C.-CHARACTER OF FRANKLIN. LORD BROUGHAM. [HENRY BROUGHAM, Lord Brougham, was born at Edinburgh, in the year 1778, but of an English family long established in the county of Westmoreland. He was educated in Scotland; called to the Scotch, and subsequently to the English, bar; entered Parlia ment in 1810; was made lord chancellor (and a peer) in 1830, and held the office till 1834. He has attained great distinction as an advocate, orator, statesman, and man of letters. His public life has been brilliant and successful; and his name is closely and honorably identified with all the great reforms which have been going on in England during the last thirty or forty years—including the abolition of the slave trade, parHamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, reform in the civil and criminal law, and the education of the people. He has always been a man of prodigious industry and unwearied activity of mind, never allowing any of the shreds and fragments of time to be wasted. He has thus gone through an amount of labor under which ordinary energies would have broken down. While yet quite young, he engaged with ardor and success in scientific investigation, and some papers by him, on mathematical subjects, published in the Transactions of the Royal Society, made him widely and favorably known. Under the constant pressure of public and professional duties, he has found time for literary labor. His Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the principal European Powers was published in 1803. Among his subsequent publications are, Historical Sketches of the Statesmen of the Reign of George III., A Dialogue on Instinct, Political Philosophy, Lives of Men of Letters, A translation of the Oration of Demosthenes on the Crown; besides several treatises contributed to the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, including an essay on the Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Science. His speeches at the bar and in parliament have been collected and published in four large octavo volumes. To these are to be added several occasional pamphlets, papers in the Edinburgh Review, and notes to a new edition of Paley's Natural Theology. His style is vigorous, manly, and energetic; going straight to the point aimed at, but without rising to any very lofty height of eloquence, or being marked by any rare grace of expression. In his delineation of character, he seizes upon the prominent mental and moral traits, and presents them strongly. His powers of sarcasm and invective are great, and freely used. His opinions are sometimes expressed with more confidence than is warranted by the amount of his knowledge upon the subject in hand. He is more remarkable for the wide range of his studies and the variety of his acquisitions than for accuracy and depth in any one department. Of the institutions and public men of our own country he has always written and spoken in the most friendly and generous spirit. This sketch of Franklin is from the Historical Sketches of Statesmen who flourished in the time of George III.] ONE of the most remarkable men certainly of our times as a politician, or of any age as a philosopher, was Franklin ; who also stands alone in combining together these two characters, the greatest that man can sustain, and in this, that, having borne the first part in enlarging science by one of the greatest discoveries ever made, he bore the second part in founding one of the greatest empires in the world. In this truly great man every thing seems to concur that goes towards the constitution of exalted merit. First, he was the architect of his own fortune. Born in the humblest station, he raised himself by his talents and his industry, first to the place in society which may be attained with the help only of ordinary abilities, great application, and good luck; but next, to the loftier heights which a daring and happy genius alone can scale; and the poor printer's boy, who at one period of his life had no covering to shelter his head from the dews of night, rent in twain the proud dominion of England, and lived to be the ambassador of a commonwealth which he had formed, at the court of the haughty monarchs of France who had been his allies. Then, he had been tried by prosperity as well as adverse fortune, and had passed unhurt through the perils of both. No crdinary apprentice, no commonplace journeyman, ever laid the foundations of his independence in habits of industry and temperance more deep than he did, whose genius was afterwards to rank him with the Galileos and Newtons of the old world. No patrician born to shine in courts, or assist at the councils of monarchs, ever bore his honors in a lofty station more easily, or was less spoiled by the enjoyment of them, than this common workman did when negotiating with royal representatives, or caressed by all the beauty and fashion of the most brilliant court in Europe. Again, he was self-taught in all he knew. His hours of study were stolen from those of sleep and of meals, or gained by some ingenious contrivance for reading while the work of his daily calling went on. Assisted by none of the helps which affluence tenders to the studies of the rich, he had to supply the place of tutors by redoubled