when he had quarrelled irreconcilably with the Whigs, he loved to dwell upon the vigor with which he had trampled upon them in debate. "My fairness towards the vile clique of the present Government," he says, for example, he says, for example, whose treatment of me has been the ne plus ultra of ingratitude, baseness, and treachery, is more than I can well justify to my own pride. However, 1 punish them daily in Parliament, and that may suffice. Depend upon it," he says again, there is no great comfort ever accrues to those who try their hands upon my back." His greatest triumph of all was secured when he conceived the brilliant idea of giving out that he had been killed in a carriage accident, to see what the newspapers would say of him. The sensation caused by the report gave a banquet to his vanity in which he exulted hugely. "A lie, he wrote to Mr. Napier, daily repeated by two or three papers in London and one in Edinburgh, has deceived you all, namely, that the people of this country have no longer any care about me, and that my useless, worthless, and mischievous life' (such is their language) was done for all purposes. Is it so? Look at the last week and tell. I assure you this room is filled with newspapers from all parts of the country; some crying peccavi for having ever attacked me, others thanking God they never had been seduced by the Treasury jobbers into such a course. Let this show the risk of men in a party giving up an old leader, because another happened for the hour to be invested with office." Of course he did not fail to declare that the report of his death was the invention of his enemies, that they might have an opportunity of letting loose their papers on him, and Tom Moore, their doggerel poet.

It was not merely in his private letters to Mr. Napier that Brougham extolled his own prowess and his virtues. He did not scruple to allude to himself in his articles for the Review in terms of which the following sentences are a specimen "Of all the portentous signs of the times for the present Ministry, the most appalling is the nearly unanimous choice of Mr. Brougham to be member for Yorkshire. This is as suredly the most extraordinary event in

When

the history of party politics." he could not puff himself, he more than hinted how and when it was desirable that others should render him that service. At a very early period in their collaboration for the Review, this brought him into collision with Macaulay. Shortly after the Yorkshire election, he wrote to the editor concerning a speech of his on Colonial Slavery that " T. Macaulay is to prepare a leading article on it and the subject for next number, which 1 hope will be first, as the question has, since 1 declared against the right of holding men in slavery, assumed a new aspect. When this was mentioned to Macaulay, who warmly reciprocated Brougham's aversion, he replied that the triumph in Yorkshire must have turned his brains; and he flatly refused to make Brougham's speech his text, adding, "We have had quite enough of puffing and flattering each other in the Edinburgh Review. It is in vile taste for men united in one literary undertaking to exchange these favors." soon afterwards a more serious breach occurred between the two contributors. Macaulay had been engaged to write an article on the French Revolution of July, and had nearly finished it when Brougham unexpectedly claimed the subject for his pen. "I must beg," he wrote, "and, indeed, make a point of giving you my thoughts on the Revolution, and therefore, pray send off your countermand to Macaulay. The reason is this: all our movements next session turns upon that pivot, and 1 can trust no one but myself with it, either in or out of Parliament." Readers of Mr. Trevelyan's biography know the indignation with which the countermand was received by Macaulay, dictated as it was by the person of all persons on earth to whom he felt least inclined to stoop," and how nearly it occasioned the withdrawal of his invaluable services from the Review.

Very

Macaulay did in fact declare that he would write no more after such an insult, but Mr. Napier's tact persuaded him to relent. No collision occurred again between the two great rivals. Brougham was left in undisturbed possession of contemporary politics, and Macaulay, happily as it proved for his own fame and the delight of his readers,

