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grew stupid, or even old, in anything but years; and it is extraordinary what a very large part of the Review was written by those three men. For the first quarter of a century of its career the witty parson,' in a humorous and forcible style all his own, discussed a great variety of subjects. Sometimes he gave character sketches of people so dissimilar as Madame d'Epinay, Hannah More, and Charles Fox. At another time he would discourse eloquently on the evils of transportation and Botany Bay. He would discuss the poor laws and the game laws, prison reforms and chimney-sweepers, Bentham on Fallacies, and Catholic Emancipation; and, however brilliant his wit, his writings never fail to show a manly judgement and a kindly, human, sympathetic spirit.

Macaulay and Sydney Smith were, as all the world knows, the most brilliant talkers of their day. Good as it always was, Macaulay's flow of conversation was sometimes felt to be even too abundant. His utterance was very rapid, and he spoke with a panting anxiety. Sydney Smith, himself an enormous talker, used to complain that Macaulay never let him get in a word. Once Smith said to him, 'Now, 'Macaulay, when I am gone, you'll be sorry that you never 'heard me speak.' On another occasion Smith said that he had found Macaulay in bed from illness, and that he was therefore more agreeable than he had ever seen him. There * were some glorious flashes of silence.'

Brilliant as was his wit, Sydney Smith's sincerity and deep earnestness could at times be very impressive. After the death of William IV., and the accession of his niece to the throne at the age of eighteen, Sydney Smith preached at St. Paul's, taking for his theme the true character and the opportunities of a patriot queen. There were two subjects to which he mainly directed her attention, where her influence might, he urged, be of the greatest possible service to her subjects the cause of popular education, and the maintenance of peace. In noble language he held up to his young Sovereign the ideal of a life to be lived for the highest interest and welfare of those whom she had been called upon to rule. And happy would the preacher have been could he have foreseen that the reign just beginning was to afford during more than sixty years the greatest example any country has ever witnessed of a monarch carrying into practice the precepts which he so well expounded.

*Cockburn's Journal.

On Jeffrey's resignation of the Editorship of the Review, in 1829, Macvey Napier, professor of conveyancing in the University of Edinburgh, succeeded to the post. The new Editor had been a frequent contributor from very early days, he was an intimate friend of Jeffrey's, and he was firmly convinced of the advisability of keeping the headquarters of the Review in its old home in the north. Napier's difficulties were considerable. They arose, however, from no dangerous rivalry of other organs of opinion, but almost solely from troubles within his own camp, caused by the pretensions of Brougham to work the Review entirely in his own personal interest. Brougham's versatility was abnormal; his energy untiring; his vanity without limit. After 1835, when Lord Melbourne formed his second ministry without inviting Brougham back to the woolsack, the ex-Chancellor's hostility to the Whig Premier knew no bounds. Men recognised his genius, whilst they had a profound distrust of his character. No one, however, had done more work for the Review, and it was long a tradition that in one particular number every single article had come from his pen. After Jeffrey had gone, it was, perhaps, not unnatural that a man of Brougham's character should endeavour to make the Review his organ, rather than the exponent of a policy and a cause. There were other men writing for the Review very little inclined to defer to pretensions such as these. Macaulay loses patience with a man who half knows everything,' and protests against the use of the Review as an instrument for 'puffing its own 'contributor.' When, after he had himself undertaken to write on French politics in the autumn number of the eventful year 1830, Brougham claims that subject for himself, Macaulay fairly tells the Editor that he must make his choice once for all between his two contributors. He had always known,' Macaulay writes, "that in every association, political or literary, Brougham would wish to domineer, and 'that no Editor of the "Edinburgh Review" could, without 'risking the ruin of the publication, resolutely oppose the ' demands of a man so able and powerful.' Napier on this occasion acceded to Brougham's imperious request to send ' off a countermand to Macaulay'; and it was Brougham's article, not Macaulay's, that was published in the October 'Review' on the Revolution of 1830. Doubtless Macaulay's threat of secession weighed with the Editor. At any rate, we hear no more of any attempt of Brougham's to oust his rival from the field editorially assigned to him.

From a pen drawing of the bust in the Library of the Edinburgh University by P. Sclater, the sculptor, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.