their day; when political economy was in its infancy, and the multifarious social problems based on it, or on our complex system of commercial arrangements and internal administration, were unknown. To be at home in English history and the Latin classics-to be familiarly versed in the commonplaces of civil and religious liberty, prerogative, toleration, standing armies, the Protestant succession, and the balance of powerto have a copious and well-chosen vocabulary-to be well born or well connected-to be fluent, animated, and bold-was enough, and more than enough, to raise the hopes of an Opposition, or make a Minister look about him. A modern debater addresses the entire nation through the parliamentary reporters, and his reputation depends in a great measure on the estimate they may found on the substance of his speeches. St. John had only to satisfy those who were present when he spoke.

.

In his Spirit of Patriotism' he labours hard to prove from the examples of Demosthenes and Cicero, that all the powers of eloquence, unaided by study and experience, will prove unavailing in the long run; and if he means that they will not make a statesman, a patriot, an enlightened reformer or benefactor of his country, he may be right. But he has shown in another place how great and how baneful an influence might be acquired in the House of Commons by arts, acquirements, and expedients which have no apparent affinity to knowledge or judgment, comprehensiveness or solidity. You know the nature of that assembly,' he writes to Windham; they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and by whose halloa they are used to be encouraged.' The Tory squires grew fond of St. John, much as their successors grew fond of Mr. Disraeli in our time, for giving voice to their antipathies and hunting down the most respectable of their opponents. In serious argu

6

ment, and whenever an appeal could be made to reason, justice, or constitutional doctrine, he was invariably worsted by Somers; but his dashing oratory carried all before it in debate; and it was by slow degrees, and by dint of moral courage and unflinching energy, rather than by power of words, that Walpole succeeded in establishing a partial counterpoise.1

Bolingbroke had many contemporaries who attained distinction in the same walk: Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, for one; who, on the death of Queen Anne, offered to head a troop of horse in his lawn sleeves, and proclaim James III. at Charing Cross. In the debate on the Occasional Conformity and Schism Bill in the House of Lords, in December, 1718, it was very warmly opposed by Atterbury, who said, 'he had prophesied last winter this Bill would be attempted in the present session, and he was sorry to find he had proved a true prophet.' Lord Coningsby rose immediately after the bishop, and remarked, that one of the right reverends had set himself forth as a prophet; but, for his part, he did not know what prophet to liken him to, unless to that famous prophet Balaam, who was reproved by his own ass.' The bishop, in reply: Since the noble lord hath discovered in our manners such a similitude, I am well content to be compared to the prophet Balaam; but, my lords, I am at a loss how to make out the other part of the parallel. I am sure that I have been reproved by nobody but his lordship.'.

This may pair off with Rowland Hill's retort, who read from the pulpit an anonymous letter reproaching him with driving to chapel in his carriage, and reminding him that this was not our Blessed Lord's mode of travelling. He then said: 'I must admit that it is not. But if the writer of this letter will come here next

1 What is here said of Bolingbroke is reprinted from a review of Macknight's Life of Bolingbroke, in the Edinburgh Review' for October, 1863.

Sunday bridled and saddled, I shall have great pleasure in following our Blessed Lord's example in that as in all other matters within my power.'

The famous Lord Peterborough was as ready for an encounter in the senate as in the field. Speaking in opposition to the Septennial Bill in 1716 he said, that if this present Parliament continued beyond the time for which they were chosen, he knew not how to express the manner of their existence, unless, begging leave of that venerable bench (turning to the bishops) they had recourse to the distinction used in the Athanasian Creed; for they would be neither made nor created, but proceeding.'

After Bolingbroke, or rather after his sudden fall, which he survived for thirty-seven years, we arrive at Walpole and the phalanx of assailants he provoked as if for the express purpose of encountering them singlehanded and taking all their points upon his shield. During the first fourteen years of his administration the most formidable was Pulteney, whom Macaulay calls the greatest leader of Opposition that the House of Commons had ever seen. Once, in answering a charge, Walpole laid his hand upon his breast, and said

Nil conscire sibi, nulli pallescere culpæ.'

