Unlike Lords Bolingbroke, Buckingham, or Bacon, Lord Brougham entered public life a reformer and a patriot. The subject of his first successful speech in Parliament was the slave-trade. He denounced not only the abominable traffic itself,--the men who stole, bought, and kept the slave; but also the traders and merchants,--'the cowardly suborners of piracy and mercenary murder,' as he termed them, under whose remote influence the trade had been carried on; and the sympathies of the people went along with him. He was on every occasion, too, the powerful advocate of popular education. Brougham is no discoverer of great truths; but he has evinced a 'curious felicity' in expressing truths already discovered: he exerted himself in sending 'the schoolmaster abroad,' and announced the fact in words which became more truly his motto than the motto found for him in the Herald's Office. He took part in well-nigh every question of reform; stood up for economy, the reduction of taxes, and Queen Caroline; found very vigorous English in which to express all he ought to have felt regarding the Holy Alliance and the massacre at Manchester; and dealt with Cobbett as Cobbett deserved, for doing what he is now doing himself. There was always a lack of heart about Brougham, so that men admired without loving him. There were no spontaneous exhibitions of those noblenesses of nature which mark the true reformer, and which compel the respect of even enemies. Luther, Knox, and Andrew Thomson were all men of rugged strength,--men of war, and born to contend; but they were also men of deep and broad sympathies, and of kindly affections: they could all feel as well as see the right; what is even more important still, they could all thoroughly forget themselves, and what the world thought and said of them, in the pursuit of some great and engrossing object: they could all love, too, at least as sincerely as they could hate. Brougham, on the contrary, could only see without feeling the right; but then he saw clearly. Brougham could not forget himself; but then he succeeded in identifying himself with much that was truly excellent. Brougham could not love as thoroughly as he could hate; but then his indignation generally fell where it ought. His large intellect seemed based on an inferior nature--it was a brilliant set in lead; nor were there indications wanting all along, it has been said, that he was one of those patriots who have their price. But the brilliant was a true, not a factitious brilliant, whatever the value of the setting; and the price, if ever proffered, had not been sufficiently large. Brougham became Lord Chancellor, the Reform Bill passed into a law, and slavery was abolished in the colonies.