Note 117 — Chapter IV

Chap. ii. p. 80. With Lord Brougham and others, my father, some years before, had been associated in the movement for the “Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” a Society which, in England and Wales acted as pioneers in the good work of publishing cheap and wholesome literature, just as in Scotland did the Chambers Brothers. Unfortunately, Brougham believed himself to be scientific, and contributed to the series an article so full of mistakes that some wag immediately dubbed the Society that for the “Confusion of Useful,” etc. Brougham was a supporter of the postal reform, and my father found in him more kindliness than the world gave him credit for possessing. The great lawyer was a very eccentric man, and Punch caricatured him unmercifully, invariably representing him as clad in the large-checked “inexpressibles” which he is said to have always worn because, in a moment of weakness, he had purchased as a bargain so huge a roll of cloth of that pattern that it supplied him with those garments for the rest of his days. The story is pretty generally known of his causing to be published the news of his death, and of his sitting, very much alive, in a back room of his darkened house, and reading, with quite pardonable interest, the obituary notices which appeared in the different newspapers. He wrote an execrable hand, which varied in degrees of illegibility. The least illegible he and his secretary alone could read; a worse he only; the very worst, not even he could decipher, especially if he had forgotten the matter of which it treated. This story has, of course, been fathered on many bad writers; but any one possessed of a Brougham autograph must feel convinced that to none but him could possibly belong its authorship.