In

him a hint; and as it is the only, or almost the only thing he wants (some bread to all his sack is another and a sad want) he may well bear a hint." the essay on Bacon, Brougham detected a graver fault, and it is only fair to him to say that there was more than a grain of truth in this particular criticism. "The Bacon is, as you say, very striking, and no doubt is the work of an extremely clever man." But greater blunder never was committed than the one Macaulay has made on the Inductive Philosophy.' He is quite ignorant of the subject. He has no science at all, and cannot reason. His contemporaries at Cambridge always said he had not the conception of what an argument was; and surely it was not right for a person who never had heard of Gilbert's treatise to discuss Bacon's originality— nay, to descant on Bacon at all, who seems never to have read the Sylva Sylvarum' (for see p. 83 about ointments for broken bones); and who goes through the whole of his speculation (or whatever you choose to term it) without making any allusion to Bacon's notorious failure when he came to put his own rules in practice, and without seeming to be at all aware that Sir I. Newton was an experimental philosopher." But these complaints are tame compared with the strain of indignant remonstrance which Brougham poured forth to the editor upon the appearance of Macaulay's essay on Clive. "I have no heart to say one word on any subject of the last number but one-1 mean one which absorbs all others-Macaulay's most profligate political morality. In my eyes, his defence of Clive, and the audacious ground of it, merit execration. It is a most serious, and, to me, a most painful subject. No-no-all the sentences a man can turn, even if he made them in pure taste, and not in Tom's snip-snap taste of the lower empire-all won't avail against a rotten morality. . . . What? are we gravely to be told, at this time of day, that a set-off may be allowed for public, and therefore atrocious crimes, though he admits that a common felon pleads it in vain? Gracious God! where is this to end? What horrors will it not excuse? . . . Every great ruffian who has filled the world with blood and tears will be sure of an ac

sought other fields of disquisition. But though their paths did not henceforth cross, they continued in their private letters to the editor to express their opinions of each other's performances. There is comparatively little piquancy in Macaulay's comments on Brougham. They are simply the hard truth, sharply expressed, the cool cutting judgments of an enemy confident in his own superiority. In remarking on Brougham's characters' of public men in the time of George III., he can afford to acknowledge their "very high merit. very high merit." "They are, indeed," he says, "models of magazine writing, as distinguished from other sorts of writing. They are not, 1 think, made for duration. Every thing about them is exaggerated, incorrect, sketchy. . . . The style, though striking and animated, will not bear examination through a single paragraph. But the effect, on first perusal, is great, and few people read an article in a Review twice. A bold, dashing, scene-painting manner is that which always succeeds best in periodical writing. I have no doubt that these lively and vigorous papers of Lord Brougham's will be of more use to you than more highly-finished compositions." In another letter Macaulay laughs at Brougham's pretensions to universal genius. "Brougham does one thing well, two or three things indifferently, and a hundred things detestably. His Parliamentary speaking is admirable, his forensic speaking poor, his writings, at the very best, second rate. As to his Hydrostatics,' his Political Philosophy,' his Equity Judgments,' and his Translations from the Greek,' they are really below contempt." Brougham's criticisms of Macaulay are much less cool and balanced. They contain but a grain of truth to a pailful of malice. But there is an individual spice, a halfinsane oddity in the vehemence of their malice, which makes them infinitely more amusing. Macaulay's essay on Sir William Temple is an excellent paper, only he does take a terrible space to turn in. Good God! what an awful man he would have been in Nisi Prius! He can say nothing under ten pages. He takes as long to delineate three characters of little importance as I have to sketch ten, the greatest in the whole world. 1 really wish you could give

quittal because of his talents and his success. . . . Alas! if Macaulay's overweening conceit would only let him read what honest Adam Smith says, in his 'Moral Sentiments' of the evils of profligate systems of morals, it might awaken his conscience, and prevent him from being led away by the silly Empsons he lives among, and who admire nothing but sentence-making. Or, if he only knew the comfort of laying down his head to sleep, or may be to die, after writing forty years, and speaking thirtyfive, and never having once said one word, or written one word, but in favor of the highest strain of public virtue !''

One can better understand, after reading Brougham's letters to Mr. Napier, so pervaded by the vehemence of his genius, poured forth with such exuberance and frankness, such impetuous disregard of petty reserves and scruples, most transparent when they are meant to be most evasive, what it was that made his company inexpressibly fascinating and tickling to Lord Sefton. One can understand also how what was amusing to the idle and curious observer was very much the reverse of amusing to those who were pieces in the game.

"Empson," writes Macaulay, to the much-tried editor, in 1838, "has hinted to me that Brougham has been plaguing you. Really that man is the devil.' Brougham was always plaguing poor Mr. Napier. To make matters worse, the Whig leaders and their set were crying out against his subserviency to Brougham, at the very time when Brougham was sending him prayers for his emancipation from the thraldom of "that vile clique," threatening to start a rival journal, and warning him in page upon page that it was certain ruin to the Review to allow it to be made the organ of a party. This from the man who, when he was Lord Chancellor, insisted that all the political articles in the Review must be written by himself! Mr. Napier's letters of protest and remonstrance sometimes reveal a state of mind bordering on desperation. But he stuck manfully to his work, and succeeded in keeping a hook in the nose of his leviathan. If it was a hard task to found the Edinburgh Review, it was a much harder task, as this volume of correspondence proves, to save it from disruption when it had reached the height of its prosperity.Macmillan's Magazine.