diligence, and of commentaries by repeated perusal. Nay, the possession of books was to be obtained by copying what the art which he himself exer aised furnished easily to others Next, the circumstances under which others succumb he made to yield, and bent to his own purposes a successful leader of a revolt that ended in complete triumph after appearing desperate for years; a great discoverer in philosophy without the ordinary helps to knowledge; a writer famed for his chaste style without a classical education; a skilful negotiator, though never bred to politics; ending as a favorite, nay, a pattern of fashion when the guest of frivolous courts, the life which he had begun in garrets and in workshops. Lastly, combinations of faculties in others deemed impossible appeared easy and natural in him. The philosopher, delighting in speculation, was also eminently a man of action. Ingenious reasoning, refined and subtle consultation, were in him combined with prompt resolution and inflexible firmness of purpose. To a lively fancy he joined a learned and deep reflection; his original and inventive genius stooped to the convenient alliance of the most ordinary prudence in every-day affairs; the mind that soared above the clouds, and was conversant with the loftiest of human contemplations, disdained not to make proverbs and feign parables for the guidance of apprenticed youths and maidens at service; and the hands that sketched a free constitution for a whole continent, or drew down the lightning from heaven, easily and cheerfully lent themselves to simplify the apparatus by which truths were to be illustrated or discoveries pursued. His whole course, both in acting and in speculation, was simple and plain, ever preferring the easiest and shortest road, nor ever having recourse to any but the simplest means to compass his ends. His policy rejected all refinements, and aimed at accomplishing its purposes by the most rational and obvious expedients. His language was unadorned, and used as the medium of communicating his thoughts, not of raising admiration; but it was pure, expressive, racy. His manner of reasoning was manly and cogent, the address of a rational being to others of the same order; and so concise, that preferring decision to discussion, he never exceeded a quarter of an hour in any public address. His correspondence on busi ness, whether private or on state affairs, is a model of clearness and compendious shortness; nor can any state papers surpass in dignity and impression those of which he is believed to have been the author in the earlier part of the American revolutionary war. His mode of philosophizing was the purest application of the inductive principle, so eminently adapted to his nature, and so clearly dictated by common sense, that we can have little doubt that it would have been suggested by Franklin, if it had not been unfolded by Bacon, though it is as clear that in this case it would have been expounded in far more simple terms. But of all this great man's scientific excellences, the most remarkable is the smallness, the simplicity, the apparent inadequacy of the means which he employed in his experimental researches. His discoveries were made with hardly any apparatus at all; and if, at any time, he had been led to employ instruments of a less ordinary description, he never rested satisfied until he had, as it were, afterwards translated the process, by resolving the problem with such simple machinery, that you might say he had done it wholly unaided by apparatus: The experiments by which the identity of lightning and electricity was demonstrated were made with a sheet of brown paper, a bit of twine, a silk thread, and an iron key. Upon the integrity of this great man, whether in public or private life, there rests no stain. Strictly honest, and even scrupu lously punctual in all his dealings, he preserved in the highest fortune that regularity which he had practised, as well as inculcated, in the lowest. In domestic life he was faultless, and in the intercourse of society, delightful. There was a constant good humor and a playful wit, easy and of high relish, without any ambition to shine, the natural fruit of his lively fancy, his solid, natural good sense, and his cheerful temper, that gave his conversation an unspeakable charm, and alike suited every circle, from the humblest to the most elevated. With all his strong opinions, so often solemnly declared, so imperishably recorded in his deeds, he retained a tolerance for those who differed from him, which could not be surpassed in men whose principles hang so loosely about them as to be taken up for a convenient cloak, and laid down when found to impede their progress. In his family he was every thing that worth, warm affections, and sound prudence could contribute to make a man both useful and amiable, respected and beloved. CI. THE ANTIQUITY OF FREEDOM. BRYANT. HERE are old trees- -tall oaks and gnarled pines- To linger here, among the flitting birds And leaping squirrels, wandering brooks, and winds With pale blue berries. In these peaceful shades O Freedom, thou art not, as poets dream, With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs Are strong with struggling. Power at thee has launched |