BROOKFIELD'S SERMONS.*
MR. KINGLAKE says :—" Mr. Brookfield, ever generous, in- dulgent, and large-minded, was never the least demoralised by taking Holy Orders." What this means we can all understand well enough, without Lord Lyttelton's interpretation that " no one was ever more free from many, at least, of the faults which may be incident to his profession." The truth is that, in addition to his other admirable, qualities to which Mr. Kinglake refers, Mr. Brookfield was pre-eminently a humorous man ; and the speeal faults whereby the clergy are occasionally " demoralised " —conceit, dogmatism, affectation, and priestly arrogance—are errors for which a keen sense of the ridiculous is tl a surest of safeguards. A parson who has no fun in his constitution may be a saint for goodness and self-denial, and yet find it hard to avoid some of these rocks, to the offence of critics like Mr. Kinglake. But give him five grains of genuine humour, and he carries along with him a delicate but infallible mag- netic needle, whereby he is sure to steer clear of them. Our stupid grandfathers had an ideal of a pious clergyman as a lugubrious personage whose habitual tone of mind was that of Cowper's "Poems on the Bills of Mortality," and to whom it would be almost profane to ascribe the perpetration of a joke. How this came to pass in a Church of which Latimer, and South, and Jeremy Taylor had been lights, it is needless to inquire, but it is notorious that when Sydney Smith came jesting and making jokes to the delight of mankind, he was looked at as "little better than one of the wicked," and much more out of place in the pulpit than the numberless swearing, hunt- ing, and drinking parsons of the period ; while the Government of the day entertained a sincere conviction that to confer on him any higher ecclesiastical appointment than a canonry, would be to insult the decencies of British existence. Yet assuredly if there be any faculty outside of the strictly moral and religious, which a sagacious friend to a Church ought to prize in one of its ministers, it would be that Sense of the Ridiculous which guarantees them from a thousand fatal mistakes, and hinders the world from laughing at them, by compelling it to laugh with them. What would not be, for example, the value of this precious sense, could it be possessed by the Stigginses and Chadbands on one side, and the Ritualists on the other ! Would there ever have been, in such case, in the chapels any singing of such hymns as,— " My soul is like a rusty lock ;"
or in the Churches any vehement contention (as if the eternal destiny of mankind were at stake) about vestments, birettas, baldacchinos, and " orientation?"
Lord Lyttelton, in the feeling memoir of the life of his old friend and tutor prefaced to this volume, says that the most salient feature in Mr. Brookfield's character "was undoubtedly humour; in his earlier life, fun, of the most irresistible kind ;" and pro- ceeds to quote from the letters and remembrances furnished by other surviving friends, testimony to the same character- istic which none who ever enjoyed the privilege of Mr.
• sermon, by the late Rev. W. H. Brookfield. Edited by Mrs. Brookdold. With a Biographical Notice by Lord Lyttelton. London : Smith and Elder. 1875. Brookfield's society are likely to forget. As he wrote (so far as we know) no witty poems like Barham, nor essays like Sydney Smith, and his social brilliance shone, of course, only in the choice intellectual circles to which he belonged, the name of the late Prebendary of St. Paul's will probably never take its place in the public mind, along with the two great humourist canons whose facetiousness seems to scintillate like the gas corona round the dome of that least solemn of English cathe- drals. His sermons are said to have occasionally sparkled with epigrams not unprovocative (for those who could catch their delicate point) of quiet smiles. But if this were the case, the present volume of grave and earnest orthodox discourses bears no witness to the fact, and the only record which will survive of so much genial and exquisite humour must lie in the memory of those who once enjoyed its high gratification. The testimony of these friends, as collected by Lord Lyttelton, is very remarkable. Mr. Garden describes it as "the richest, the most creative, I have ever encountered." Mr. Spedding says, " I call it indescribable, because its effect depended so much upon things which cannot be described, the humour of the time, the characters of the persons present, the sensitive places in each that were so delicately touched, the places which, as too sen- sitive, were so delicately avoided." Sir Henry Taylor says, "To speak of an exuberance of wit and humour seems speaking in vain, when one finds oneself incapable of describing what the wit and humour was which was exclusively his, and which could no more belong to another than the expression of his countenance." Miss Kate Perry says, " He could imitate not only a trick of manner or voice, but he seemed for the time imbued with the spirit of the person he portrayed, becoming, as it were, the very person he repre- sented, and this so free from malice, that no one's self-love could be wounded. In the case of two of his most distinguished victims, none more enjoyed the little comedy than they did, and many will remember the hearty peals of laughter which ensued on seeing themselves as Brookfield saw them." In his earlier college days, indeed, Mr. Brookfield seems to have lived when in company in a very tempest of laughter of his own creating, albeit even then his solitary hours were darkened with moodiness and melancholy. The Master of Trinity draws a picture which it is hard to connect with the grave and decorous clergyman of later years, whose jests, brilliant as they might be, could produce only that subdued gaiety beyond which the spirits of men and women in London society rarely or ever oscillate. "At my age," says Dr. Thompson, "it is not likely that I shall ever again see a whole party lying on the floor for purposes of unrestrained laughter, while one of their number is pouring forth, with a perfectly grave face, a succession of imaginary dialogues, between characters real or fictitious, one exceeding another in humour and drollery."
There is something very singular and mournful in the fatality whereby a gift like this, so charming in itself, and used, as in this case, by its possessor with the utmost possible avoidance of offence of any kind, should yet be linked so often with a temperament essentially brooding and serious. Mr. Brookfield's countenance youth a very handsome one—betrayed at all times more of inward care and gravity than of cheerfulness, and of merriment it bore not a trace. His humorousness seems thus to have been a faculty a part, like the powers of calculation of which one some- times hears, and not by any means to have sprung from a joyous constitution, naturally viewing the bright and droll side of things from the stand-point of its own happiness. When it is added that in later years this brilliant man and most popular member of society must have constantly exerted enormous self-control to conceal from all eyes the severe physical sufferings of the malady of which at last he died, the sadness of the contrast becomes complete. The near proximity of human smiles and tears was never more touchingly illustrated. Tennyson seems to have so felt it, in the sonnet he has dedicated to the memory of his old friend and the friend of Arthur Hallam :- " Brooks—for they called you so that knew you best,
Old Brooks—who loved so well to mouth my rhymes, How oft wo two have heard St. Mary's chimes !
How oft the Cantab supper, host and guest, Would echo helpless laughter to your jest !
How oft with him we paced that walk of limes,—
Him, the lost light of those dawn-golden times, Who loved you well ! Now both are gone to rest. You man of humorous-melancholy mark, Dead of some inward agony,—is it so?
Our kindlier, trustier Jacques past away. I cannot laud this life, it looks so dark ;
2ar-ric iimp,—dream of a shadow, go ;
God bless you ; I shall join you in a day."
Mr. Brookfield was an eloquent and admired preacher, and also laboured most conscientiously for many years as an inspector of schools. If the under-current of his profound melancholy seemed inconsistent with the sparkling wit beneath which it ran, there was certainly nothing inconsistent in that wit with a very serious sense of his sacred duties, nor with manly courage in facing the terrors of mortality in their darkest shape. Tenderly hiding from the eyes of those nearest to him the pain he endured and the knowledge of the inevitably approaching end, he only succumbed when nature could bear no more,—a very few days before his death. His wife affectingly describes his last hours:- " He bore everything with the same characteristically silent endurance, only softened by a sense of what was drawing near. It was in absolute calm that he passed away ; no fear, no distress ; peaceful and collected." His last words were to his wife, "Good bye, God bless you."
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