Lord Palmerston had humour of the genial give-andtake kind, which, for a party leader, is often more serviceable than wit. He was told that Mr. Osborne, a popular speaker, whose dash and sparkle are enhanced by good feeling and sagacity, regretted a personal conflict, which he had provoked. Tell him,' said Lord Palmerston, that I am not the least offended, the more particularly because I think I had the best of it.'

Burke thus coarsely but graphically alluded to Lord North; The noble lord who spoke last, after extending his right leg a full yard before his left, rolling his flaming eyes, and moving his ponderous frame, has at length opened his mouth.' The noble lord's figure

was certainly ill fitted for oratorical effect, but by dint of tact, temper, and wit, he converted even his personal disadvantages into means of persuasion or conciliation.

'One member,' he said, 'who spoke of me, called me "that thing called a minister." To be sure,' he said, patting his large form, 'I am a thing; the member, therefore, when he called me a "thing," said what was true; and I could not be angry with him. But when he added, "that thing called a minister," he called me that thing which of all things he himself wished most to be, and therefore I took it as a compliment.'

With equal adroitness he turned his incurable sleepiness to account. When a fiery declaimer, after calling for his head, denounced him for sleeping, he complained how cruel it was to be denied a solace which other criminals so often enjoyed-that of having a night's rest before their execution. And when a dull prosy speaker made a similar charge, he retorted that it was somewhat unjust in the gentleman to blame him for taking the remedy which he himself had been so considerate as to administer. Alderman Sawbridge having accompanied the presentation of a petition from Billingsgate with an invective of more than ordinary coarseness, Lord North began his reply in the following

words: 'I cannot deny that the hon. alderman speaks not only the sentiments but the very language of his constituents.'

Lord Chatham properly belongs to the preceding generation. The chief illustrations of Lord North's era were William Pitt, Charles James Fox, Sheridan, and Burke, magis pares quam similes: indeed, it would be difficult to name four men of nearly equal eminence presenting so many points of contrast. Pitt was a born orator. Directly after his maiden speech, some one said, Pitt will be one of the first men in Parliament.' 'He is so already,' answered Fox. It was by slow degrees that Fox himself attained his unrivalled excellence as a debater, and he attained it at the expense of his audience. During five whole sessions,' he used to say, 'I spoke every night but one; and I regret that I did not speak on that night too.'

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Pitt's style was stately, sonorous, full to abundance, smooth and regular in its flow: Fox's free to carelessness, rapid, rushing, turbid, broken, but overwhelming in its swell. Pitt never sank below his ordinary level, never paused in his declamation, never hesitated for a word: if interrupted by a remark or incident, he disposed of it parenthetically, and held on the even and lofty tenor of his way. Fox was

desultory and ineffective till he warmed: he did best when he was provoked or excited: he required the kindling impulse, the explosive spark: he might be compared to the rock in Horeb before it was struck. He began his celebrated speech on the Westminster scrutiny by saying that far from expecting any indulgence, he could scarcely hope for fair justice from the House.' This raised a cry of order, and gave him occasion for repeating and justifying his obnoxious words in a succession of telling sentences which went far towards making the fortune of the speech. Mr. T. Grenville told Rogers, 'His (Fox's) speeches were full

of repetitions: he used to say that it was necessary to hammer it into them; but I rather think he could not do otherwise.' His carefully prepared speech (of which he corrected the report) in honour of the Duke of Bedford, may pair off with Lord Chatham's eulogy of Wolfe.

Magna eloquentia, sicut flamma, materiâ alitur, et motibus excitatur, et urendo clarescit.' This passage from the dialogue of Tacitus ' De Oratoribus' was quoted in Pitt's presence and declared to be untranslatable, on which he immediately replied: 'No, I should translate it thus :-"It is with eloquence as with a flame. It requires fuel to feed it, motion to excite it, and it brightens as it burns." This passage (which Pitt has rather paraphrased than translated), whilst exactly describing the eloquence of Fox, is only partially applicable to his own; for he brought his own fuel: he stood in no need of adventitious excitement; and the same lambent flame burnt clearly and equably from the exordium of his best speeches to the close. The best in all probability of his speeches (says Lord Brougham) is that upon the Peace of 1783 and the Coalition, when he closed his magnificent peroration by that noble yet simple figure: 'and if this inauspicious union be not already consummated, in the name of my country I forbid the banns.'

