year, this and other escapades were remembered against him.  “If left out,” said Lord Melbourne, “he would indeed be dangerous; but if taken in, he would simply be destructive.”  So Brougham was left out, Pepys was made Chancellor, and the Premier compared himself to a man who has broken with a termagant mistress and married the best of cooks.  Mr. Napier was not so happy.  The termagant was left on his hands.  He had to keep terms with a contributor who hated with deadly hatred the very government that the Review existed to support.  No editor ever had such a contributor as Brougham in the long history of editorial torment since the world began.  He scolds, he storms, he hectors, he lectures; he is for ever threatening desertion and prophesying ruin; he exhausts the vocabulary of opprobrium against his correspondent’s best friends; they are silly slaves, base traitors, a vile clique “whose treatment of me has been the very ne plus ultra of ingratitude, baseness, and treachery.”  He got the Review and its editor into a scrape which shook the world at the time (1834), by betraying Cabinet secrets to spite Lord Durham.  His cries against his adversaries are as violent as the threats of Ajax in his tent, and as loud as the bellowings of Philoctetes at the mouth of his cave.  Here is one instance out of a hundred:—­

“That is a trifle, and I only mention it to beg of you to pluck up a little courage, and not be alarmed every time any of the little knot of threateners annoy you. They want to break off all kind of connection between me and the Edinburgh Review.  I have long seen it.  Their fury against the article in the last number knows no bounds, and they will never cease till they worry you out of your connection with me, and get the whole control of the Review into their own hands, by forcing you to resign it yourself.  A party and a personal engine is all they want to make it.  What possible right can any of these silly slaves have to object to my opinion being—­what it truly is—­against the Holland House theory of Lord Chatham’s madness?  I know that Lord Grenville treated it with contempt.  I know others now living who did so too, and I know that so stout a Whig as Sir P. Francis was clearly of that opinion, and he knew Lord Chatham personally.  I had every ground to believe that Horace Walpole, a vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch, though a very clever writer of Letters, was nine-tenths of the Holland House authority for the tale.  I knew that a baser man in character, or a meaner in capacity than the first Lord Holland existed not, even in those days of job and mediocrity.  Why, then, was I bound to take a false view because Lord Holland’s family have inherited his hatred of a great rival?”

Another instance is as follows:—­