''Tis said with ease; but, oh! how hardly tried-
By haughty souls to human honour tied—

Oh! sharp convulsive pangs of agonizing pride.' 1

Or the scornful defiance of Cobbett (who had moved to strike his name off the list of the Privy Council), concluding with a grand passage from Cowley. But he shone where such a man would be least expected to shine, in humour, which was one of his most effective weapons in the unequal fight which he waged with the Opposition during his short administration of 1834. He also excelled in quiet sarcasm. In the debate on Commercial Distress (Dec. 3rd, 1847), Alderman Reynolds, one of the members for Dublin, had asked: 'Did not everybody know that the profit and advantage of banking consisted very much in trading on your credit in contradistinction to your capital?' In the course of the masterly reply with which Peel closed the debate, he said:

'I have the greatest respect for bankers in general and Irish bankers in particular, and among Irish bankers, I well know the position enjoyed by the honourable gentleman. Now, with all the respect to which he is entitled, and with all suavity and courtesy, I will tell him, that, in his banking capacity, I would rather have his capital than his credit.'

When this speech was delivered, the Protectionist fury against him was at its height; and the Bank Charter Act, which he upheld, was especially obnoxious

1 Sir Lawrence Peel, in his able and discriminating 'Sketch' of the Life of his distinguished relative, thinks it necessary to palliate a supposed charge of poverty of thought based on his habit of clothing his thoughts in the language of other men. But surely quotations such as his imply rather richness than poverty of mind; and the charge might be brought with equal plausibility against most of the great modern orators. It is much to be regretted that the Memoirs of Sir Robert Peel' (of which three Parts have been published), by the trustees of his papers, Earl Stanhope and Mr. Cardwell, are confined to correspondence and dry matters of fact. We have ample proof how entertaining Earl Stanhope can make history or biography; and we know no one who has a choicer collection of political anecdotes than Mr. Cardwell or relates them better.

to the mercantile interest. Yet when he sat down, an adjournment was moved on the ground taken by Pitt in moving an adjournment after Sheridan's Begum speech that the House was not in a state to vote dispassionately. Sir William Heathcote turned to a friend and colleague of Peel's (Mr Cardwell) and said: 'It is of no use for any of us to talk. No one else can approach him.' The next day the friend repeated this expression to Peel. He looked astonished and replied: 'You surprise me very much you know I left out nearly everything I meant to say.'

In 1848 Feargus O'Connor was charged in the House with being a Republican. He denied it, and said he did not care whether the Queen or the Devil was on the throne. Peel replied: 'When the honourable gentleman sees the sovereign of his choice on the throne of these realms, I hope he'll enjoy, and I'm sure he'll deserve, the confidence of the crown.'

Sheil had learnt and forgotten the exordium of a speech which began with the word 'necessity.' This word he had repeated three times, when Sir R. Peel broke in- is not always the mother of invention.'

The most formidable competitor for power whom Peel had to encounter during his leadership of the Conservative party, was Lord John (Earl) Russell: a statesman who has played too important a part in the constitutional history of England to be passed over: who, moreover, became as good a speaker as it was well possible to become with hardly any of the physical requisites, by high spirit, high training, clearness and depth of view, thought, feeling, knowledge, and accomplishment. His arrival at the goal marked out for him in early youth by one poet, has been hailed and celebrated by another:

'With an eloquence-not like those rills from a height
Which sparkle and foam and in vapour are o'er,
But a current that works out its way into light,
Through the filtering recesses of thought and of lore.

'Thus gifted, thou never canst sleep in the shade:

If the stirrings of genius, the music of fame,

And the charms of thy cause have not power to persuade,
Yet think how to freedom thou'rt pledged by thy name!'

These are two of some spirited stanzas by Moore, headed, 'Remonstrance: after a conversation with Lord John Russell, in which he had intimated some idea of giving up all political pursuits.' The following verses form part of his lordship's portrait in The New Timon: '

'But see our statesman when the steam is on,
And languid Johnny glows to glorious John!
When Hampden's thought, by Falkland's muses drest,
Lights the pale cheek and swells the generous breast;
When the pent heat expands the quickening soul,
And foremost in the race the wheels of genius roll!'

