This was another young lawyer--of Scottish birth, but of Cumberland stock; ambitious like Jeffrey and equally clever, though in a different line; he was ungainly and lank of limb; with a dogmatic and presuming manner, and a noticeably aggressive nose which became afterward the handle (and a very good handle it made) for those illustrative caricatures of Mr. Punch, which lasted for a generation. Brougham[29] was always a debater from his boy-days--and not a little of a bully and outlaw; precocious too--a capital Latinist--writing a paper on Optics at eighteen, which found publishment in the Philosophical Transactions; member of the Speculative Society where Jeffrey and Mackintosh, and Alison were wont to go, and where his disputatious spirit ran riot. He didn’t love to agree with anybody; one of those men it would seem who hardly wished his dinner to agree with him. Yet Brougham was one of the master spirits in this new enterprise, and became a great historic personage. His reputation was indeed rather political and forensic, than literary, and in his writings he inclined to scientific discussion. He had, however, a streak of purely literary ambition, and wrote a novel at one period of his life--after he had reached maturity--which he called a philosophic Romance.[30] Indeed this bantling was so swaddled, in philosophic wrappings that it could have made no noise. Very few knew of it; fewer still ever read it. He said, “It had not enough of indecency and blasphemy in it to make it popular” (it was written when Byron was in high repute). But the few who did read it thought there were other reasons for its want of success.