That Lord Brougham _was_ an extraordinary man no one in his senses will deny. An intellect of unusual capacity, goaded into diseased action by passions nearly ferocious, enabled him to astonish the world, and especially the “hero-worshippers,” as the author of Sartor-Resartus has it, by the combined extent and variety of his mental triumphs. Attempting many things, it may at least be said that he egregiously failed in none. But that he pre-eminently excelled in any cannot be affirmed with truth, and might well be denied _à priori_. We have no faith in admirable Crichtons, and this merely because we have implicit faith in Nature and her laws. “He that is born to be a man,” says Wieland, in his ‘Peregrinus Proteus,’ “neither should nor can be anything nobler, greater, nor better than a man.” The Broughams of the human intellect are never its Newtons or its Bayles. Yet the contemporaneous reputation to be acquired by the former is naturally greater than any which the latter may attain. The versatility of one whom we see and hear is a more dazzling and more readily appreciable merit than his profundity; which latter is best estimated in the silence of the closet, and after the quiet lapse of years. What impression Lord Brougham has stamped upon his age, cannot be accurately determined until Time has fixed and rendered definite the lines of the medal; and fifty years hence it will be difficult, perhaps, even to make out the deepest indentations of the _exergue_. Like Coleridge he should be regarded as one who might have done much, had he been satisfied with attempting but little. The title of the book before us is, we think, somewhat disingenuous. These two volumes contain but a small portion of the “Critical and Miscellaneous Writings” of Lord Brougham; and the preface itself assures us that what is here published _forms only a part of his anonymous contributions to the Edinburgh Review_. In fact three similar selections from his “Miscellaneous Works” have been given to the world within a year or two past, by Philadelphian publishers, and neither of these selections embrace any of the matter now issued.