It was a calm August night in Raab: repose had already taken possession of the quaint old moonlit streets, a few hours ago so sultry and so busy, and, we may add, so noisy with the bustle of the annual horse-fair. All lights seemed under the ban of the curfew, but those of a cave-haz (or coffee-house) forming the angle of the street nearly facing the windows of our primitive rooms. It was a picturesque house, with a veranda covering in a part of the street divided off by a row of square green boxes containing bushy oleanders in flower.

The scene, too, was picturesque as we caught glimpses of a considerable gathering of Magyars within, indulging in the lazy luxury of the never-neglected pipe.

We left our casements open, closing the Venetian shutters, and were prepar

ing for rest, when suddenly the surrounding stillness was broken by a brilliant cascade of clear and thrilling notes proceeding from some unrecognizable instrument or instruments, and giving expression to a melody altogether distinctive in character. It was wildly sweet and melancholy in tone, and possessed at once a grace and a power which entranced us as with some weird and irresistible fascination.

It literally spoke, and in language inspired by a creative fancy, weaving a fairy poem with the originality and facility of genius. We listened breathless, as the caprice of the unseen artist revelled in the rainbow hues with which he was pleased to tint his picture-as harmonious, as soft, as rich, and alas! as evanescent; we followed, enraptured, the magic numbers, astonished as well

as charmed by the audacity with which the movements changed, till at length the measure became rapid and yet more rapid as the tale approached its climax, and the improvisatore, carried away by his muse, expressed his enthusiasm in notes which came pouring on in unrestrained luxuriance as it were a mountain torrent leaping down from rock to rock-it was the very poetry of music. Abruptly, and with the bizarrerie which had stamped the whole performance, a final chord closed the recital, and in an instant all was hushed. Vainly we waited and hoped for a renewal of the bewitching strain; we looked out only to discern that the guests of the cavéhaz, whence we had no doubt the sounds had proceeded, were dispersing, and to feel convinced that it would be useless to repair thither with any hope of satisfying our curiosity on the subject; for as we looked the doors were closed and the lights were extinguished. Next morning, on waking, the mysterious improvization still lingered on our hearing, and on the appearance of our excellent Magyar friend we related to him what he had heard and how we had been impressed.

"Glad I am," replied he, "that you have had an opportunity of hearing that singular and beautiful music: it is one of the peculiarities of our nation and the speciality of our vast nomad tribes to whom these itinerant bands belong. As their habits are altogether erratic, their visits to our larger and even our smaller cities are arbitrary, but just now they are attracted hither by our cattlefair.

"These Zigeuners of Hungary," he continued, "like the Gitanos of Spain, the Bayadères of Portugal, the Bohemians of Central and the Gypsies of Northern Europe, have no fixed habitation: they lead a free and independent life, occupying movable dwellings and establishing themselves at intervals in our putztas and forests. You will meet them halting within and on the skirts of the Bakonyer-Wald as they journey from place to place and settle for the time being in the immediate vicinity of the locality where they seek employment.

"As they exercise various handicrafts, they are always sure of being able to earn their livelihood, whether by tinker

ing, carpentering, basket-making, china mending, horse-shoeing, or other industries, while a certain number of them possess the remarkable gift of imagining the wildest and most stirring poems and interpreting them in a music entirely sui generis.

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As long as they remain in one spot they resort in the evenings to the principal caves, so that if you would like to hear and also to see their performance, which is, I assure you, very extraordinary, I will with pleasure conduct you this evening to one which 1 know they frequent."

Rejoiced at this offer, we met at the appointed hour, and after traversing the broad market place in which stood our hotel, the "Golden Lamb," and threading several narrow and characteristic streets, we arrived at the entrance of the cave in question. A considerable crowd surrounded the door, but as soon as they perceived we were strangers they made a passage with the utmost courtesy, and we followed our friend within, into a spacious room. At the upper end a portion of the floor was raised about a foot; here were placed seats for those of the audience who were of a higher class, and among them, according to the dictates of Magyar hospitality, to us was immediately assigned a place of honor.