Pulteney objected that his Latin was as faulty as his argument, the correct reading being nullâ pallescere culpâ. A bet of a guinea was proposed and accepted. A 'Horace' was sent for on the instant: Pulteney proved right, and holding up the guinea, which Walpole had thrown across the table, exclaimed, ‘It is the only money I have received from the Treasury for many years, and it shall be the last.' The identical guinea is now in the Medal Room of the British Museum, with a memorandum in the handwriting of Pulteney recording the incident, with this addition to the common version: 'I told him (Walpole) I could

take the money without any blush on my side, but believed it was the only money he ever gave in the House where the giver and receiver ought not both equally to blush.'

When Walpole first spoke in the House his manner was ungraceful, he paused for want of words, and could only stutter and stammer. What future promise (it was asked) was there in that sturdy, bull-necked, redfaced young member for Castle Rising, who looked like the son of a small farmer, and seemed by his gait as though he had been brought up to follow the plough ?'1 This was in 1701. Speaking of occurrences in 1713, Bishop Newton relates that, when Steele was to be expelled the House of Commons, Mr. Walpole, Mr. Pulteney, and Mr. Addison, were commissioned to go to him by the noblemen and members of the Kit-Cat Club, with the positive order and determination that Steele should not make his own speech, but Addison should make it for him, and he should recite it from the other's writing, without any insertion or addition of his own. 'Addison thought this a hard injunction, and said that he must be like a school-boy, and desire the gentlemen to give him a little sense. Walpole said that it was impossible to speak a speech in cold blood; but being pressed, he said he would try, and immediately spoke a very good speech of what he thought proper for Steele to say on the occasion; and the next day in the House made another speech as good, or better, on the same subject; but so totally different from the former, that there was scarce a single argument or thought the same.'

Walpole's powers were displayed to advantage in the debate on the renewal of the Septennial Act in 1734; 2

1 Macknight's Life of Bolingbroke.'

2 Sir John St. Aubyn, another speaker of note, said in this debate: For this reason, short Parliaments have been less corrupt than long ones: they are observed, like streams of water, always to grow more impure the greater distance they run from the fountain head.'

especially when replying to Sir William Wyndham, who had thought proper' to suppose a man devoid of all notions of virtue or honour, of no great family and of but mean fortune, raised to be chief minister of State by the concurrence of many whimsical events.' Walpole, supposing' in his turn, made a bitter and telling attack on Sir William's friend, political ally and (it was more than suspected) prompter, Bolingbroke:

'But now, Sir, let me too suppose, and the House being cleared, I am sure no person that hears me can come within the description of the person I am to suppose-let us suppose in this, or some other unfortunate country, an anti-minister, who thinks himself a person of so great and extensive parts, and of so many eminent qualifications, that he looks upon himself as the only person in the kingdom capable to conduct the public affairs of the nation, and therefore christening every other gentleman who has the honour to be employed in the administration by the name of blunderer: suppose this fine gentleman lucky enough to have gained over to his party some persons really of fine parts, of ancient families, and of great fortunes, and others of desperate views, arising from disappointed and malicious hearts: all these gentlemen, with respect to their political behaviour, moved by him, and by him solely all they say, either in private, or in public, being only a repetition of the words he has put into their mouths, and a spitting out of that venom which he has infused into them and yet we may suppose this leader not really liked by any, even of those who so blindly follow him, and hated by all the rest of mankind: we'll suppose this anti-minister to be in a country where he really ought not to be, and where he could not have been, but by an effect of too much goodness and mercy; yet endeavouring with all his might, and with all his heart, to destroy the fountain from whence that mercy flowed.

Let us farther suppose this anti-minister to have travelled, and at every court where he was, thinking himself the greatest minister, and making it his trade to betray the secrets of every court where he had before been; void of all faith or honour, and betraying every master he had ever served. Sir, I could carry my suppositions a great deal farther; and, I may