In the first place, the noble and learned lord has weakened, the passage, which runs thus: 'If, however, the baneful alliance is not already formed, if this illomened marriage is not already solemnized, I know a just and lawful impediment, and, in the name of the public safety, I here forbid the banns.' In the second place, it is divided by three pages of the report from the peroration, which ends with a no less celebrated passage. After remarking that no vote of the House could deprive him of the consciousness of having done his duty, he said:

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And with this consolation, the loss of power, Sir, and the loss of fortune, though I affect not to despise them, I hope I soon shall be able to forget:

'Laudo manentem: si celeres quatit

Pennas, resigno quæ dedit—

probamque

Pauperiem sine dote quæro.'

'Why did he omit et me virtute meâ involvo?' eagerly asked a young man, afterwards a distinguished member of Opposition, of Bishop Tomline, who was under the gallery during the delivery of this speech-'an omission,' adds the Bishop, 'generally considered as marking the modesty and good sense of Mr. Pitt.'1

The same quotation was appropriately introduced by Canning. After beginning Laudo manentem, he went on, or to adopt the more beautiful paraphrase of Dryden :

'I can enjoy her while she's kind,

But when she dances in the wind,

And shakes her wings and will not stay,

I puff the prostitute away.'

To give another instance in which Canning used the same quotation as Pitt

'Stetimus tela aspera contra

Contulimusque manus: experto credite quantus

In clipeum assurgat, quo turbine torqueat hastam.'

This was applied to Fox by Pitt, by Canning to Brougham, and by Palmerston to Stanley. Indeed, it is one of the stock quotations which were constantly recurring, like

'Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes ?'

The altered constitution of the House since 1832,

It was just before this speech (not before that on the Slave Trade) that Pitt was vomiting. The incident is thus recorded in Wilberforce's Diary: Pitt's famous speech. . . . Stomach disordered, and actually holding Solomon's porch door open with one hand whilst vomiting during Fox's speech, to which he was to reply.' Solomon's porch was the portico behind the old House of Commons.

and still more, we fear, since 1867, has been in no respect more marked than in the absence of that familiarity with the Latin classics, which renders it comparatively dead to quotations or illustrations drawn from them. The time is gone when a false quantity in a man was much the same thing as a faux pas in a woman. Ignorance of more important matters then went for little or nothing. When Sir Robert Walpole was accused in the House of attempting to revive the worst practices of Empson and Dudley, he turned to Sir Philip Yorke, and asked who Empson and Dudley were. He was not ashamed of this; but he was sorely nettled by Pulteney's exulting correction of his Latin. The late Lord Derby carried off with a laugh his mistake, during the discussion of the Corn Laws, about Tamboul; but Lord Clarendon, with all his varied knowledge, high cultivation and accomplishment, was obviously piqued when, as ill luck would have it, in a debate on public schools in the Lords with a numerous attendance of head-masters below the Bar, he slipped into a false quantity by the transposition of a word:

'Sunt bona, sunt mediocria, sunt plūra māla.'

'Măla plūra,' maliciously insinuated Lord Derby in an audible aside; and by a common instinct up went the right hands of the head-masters in fancied application of the birch. Lord Clarendon's misfortune lay in his audience. In the House of Commons neither felicity nor infelicity of this sort tells upon or is noticed by the majority. We remember the ' a phenomena' of a metropolitan member raising only a partial titter; and when general effect is the object, it is hardly safe to go beyond Virgil and Horace, if so far.

A county member, Sir William Bagot, rose whilst Burke was speaking, under an impression that he had done; and on Burke's angrily complaining of the inter