He particularly excelled in a comprehensive reply at the end of an important debate: and one of the most telling retorts ever uttered in either House was his, when Sir Francis Burdett, after turning Tory and becoming a member of the Carlton Club, thought proper to sneer at the cant of patriotism :

'I quite agree with the honourable baronet that the cant of patriotism is a bad thing. But I can tell him a worsethe recant of patriotism-which I will gladly go along with him in reprobating whenever he shows me an example of it.'

It has always seemed unaccountable to us that Peel, who had joined battle, without losing heart or ground, with such antagonists as Brougham, Canning, Stanley, and Lord Russell, should have quailed before Mr. Disraeli; or, if quailed be too strong a term, should have allowed himself to be so ruffled and annoyed. Contempsi Catilinæ gladios: non pertimescam tuos. He was so irritated on the night of the third reading of the Corn-Law Bill that he came after the debate to Lord Lincoln (the late Duke of Newcastle) at Whitehall Place, and insisted on his carrying a hostile message to Mr. Disraeli. On Lord Lincoln's positive refusal,

Sir Robert was going off in search of another second, and was with difficulty driven from his purpose by the threat of an application to a magistrate. The most plausible explanation is that he was maddened by the clamorous cheers of his quondam friends and followers:

'Non me tua fervida terrent

Dicta, ferox: Dii me terrent

the Dii being understood in the theatrical sense the gods that thunder their applause or censure from the gallery. It must be remembered also that there was twice over some foundation for the charge so pointedly levelled at him, of having acted like the Turkish admiral who steered the fleet under his command straight into the harbour of the enemy; and that Mr. Disraeli was in his happiest vein. This was the night (May 15, 1846) when he declared Peel's life to be one great appropriation clause,' termed the Treasury Bench 'political pedlars that bought their party in the cheapest market and sold us in the dearest;' and compared the conversion of the Peelites to that of the Saxons by Charlemagne, who, according to the chronicle, were converted in battalions and baptized in platoons.'

Sheil's mode of accounting for Mr. Disraeli's want of spirit and freshness after Peel's death is well known. He compared him to a dissecting surgeon or anatomist without a corpse. His best speeches and two or three of them are of rare excellence-were those which he spoke when, as leader of the young England party, he first opened the trenches against Peel. His later and more elaborate speeches are deficient in substance, soundness, spontaneity and flow. They neither convince nor move. As Cicero says of Epicurus, Nil magnificum, nil generosum sapit.' They do not make his hearers wiser or better; nor would he gain by it if they did. It is only when his fertile fancy supplies

an allusive pleasantry, or when he can indulge his genius for sarcasm, that he brightens up or seems at home. Rogers said of Lord Aberdeen's (the Premier) dancing, when obliged to stand up with an ambassadress, that he danced as if he was hired for the purpose and was not sure of being paid. Mr. Disraeli has commonly spoken since 1846 as if he was under an engagement to do a given amount of work for his party, and was not sure of their approval when he had completed it.

What his biographer deems the most presentable bit of his rhetoric is the warning to the Manchester School: that there is no reason why they should form an exception to that which history has mournfully recorded; why they, too, should not fade like the Tyrian dye, and moulder like the Venetian palaces.' But surely some happier passages might be discovered by those who cared to look for them. He made a capital hit in his speech at Manchester :

'As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench, the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.'

Genuine Saxon, by the soul of Hengist!' was the exulting shout of Cedric on hearing the name of a Saxon knight who had been victor in the lists. 'Genuine Saxon!' will be the exclamation of every critical listener to Mr. Bright. His look, his tone, his choice of words and illustrations, his stubborn independence, his boldness, his pugnacity, are all redolent of race. A Foxite adduced Pitt's preference of Latin compounds as an all-sufficient proof of habitual ambiguity. Apply a similar test to Mr. Bright and no further proof will be needed of his straightforwardness. His diction is