Down the centre of the room was a large billiard table, and along either side at regular intervals small circular marbletopped tables, at which sat groups of two or more persons sipping wine, coffee, beer, etc., but the universal pipe was in the mouth of every one, and so dense was the smoke that it was not easy to distinguish what was going on.

Just below the daïs a considerable space had been reserved for the Zigeuner band. In the midst stood a large square table, and on it was the singular instrument to be played by the principal performer, the tones of which had so intensely mystified us, and to which the ten others, flute, fife, violins and violoncellos, constituted the accompaniment. It consisted of a sounding-board about three feet in length and of a breadth sloping from two to three feet, across which were stretched the strings, the whole of extremely rough construction and played by means of two short strips of whalebone muffled with a rag

wound round the end of each with these it is more sharply or gently, deliberately or rapidly struck, and it is difficult to conceive how so simple not to say clumsy an apparatus can be made to produce a tone so sweet, flexible, and powerful, or be amenable to such delicate, brilliant, varied and expressive execution. It is called "tzymbalon,' and the tzymbalon player it is who improvises the melody and gives the cue to the band, who upon the intuitive apprehension of his thoughts and also of those of each other produce the most appropriate and effective accompaniment. From the divan on which we had been so obligingly placed we were able, without being too near the music, to observe not only the whole group, but could also study the audience.

The performers were now agreeing upon their theme, arranging their several parts (howbeit all score-less)-and tuning their strings, and it was impossible not to remark the unmistakable stamp of their race which all bore, not only on their countenances and features, but in their whole person and bearing. Swarthy in complexion, with jet-black hair, beard, eyes, and eyebrows, their Criental features were lighted up with an intelligent expression, and that they were born musicians, untutored, untaught, untrained by any laws for - for genius recognizes none-was manifested in the complete command they had of their instruments, which seemed to be absolutely part of themselves. Equally strkiing was the marvellous spontaneity and simultaneousness of their action in this entirely extemporaneous perform ance. Never was there the slightest hesitation or break on the part of any of them, though the leader playing the tzymbalon changed whether the key, the time, the harmony, or the movement as he wove his romance, for such it was.

The pieces thus executed by these unique musicians may be called operas without written libretti," and strange to say the libretto would be utterly superfluous, for so expressive are the strains, the hearer must be dull of comprehension indeed if he fail to follow their meaning. Indeed one scarcely realizes that the scene so graphically described by the music is not actually before one's eyes, so entirely do they follow the Horatian

rule and lead the minds of the audience quocumque volent, making them see what they seem to see themselves.

The theme is generally a legend or story, selected from among those orally preserved among the tribe, and narrated in the language of music, so that it is no wonder they should be lost in a kind of dreamy inspiration and abandon themselves for the time to the caprices of their imagination. their imagination. According to the nature of the subject, they occasionally become so excited that they impress one with the idea they are enacting the scene they depict, and thus, without an effort, succeed in firing their audience with their own enthusiasm.

At length the instruments are tuned, and amid breathless silence the piece begins. To ourselves no intimation had been made as to its nature; no form of words or even abridged "argument had been passed round. There was nothing but the weird influence of these musicians of nature imparting their narrative by the language of music to a musical people. Attracted by the prestige and the novelty of the situation, we also gave ourselves to the subject, and as it proceeded it interpreted itself to us as follows:

The simple, flowing, graceful melody with which it opened described a calm scene of rural life, the rosy dawn, the freshness of the easy morning hour, the dewy grass, the scent of spring flowers, the brook bubbling beneath overhanging branches, all was there-a contented peasant population going forth to their healthy, harmless, peaceful occupations; the cowherd driving his cattle to their mountain pastures; the shepherd leading his flocks afield; the Ross-hirt scampering over the putzta with his troop of horses, and the advancing day bringing out the insect youth" with their busy hum on the calm noontide air.

Now we are in the depths of the forest; the sun is pouring his beams through the interstices of the foliage, and the glowing light mottles the chequered ground. Innocent birds are singing in the trees, but among men a marauding spirit is astir a horde of brigands, headed by their desperate chief, is preparing an attack on these happy, laborious, unconscious, and alas! prosperous villagers. Their plan of ac