your mind tablets: then home, and in after years it may be your lot
to tell your children that once at least you have seen with your own
eyes the famous Lord of Vaux; once listened to the voice which has
shaken thrones and made tyrants tremble; that has been a herald of
deliverance to millions pining in slavery and captivity; a voice that
has given utterance, in man’s most eloquent words, to the noblest,
wisest thoughts lent to this man of men by heaven; a voice that has
been trumpet-sounding these sixty years past in defence of Truth, and
Right, and Justice; in advocacy of the claims of learning and industry,
and of the liberties of the great English people, from whose ranks he
rose; a voice that should be entitled to a hearing in a Walhalla of
wise heroes, after Francis of Verulam and Isaac of Grantham; the voice
of one who is worthily a lord, but who will be yet better remembered,
and to all time,--remembered enthusiastically and affectionately,--as
the champion of all good and wise and beautiful human things--Harry
Brougham.”
[Sidenote: _Temple Bar_, 1868.]
“The personal man, the bodily man, the private man, did not vary.
From 1830 to 1866,--the period between his brightest glow of fame and
his mental eclipse,--he was always the same gaunt, angular, raw-boned
figure, with the high cheek-bones, the great flexible nose, the mobile
mouth, the shock head of hair, the uncouthly-cut coat with the velvet
collar, the high black stock, the bulging shirt front, the dangling
bunch of seals at his fob, and the immortal pantaloons of checked
tweed. It is said that one of his admirers in the Bradford Cloth Hall
gave him a bale of plaid trousering ‘a’ oo’’[1] in 1825, and that he
continued until the day of his death to have his nether garments cut
from the inexhaustible store. I have seen Lord Brougham in evening
dress and in the customary black continuations; but I never met him by
daylight without the inevitable checks.”
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
1809-1861
[Sidenote: M. R. Mitford’s _Recollections of a Literary Life_.]
“My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen
years ago. She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that
I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that
it is not merely the impression of my partiality, or my enthusiasm.
Of a slight delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on
either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly
fringed with dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look
of youthfulness, that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in
whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translatress of
the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus, the authoress of the _Essay on Mind_, was
old enough to be introduced into company, in technical language, was
_out_.”--1835.
[Sidenote: Sara Coleridge’s _Letters_.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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