lawyers; but his opinions in all cases involving equity -- in which he had been instructed by his ethical training in Edinburgh -- will ever be reckoned of great value.As he had excessive self-will and little prudence, his colleagues were in a constant {362}
state of alarm as to what he might do next.They felt that he was dragging the Great Seal through the dirt in a tour which he took through Scotland, receiving congratulations from quarters which did not add to his dignity. At one of his meetings he boasted that he would write that evening to his sovereign, King William, telling him how great was the honor which bad been conferred on him.His colleagues took advantage of the occasion to part with him, and henceforth he held a somewhat ambiguous position in political life; cast off by the liberals and not willing to join the tories, not withstanding his excessive admiration of the Duke of Wellington and Lord Lyndhurst.Still he led a useful life, helping on every educational cause, such as Mechanics' Institutes and the London University.
He was elected, as so many eminent men have been, lord rector of Glasgow University, and delivered, in 1825, a very able and elaborate defence of learning; but declared that man is no more responsible for his belief than for the color of his skin.He may have imagined that the supporters of Calvinism would not frown on such a doctrine; but he was immediately met by Chalmers, Wardlaw, and a host of others, who could not stand such a perversion of the doctrine of necessity, and who showed that the will had much to do with the formation of opinions, for which man, therefore, was responsible, if not to his neighbors, at least to God.
Prompted by a boundless ambition and activity of mind, he threw him self into an infinite number and variety of works, in no one of which, except oratory, did he reach the highest eminence.He continued to cultivate science, physical and mathematical, but had not leisure nor patience to widen the boundaries of any one department.He wrote innumerable articles and papers, especially sketches of statesmen and philosophers.These are always able, candid, kindly, but are deficient in delicate appreciation of character and motive.In his later years he employed a portion of his time in writing an autobiography.
He had been all along an able defender of the great truths of natural religion.He had spoken with reverence of the scriptures, and delighted to show that the theology of nature had sustained revelation.But it was only in his later days that be seemed thoroughly to bow down before God.
it is believed that he was much affected by a change which bad taken place in the character of Lord Lyndhurst, whose clear and sharp intellect he so much admired.Certain it is that in old age he gave forth utterances which show that be was thoroughly penetrated with the importance of divine realities.He spent a good deal of his later life at Cannes, and died there May 9, 1868.
I believe that there is a philosophy-underlying most of the criticisms, {363} and even the orations, of Brougham.
