Lord Brougham has obviously expended his chief labour on the life of this favourite philosopher, of whom, fifty years ago, every Scottish economist was a devoted pupil. Times are changed, yet this intelligent biographer has given a very ample and accurate, so far as we can judge, analysis of the _Enquiry_. But he would have greatly increased the obligations of the reader, by giving some portion of his treatise to the questions which modern artifice has devised, and modern infatuation has adopted.
An interesting "memoir" of Johnson commences the volume; but the topic would lead us too far. The biographer gives that literary Samson full applause for the strength of his understanding, the boldness of his morality, and the pungency of his wit. Rather to our surprise, he pours out an eloquent panegyric on Boswell. That we are indebted to this versatile personage for one of the most amusing and instructive collections of reminiscences in the history of authorship, will be readily conceded. But this is the first time of our hearing a demand that we should pay him any more peculiar homage. But Lord Brougham is himself the head of a school: his _ipse dixit_ demands acquiescence, and none can doubt that, if he is singular in his dogmas, he deserves attention for the vigour of his advocacy.
The natural history of the Cockney has been frequently illustrated, and never so successfully as in time past in the pages of Maga. But nature is inexhaustible in all her creations. You might study a lifetime, and yet not fully master the properties of one of those little Infusoria that wriggle or spin about in a phial of foul or fair water, and a still wider subject of study is of course supplied by any larger animal, such as a Cockney, placed as he is a little lower than the angels, and half-way down, or there abouts, between a man and a chimpanzee.
Upon careful inquiry it would probably be found, that in most nations the population, though all purporting to be men and women, consists in a good measure of beings that stand several degrees below the point of humanity. France, among several specimens of a higher order, has occasionally shown that a considerable proportion of its inhabitants was a hideous cross between the tiger and the baboon. Holland has had its Grotius and its Erasmus, but the otter and the beaver breed make up the mass of those who go by the name of Dutchmen. There has been no want in Germany of clear-sighted men, but the mole, the bat, and the owl furnish a large contingent to the ranks of its _literati_. In other nations we see a greater or less preponderance of the wolf or the bear, the goat or the goose, the ass, the hog, or the hippopotamus. Such being the universal condition of the world, we should rather be proud than otherwise, that, in England, we can boast of a secondary tribe, made, perhaps, by some of nature's journeymen, but that yet imitate humanity so respectably, so amiably, and so amusingly, as the Cockney must be admitted to do.