Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 07.pdf/117

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94
The Green Bag.

ding. Deep furrows of age and thought and toil, perhaps of sorrow, run all over it, while his vast mouth, with a ripple of humor ever playing around it, expands like a placid bay under the huge promontory of his fantastic and incredible nose. His eye is dim, and could never have been brilliant, but his voice is rather shrill, with an un mistakable northern intonation; his manner of speech is fluent, not garrulous, but obviously touched by time; his figure is tall, slender, shambling, awkward, but of course, perfectly self-possessed. Such is what remains at eighty of the famous Henry Brougham." ..." Lord Brougham interests me as much as any man. lie is now eighty years of age, but I do not see that he is much broken. His figure is erect, not very graceful, certainly, but active. His face is so familiar to every one, principally through the pictures in ' Punch,' as hardly to require a description. The whole visage is wild and bizarre, and slightly comical, but not stern or forbidding. Like his tongue and his mind, it is eminently Scotch, sharp, caustic, rugged, thistleish. The top of the head is as flat as if it had been finished with a plane. The brain chamber is as spacious as is often allotted to any one mortal, and as the world knows, the owner has furnished it very thoroughly. The face is large, massive, seamed all over with the deep furrow s of age and thought and toil; the nose is fantastic and incredible in shape. There is much humor and benevolence about the lines of the mouth. His manner is warm, earnest, eager, cordial. I was with him half an hour yesterday, and he talked a good deal of the question of Cuba and the slave-trade. He was of opinion that the claim to visit must be given up; that there was no logical defence for it; but he spoke with a sigh and almost with tears of the apparent impossibility of sup pressing the slave-trade, or of preventing in America the indefinite extension and expansion of slavery." ..." Then came Lord Brougham, looking as droll as ever. There certainly never was a great statesman and author who so irresistibly suggested the man w ho does the comic business at a small theatre as Brougham. You are compelled to laugh when you see him as much as at Keeley or Warren. Yet there is absolutely nothing comic in his mind. On the contrary, he is always earnest, vigorous, impressive, but there is no resisting his nose. It is not merely the con figuration of that wonderful feature which surprises you. but its mobility. It has the litheness and almost the length of the elephant's proboscis, and I have no doubt he can pick up pins or scratch his back with it as easily as he could take a pinch of snuff. He is always twisting it ahout in quite a fabulous manner." (Motley must mean, like an elephant in a fable! Otherwise he would not have been guilty of such a use of the word " fabulous.") On arriving at Holland House for dinner, "there were but two persons in the room. In the twilight I did not recognize them, but presently I observed the familiar proboscis of Lord Brougham wagging in a friendly manner towards me." Brougham was doctored at Oxford, in 1860, at the same time with Motley, and the latter thus describes him on the march through the streets to the scene : "Nothing could be more absurd than old Brougham's figure, long and gaunt, with snow-white hair under the great black porringer, and with his wonderful nose wagging

lithely from side to side as he hitched up his red petticoats and stalked through the mud.". Motley also draws attractive pictures of Lyndhurst at eighty-six, as, for exaniple : "Nothing can be more genial, genuine and delightful than Lyndhurst's manner ... I like his society because of the magnificent spectacle he affords of a large, bright in tellect setting in 'one unclouded blaze of living light,' without any of the dubious haze which so often accom panies the termination of a long and brilliant career. Every body looks up to him with reverence and delight. He is full of fun, always joking, always genial, and alive to what is going on around him from day to day. He has made two or three very good speeches this session, and is going to make another, and there is not a sign of senility in any thing that he says." Motley records that Brougham and Lyndhurst were always chaffing one another. He heard Lyndhurst declare that Brougham once went upon the wool sack in plaid trousers, and with his peer's robe over his chancellor's robe. Brougham denied the trousers, but did not deny the double robes. " Lady Stanley observed that the ladies in the gallery all admired Lord Chelmsford for his handsome leg. 1 A virtue that was never seen in you. Brougham,' and so on." We get a glimpse of Judge O. W. Holmes in a letter from his father to Motley in 1860: "I am just going to Cambridge to an 'exhibition,' in which Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks a translation (expectatur versio in lingua vernacula), the Apology for Soc rates; Master O. W. Holmes, Jun., being now a tall youth, almost six feet high, and lover of Plato and of art." (!)

Gladstone's Horace. — The G. O. M., not being very busy of late, has made a metrical trans lation of the Odes of Horace. It is an astonishingly .clever performance. Mr. Gladstone evidently lacks some of the niceties of a practised versifier, but he is generally skillful and remarkably faithful to the sense, and always vigorous. His metres are varied, but he makes no attempt to imitate the original metres, and he struggles for conciseness, sometimes at a great cost. Occasionally he misses the sense, as for ex ample, notably, in the last line of the first ode "of the first book, which he renders : "Count me for lyric minstrel thou, The stars to kiss my head will bow." Such is not the sense of " Sublimi feriam sidera vertice." The phrase does not mean that the stars will stoop, but that the poet will strut and exalt his head to them. As we have not had many cares of state on our mind of late, we think we can do this better, as for example :