'certainly one of his brightest flights.' The allusion to the protest of the Russian Minister at Madrid, who had declared with horror that blood had been shed in the Royal Palace, was at once (remarks Lord Russell) a withering invective and a just condemnation of despotism. If

I had been one of the counsellors of the Emperor,' he said, the last subject I would have advised my master to touch upon would have been that of blood shed in the Royal Palace.' At the epoch of the Emperor's coronation, a lady, writing from St. Petersburg, had described the ceremony in these terms: The Emperor entered the church preceded by the assassins of his grandfather, surrounded by the assassins of his father, and followed by his own.'

Canning was not equal in declamatory power to Pitt, in debating power to Fox, or in wit to Sheridan: he wanted the reasoning powers of Plunket, as well as the tremendous energy, the all-embracing capacity, of Brougham. But from the meridian of his career to its untimely end, he was, by common consent, the most eloquent, most accomplished, most popular, of contemporary speakers; and his speeches abound in passages which we are disposed to name as the most finished specimens of spoken rhetoric in our tongue. Thus, in supporting the vote of thanks to the Duke (then Marquis) of Wellington for the victory of Vittoria—

'How was their prospect changed! In those countries where, at most, a short struggle had been terminated by a result disastrous to their wishes, if not altogether closing in despair, they had now to contemplate a very different aspect of affairs. Germany crouched no longer trembling at the feet of the tyrant, but maintained a balanced contest. The mighty deluge by which the Continent had been overwhelmed is subsiding. The limits of nations are again visible, and the spires and turrets of ancient establishments are beginning to reappear above the subsiding waves.'

Or in the speech at Plymouth, in 1823, before the invention of ironclads :

In

'The resources created by peace are means of war. cherishing those resources, we but accumulate those means. Our present repose is no more a proof of inability to act, than the state of inertness and inactivity in which I have seen those mighty masses that float in the waters above your town, is a proof that they are devoid of strength and incapable of being fitted out for action. You well know, gentlemen, how soon one of those stupendous masses now reposing on their shadows in perfect stillness-how soon, upon any call of patriotism or of necessity, it would assume the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and motion-how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling plumage-how quickly would it put forth all its beauty and its bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and awaken its dormant thunder. Such as is one of those magnificent machines when springing from inaction into a display of its might—such is England herself, while apparently passive and motionless she silently concentrates the power to be put forth on an adequate occasion.'

Another striking example is his reply to the speaker who eulogised Pitt for a temporary departure from his principles;

'Such perverse worship is like the idolatry of barbarous nations, who can see the noonday splendour of the sun without emotion, but, when he is in eclipse, come forward with their hymns and cymbals to adore him. And thus there are those who venerate Mr. Pitt less in the full meridian of his glory than under his partial obscurations, and gaze upon him with the fondest adoration when he has accidentally ceased to shine.'

The specimen Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling) gives of his humour (the sketch of Lord Nugent and his equipment) is confessedly open to the objection of being too laboured and too long. One of his happiest hits was the comparison of Brougham to Dennis claiming the thunder; from which Brougham did not recover for some weeks.

It was John Wilson in Blackwood,' we believe, who

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:

"The

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?” 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.

4

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