all the armory of dialectics, and unbounded in fertility of illustration; and gifted with a playfulness and richness of fancy far beyond either of his competitors. There can be no doubt, that if his career had been destined to the same field as theirs, with the same early practice, and the same experience in that most capricious of all arenas, the House of Commons, he would have maintained there that intellectual ascendency which he asserted in all other situations, even against antagonists the most formidable. Indeed, although the menagerie of the House of Commons embraces many strange animals, and the sounds which command stillness, and receive favour, are not always those which sound sweetest to the unpractised ear, we think that Jeffrey was peculiarly well qualified to have taken a prominent place in that assembly. That justice has never been done to his powers of public debate, and still more, his masterly apprehension of public policy, has arisen entirely from the circumstance of the late period of life when he entered Parliament, and the short apprenticeship he served there. To a command of language very rare indeed, even in our greatest public orators, and that not a shallow stream, but a perennial flow of well-chosen words; and the most vivid conception of the most subtle differences, and the happiest power of banter, illustration, and retort, he added a fund of practical wisdom-a calm, liberal, candid spirit, and a cool-headed knowledge of human nature, for which his more shining and popular qualities perhaps prevented his obtaining due credit. It was a singular coincidence that united in the debatingroom of a Scotch college three young men whose names were afterwards destined to revolutionize both literature and politics. One-not the least powerful of the three, perished in the flower of his manhood, when the promise of fruit for his country was the greatest. But probably no two men could be named who have contributed so much to that remarkable alteration in the tone, tastes, politics, and habits of thinking and writing which have taken place since the beginning of this century, as Jeffrey and Brougham. In October 1802, this coterie of the Speculative commenced their great undertaking of the Edinburgh Review. We have no space to enter into what is a curious enough episode, the history of the establishment of the Review; Sydney Smith was the first editor, and Brougham, we believe, did not join till the third Number. But beyond all doubt Jeffrey was the soul and directing spirit of this celebrated and most successful enterprise. When it started, he was a man verging on thirty, in the full vigour of his ever active mind, and with the matured power not merely of writing smartly, or pronouncing powerfully, but of reading the lessons of the past, and of sowing for future harvests. To describe Scottish politics or Scottish society as it then existed is a task we, who can only write from hearsay, will not attempt. If the traditions we have heard be true, a correct picture of the tone, spirit, and feeling of public men, and the upper classes generally in Scotland from 1790 to 1805, would excite the incredulity of the public of 1850 as a caricature too gross for belief. Subservient to power, intolerant to all who differed from them-crushing with illiberal and ignorant arrogance the head which was raised to confront oppression, or the voice which dared to speak for freedom-were the ruling men of Scotland in that day. A spirit of intense jobbing pervaded all departments of the public service, and the knowledge of this, the greatest of all the sciences, was the best, if not the only passport to public favour. Education of the people was Jacobinical-missions abroad were Jacobinical public meetings or discussions on political subjects flat revolution. In short, the demon of vulgar, cringing, insolent ignorance reigned paramount, and trod out every generous aspiration, even in its earliest spark. Against this hydra-headed monster did these adventurous striplings unfold the defying banner of the Edinburgh Reviewand they held it aloft against many a hurricane, till they planted it triumphantly on the grave of their antagonist. The united hardihood and vigour-the fearlessness of youth, with the strength of manhood-with which its pages were devoted to the vindication of popular rights-the shout of merriment, or the cutting sneer with which it uniformly saluted the bewigged and pompous form of venerable abuse-its irreverent mockery of solemn and time-honoured prejudices, and its free, truthful handling of the great principles of justice and liberty, have rendered this remarkable Journal a kind of mausoleum, reared for the interment of defunct and antiquated error. It will stand as long as our language is understood, a noble monument to tell posterity of the narrow perverted bigotry which oppressed their forefathers, and of those daring spirits by whom the chains were broken, and the captive mind set free. Thus, the merely literary department of the Review, brilliant as it was, and celebrated as it soon became, is far from being the portion of it for which the nation has most reason to be grateful. It would no doubt have been a triumph, enough to have satisfied any man's ambition, to have succeeded in purifying the literary atmosphere of our country from the clouds and mists of false and feeble taste which defaced it at the beginning of the century, and to have led back the national genius "to water at those springs on chaliced flowers that lie"-the fresh and undefiled stream of Elizabethan English. All this Jeffrey did, and almost single-handed. The canon of literary criticism which the Review established was his own, and was the result of the deep draughts which he himself had drawn at the pure wells of our earlier writers. This, no doubt, was a signal achievement-but not the greatest either of the Review itself, or of its editor. To find the real mastery of Jeffrey's genius one must look a little deeper, and see how year by year he toiled to undermine that fabric of corrupt and autocratic principle which he found overlaying the free constitution of this country-how he loosened a keystone here, and shook a pillar there content to introduce his lever one day, and waiting for the next to make its power felt until by degrees, not startling but sure, in thirty years he saw the temple of the idol crumbling at his feet, and the altar of popular right raised upon its ruins. No doubt this monarch had able counsellors-a cabinet composed of the most powerful spirits of the age. Still, if we are to take his critical labours as his monument, we point not merely to his collected essays but to the Review itself. It is only there that it is possible to see the unity, originality, and sustained vigour of the design. Dissertations which, taken by themselves sound almost elementary, are there seen to