at Canning's death said or wrote:- There died George Canning, the last of the rhetoricians.' Nothing of the kind. The rhetorical spirit has survived and transmigrated. It animated the insignificant figure, it lighted up the intelligent eye, it swelled the shrill voice, of Sheil.

If to wield at will the fierce democracy be the highest triumph of oratory, O'Connell was the first orator of his generation; but the scene of his glory was the public meeting. It was as the Irish Rienzi, as the representative of Roman Catholic Ireland, that he entered the House of Commons; and the position he held in it was principally won without its walls.

'Pass by his faults, his art be here allowed-
Mighty as Chatham, give him but a crowd;
Hear him in Senates, second-rate at best,
Clear in a statement, happy in a jest.'

Sheil, distrusted by the 'tail' and discredited by their chief (as the affair of Who's the Traitor?' proves) won his way to the front by his rhetoric, and a few specimens will show that it was of the finest quality in its line. Lord Lyndhurst, adopting the very language of O'Connell, had spoken of the Irish as aliens in blood, language, and religion.' He was under the gallery on the peers' bench on February 22, 1837, during the debate on the Irish Municipal Bill, when Sheil caught up and commented on the phrase:

Aliens! good God! was Arthur, Duke of Wellington, in the House of Lords, and did he not start up and exclaim, "Hold! I have seen the aliens do their duty?" "The battles, sieges, fortunes he has passed," should have come back upon him. . . . Whose were the arms that drove your bayonets at Vimeira through the phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the moats at Badajoz? All his victories should have rushed and crowded back upon his memory -Vimeira, Badajoz, Salamanca, Albuera, Toulouse, and, last of all, the greatest Tell me, for you were there

-I appeal to the gallant soldier before me (Sir Henry Hardinge), from whose opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an intrepid breast;-tell me, for you must needs remember-on that day when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance-while death fell in showers-when the artillery of France was levelled with a precision of the most deadly science-when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the onset-tell me if, for an instant, when to hesitate for an instant was to be lost, the "aliens" blenched? And when at length the moment for the last and decisive movement had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely checked, was at last let loose when, with words familiar, but immortal, the great captain commanded the great assault-tell me, if Catholic Ireland, with less heroic valour than the natives of this your own glorious country, precipitated herself upon the foe? The blood of England, Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the same stream, and drenched the same field. When the chill morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark together;-in the same deep pit their bodies were depositedthe green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust-the dew falls from heaven upon their union in the grave. Partakers in every peril-in the glory shall we not be permitted to participate; and shall we be told, as a requital, that we are estranged from the noble country for whose salvation our life-blood was poured out?'

The wave of his hand towards the peers' bench was the signal for vociferous cheering: still more spirit-stirring was the appeal to Sir Henry Hardinge; and the most enthusiastic applause burst forth at the conclusion.

There was not a worn-out or exhausted topic that Sheil could not freshen and adorn; as that of a provision for the Roman Catholic clergy:

The Catholics of Ireland know that if their clergy were endowed with the wealth of the establishment, they would become a profligate corporation, pampered with luxury, swelling with sacerdotal pride, and presenting in their lives a monstrous contrast with that simplicity and that poverty of which they are now as well the practisers as the teachers.

They know that, in place of being, as they now are, the indefatigable instructors of the peasantry, their consolers in affliction, their resource in calamity, their preceptors and their models in religion, their visitors in sickness, and their companions at the bed of death; they would become equally insolent to the humble, and sycophantic to the great-flatterers at the noble's table and extortioners in the poor man's hovel slaves in politics, and tyrants in demeanour: who from the porticoes of palaces would give their instructions in humility; who from the banquets of patricians would prescribe their lessons in abstinence; and from the primrose path of dalliance point out the steep and thorny way. to heaven.'

This covert attack upon the Church, whom Burke exhorts to raise her mitred head in palaces, may be compared with the fell onslaught of Brougham in his defence of Ambrose Williams.

