At the meeting of the Convention in 1688, we hear of Sir Thomas Littleton, 'gifted with a vehement and piercing logic, which had often, when, after a long sitting, the candles had been lighted, roused the languishing House, and decided the event of the debate.' There, too, was William Sacheverell, an orator whose great parliamentary abilites were many years later a favourite theme of old men who lived to see the conflicts of Walpole and Pulteney. There too were other veterans, but all were speedily to be thrown into the shade by two young Whigs, who then took their seats for the first time-Charles Montagu and John Somers.1 We are compelled to take the oratorical reputation of each of them upon trust. Lord Campbell says of Somers, that although he sat in Parliament from the beginning of the year 1689 till his death, not much. short of thirty years, and during a considerable part of that period led a great party, first in the Lower and then in the Upper House, there is not extant as much of any one speech he delivered as would make half a column of a newspaper; and in the very scanty reports of parliamentary proceedings in the reign of William and Anne, his name is rarely mentioned.'

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Macaulay says: His speeches have perished, but his state papers remain, and are models of terse, luminous, and dignified eloquence.' Amongst modern orators, the closest parallel would be Lord Lyndhurst. In no instance do the reports purport to give more than the substance of what Somers said; and the most successful efforts of Montagu have been similarly reduced to little better than a caput mortuum. Thus, we are assured by the historian that the extraordinary ability with which, at the beginning of the year 1792, he managed the conference on the Bill for regulating trials in cases of treason, placed him at once in the first rank of parliamentary orators; but the report of his speech, filling

1 Macaulay's History,' chap. x.

eight pages, is a dry abstract or abridgment of his argument.

One of the severest and best merited rebuffs received by King William was the opposition to the grant to the Earl of Portland in 1695 of sundry lordships with the royalties in Wales, forming a large proportion of the demesnes of the Principality. When this affair was brought before the House of Commons, Mr. Price, 'a gentleman of great parts,' since one of the Barons of the Exchequer, amongst other pointed things, is reported to have said :

'I shall make no severe remarks on this great man, for his greatness makes us little, and will make the Crown both poor and precarious. And when God shall please to send us a Prince of Wales, he may have such a present of a Crown made him as a Pope did to King John, who was surnamed Sans Terre, and was by his father, King Henry II., made Lord of Ireland, which grant was confirmed by the Pope, who sent him a crown of peacocks' feathers in derision of his power and the poverty of his revenue. I would have us to consider that we are Englishmen, and must, like patriots, stand by our country and not suffer it to become tributary to strangers. We have rejoiced that we have beat out of this kingdom Popery and slavery, and we do now with as great joy entertain Socinianism and poverty, and yet we see our properties daily given away, and our liberties must soon follow.'

The palm of eloquence in the next generation is, by universal consent, awarded to Bolingbroke, of whom

1 'Parliamentary Debates.' The entire speech was printed in 1702 under the title of Gloria Cambriæ, or Speech of a Bold Briton against a Dutch Prince of Wales.' Macaulay referring to it remarks: 'Price was the bold Briton whose speech, never, I believe, spoken, was printed in 1702. He would have better deserved to be called bold if he had published his impertinence while William was living.' According to the reporter in the 'Parliamentary Debates,' 'This short and eloquent speech made so great an impression that Mr. Price's motion was carried by an unanimous consent.' Smollett and Belsham both speak of the effect of the speech as delivered; and it is on record that equally strange language, or impertinence,' was hazarded by Mr. Price, as member of a deputation, before the Lords of the Treasury.

not one spoken sentence has been preserved. There is a current story that when the company were speculating on what lost or missing production was most to be regretted, and one named the lost works of Livy, another those of Tacitus, Pitt at once declared for a speech of Bolingbroke. All accounts agree that his voice and person were eminently adapted for oratorical display; and his writings abound in indications of the qualities by which he won his admitted supremacy in debate.1 Take, for example, what Lord Brougham calls a noble passage,' from the 'Dissertation on Parties: '

'If King Charles had found the nation plunged in corruption; the people choosing their representatives for money, without any other regard; and these representatives of the people, as well as the nobility, reduced by luxury to beg the unhallowed alms of a court; or to receive, like miserable hirelings, the wages of iniquity from a minister; if he had found the nation, I say, in this condition (which extravagant supposition one cannot make without horror), he might have dishonoured her abroad, and impoverished and oppressed her at home, though he had been the weakest prince on earth, and his ministers the most odious and contemptible men that ever presumed to be ambitious. Our fathers might have fallen into circumstances which compose the very quintessence of political misery. They might have "sold their birthright for porridge," which was their own. They might have been bubbled by the foolish, bullied by the fearful, and insulted by those whom they despised. They would have deserved to be slaves, and they might have been treated as such. When a free people crouch, like camels, to be loaded, the next at hand-no matter who-mounts them, and they soon feel the whip, and the spur of their tyrant; for a tyrant, whether prince or minister, resembles the devil in many respects; particularly in this: He is often both the

1 'Lord Bolingbroke's productions, with all their defects in argument, method, and precision, contain a force and energy which our orators rarely aim at, though it is evident that such an elevated style has much better grace in an orator than a writer, and is assured of more prompt and astonishing success.--(Hume,' Essay on Eloquence.')

tempter and tormentor. He makes the criminal and he punishes the crime.'

Or the following specimen of his imagery, which has been pronounced as rich and varied as Dryden's and more chaste :

'It is evident that a minister, in every circumstance of life, stands in as much need of us public writers as we of him: in his prosperity he can no more subsist without daily praise, than we without daily bread; and the farther he extends his views, the more necessary are we to his support. Let him speak as contemptuously of us as he pleases, for that is frequently the manner of those who employ us most, and pay us best; yet will it fare with his ambition as with a lofty tree, which cannot shoot its branches into the clouds, unless its root work into the dirt, from which it rose, on which it stands, and by which it is nourished.'

After reading these passages, we can readily believe the tradition that he dictated his compositions to an amanuensis. His periods swell and amplify, as if the author was in the full fervour of declamation; and, so far as mere readers are concerned, his writings might be improved by a judicious retrenchment of their redundancies. The fulness and richness of St. John's printed language, however, leave no doubt that he amply fulfilled in his own person what he requires in. the genuine orator, when he lays down that 'eloquence must flow like a stream that is fed by an abundant spring, and not spout forth a little frothy water on some gaudy day, and remain dry the rest of the year.'

He was by no means a solitary instance, in the last century, of a very young man becoming the mouthpiece of a party, or taking the lead in the conduct of affairs, at his first entrance into public life. The Pitts, father and son, and Charles Fox, are remarkable examples of this description of precocity; and the phenomenon ceases to inspire wonder, if we reflect on the very different sort of training required for public life in

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.

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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