be only rounds of the ladder by which the fortress was to be won. And he lived to see the day when not only were those dominant dogmas as worn out and exploded as the astronomy of Galileo's persecutors, but some of the very men who clamoured for them most loudly, and most bitterly attacked their assailant, forgetful of their early animosities, joined and cheered him on his onward path. The Review commenced in 1802. The first two Numbers were edited by Sydney Smith, who was at that time in Edinburgh. On his departure the conduct of the periodical devolved on Jeffrey, who continued to act as Editor until 1829. But while immersed, as might be thought, in working this great critical machine, harassed by the toils of editorship, the delays of contributors, jealousies of writers, and all the wearying details behind the curtain of periodical publication, he continued to earn for himself both the reputation and the profit which follow the successful barrister. His professional career was quite brilliant enough to have by itself placed him among the foremost in the greatest days of the Bar of Scotland. The Parliament House probably never saw-and may never see againsuch a brotherhood of legal talent as the Whig lawyers of 1815; Clerk, Cranstoun, Jeffrey, Moncreiff, Cockburn, Fullerton, formed a phalanx, who for years kept the ring against all comers, and neither feared nor found competitors. Each had his own peculiar walk; but none shone with a brighter light than Jeffrey. Clerk, Cranstoun, and Moncreiff were more profound lawyers: though, even as a mere lawyer, irrespectively altogether of the forensic part of the profession, his knowledge and power of applying it were eminent. He possessed, with a power of subtlety very rare, a lucid and quick apprehension of legal distinctions, which his discursive fancy illustrated, but did not disturb; and was capable of pursuing with the closest logic the most abstruse and technical chain of legal deduction. Thus, even before the institution of the Jury Court in 1815, when trial by jury in civil causes was for the first time introduced into Scotland, he had already reached the first rank as a pleader, and was on the high road to juridical fortune and fame. There is no doubt, however, that at the Bar his great preeminence rested on his powers of popular oratory, which were quite as remarkable as we are inclined to say even more remarkable than-his distinguished ability as an author. He was an orator of the highest class; always brilliant, always pointed, and when roused, radiant with the inspiration of genius. A critic might say, that at times his muse soared a flight too high for the dull brains of a jury of shopkeepers; that he "went on refining, And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining." But the criticism is more pointed at the tendency of his style, than well-founded in its general effect. He was not only a brilliant, but a most successful pleader: powerful in arresting the attention, captivating the fancy, and carrying off the judgment in triumph, chained to his glowing and fervent chariotwheels. No one who ever heard him can forget the fascination of his flowing rhetoric, or his marvellous mastery of language. We well recollect-though it was near the end of his forensic career, and after uncertain health had in some measure restrained his fire-the last speech we ever heard him make to a jury. We think we see him still-his slight diminutive figure, and rather artificial pronunciation, not promising at the first suggestion, the coming power. How, as it proceeded, all this vanished from perception under the magic of his words-how musically poured forth that bright exhaustless stream--how even the person of the orator seemed to dilate as he dashed along his impassioned path-and even when the long-drawn breath followed the peroration, he "So charming left his voice, that we awhile Nor were even these pursuits, either of which were engrossing enough for most men, the limit of his exertions. He took a bold and prominent part in all the political discussions in Scotland; and at one period of his career this was not a light or agreeable duty. There was a time-between 1815 and 1822-when some more witty than discreet of the junior Tories, overshadowed at the Bar by the genius of the Whig lawyers, revenged themselves by pasquinades, which at last came to a very abrupt and melancholy termination. During this time Jeffrey was ever in the front ranks of the party-wise and sagacious in counsel, as he was energetic and effective in action. But these were times to which we do not allude further here. They are happily gone by; and party spirit, though not extinguished, has been robbed of that foul and base venom which it carried with it in some quarters then. There was nothing over which Jeffrey's amiable and candid spirit rejoiced more in later days, than the extraction of the serpenttooth with which he and his comrades had so long to contend; and over the grave of one of the gentlest hearts that ever beat in a great man's breast, where his last remains were laid, among the tears and choking sorrow of many a political adversary, we shall not do violence to the ashes of the mighty dead by stirring the embers of extinguished animosity. The last time we saw him on an Edinburgh platform, he himself gave expression to a similar sentiment. It was a memorable occasion, not to be forgotten by any who witnessed it, whether for the importance of the subject, the immense concourse by which it was attended, or the singular combination of parties who took part in it. We allude to the great meeting on Catholic Emancipation in 1829, in which not only the Whig leaders of the day took part, but which numbered among the occupants of the platform Dr. Chalmers, and many of the political chiefs of the Tory party in Scotland. We recall this meeting to mind, because the speech Jeffrey made on the occasion, although not certainly one of his most laboured efforts, possessed on the one hand that charming and graceful courtesy to his political opponents, who then sat beside him, of which he was so great a master; and on the other, contained a few sentences which comprised, in truth, his political creed, and deserve to be written in letters of gold. After saying that he had been unable, as he expressed it, "so to chastise the ancient mammon of Whiggery within him as to cease to wish that the honour of emancipating the Catholics had been reserved for a Whig ministry;" and congratulating the country on the subsiding of party rancour, he proceeded to speak of the effect of civil disabilities, in tones that still remain engraven on our heart." It is among the worst consequences of injustice to communicate to its victims the very vices it imputes to them. They who are not trusted, will soon cease to be trustworthythey against whom the law is, will soon be against the law |