Stanley's (the late Lord Derby's) prominent features are accurately hit off in 'The New Timon: '

'The brilliant chief irregularly great,'

Frank, haughty, rash- the Rupert of Debate!
Nor gout, nor toil, his freshness can destroy,
And time still leaves all Eton in the boy.

Yet who not listens with delighted smile

To the pure Saxon of that silver style ?'

The epithet Rupert of Debate,' if not originated, was interpreted by Mr. Disraeli: His charge is irresistible, but when he has driven the force directly opposed to him off the field, he returns to find his camp in the possession of the enemy.' Macaulay said of him that his knowledge of the science of parliamentary defence resembled an instinct. 'The year 1833 was in my opinion,' observes Lord Russell, 'the most distinguished and the most memorable of Lord Derby's political career.' It was in 1833, after Lord Althorp had brought in the Irish Coercion Bill, that Stanley, finding no impression had been made, turned to Lord Russell, and said: 'I meant not to have spoken till to-morrow night, but I find I

must speak to-night.' He took Lord Althorp's box of official papers, and went upstairs to a room where he could look them over quietly. After the debate had proceeded for two or three hours longer, with no change of temper in the House, he rose and laid before them so complete and appalling a picture of the condition of Ireland, that they became deeply interested :--

When (says Lord Russell) he had produced a thrilling effect by these descriptions, he turned upon O'Connell, who led the opposition to the measure, and who seemed a short time before about to achieve a triumph in favour of sedition and anarchy. He recalled to the recollection of the House of Commons that, at a recent public meeting, O'Connell had spoken of the House of Commons as 658 scoundrels. In a tempest of scorn and indignation, he excited the anger of the men thus designated against the author of the calumny. The House, which two hours before seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was now almost ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst of the storm which his eloquence had raised he sat down, having achieved one of the greatest triumphs of eloquence ever won in a popular assembly by the powers of oratory.'

Turning to the report of this speech, we find that the effect was produced by extracts and letters pointed and applied with great declamatory force. Stanley never thought of shining, and it may be doubted whether he ever prepared any of the most telling passages in his speeches. His luminous points were sparks from a working engine, not fireworks thrown up for display. He was a desperately hard hitter, as both Sheil and O'Connell (who invented the epithet of Scorpion Stanley) found to their cost. It was O'Connell, also, who, in ridicule of the tenuity of Stanley's personal following after quitting the Whigs, made the wellknown quotation :

'Thus down thy hill, romantic Ashbourne, glides
The Derby Dilly carrying sir insides.'1

'The Anti-Jacobin.' It is three in the original.

The reins of the Derby Dilly were soon afterwards in the hands of Sir Robert Peel, and it is no slight testimony to his reputation and position that such men as Stanley and Graham were content to act under him. 'And, in truth, Sir Robert Peel is a remarkable man, confessedly a puissance in himself, confessedly the leading member of the representative, yes, even of your reformed assembly. It is a current mistake in the provinces to suppose that he is rather sensible than eloquent. If to persuade, to bias, to soothe, to command the feelings, the taste, the opinions of an audience often diametrically opposed to his views, if this be eloquence, which I, a plain man, take it to be, then Sir Robert Peel is among the most eloquent of men.'1

What people are wont to call eloquence is that which gives pleasure or excites emotion independently of the subject or the aim; and in following Sir Robert Peel the mind was exclusively bent on the train of reasoning, the lucidity of statement, or the comprehensiveness of view. To call him a parliamentary middle-man was preposterous. He was the greatest member of Parliament, bred in and formed by it, that the House of Commons had known since Walpole. Its forms, its ways, its temper, its opinions, were familiar to him. He had every description of knowledge that could be made available in debate, the business-like habits which please men of business, and the high cultivation by which the fastidious are conciliated. He was anything but a dry prosaic speaker. There are touches of sensibility in his speeches that deepen into genuine pathos, of conscious self-vindicating worth that rise to dignity, of concentrated scorn that explodes to the dismay and confusion of the scorner, as in the speech in which, as descriptive of his own mental sufferings, he introduced the fine lines of Dryden :

1 'England and the English.'