Burke, his oratory would sometimes make one suspect that he eats potatoes and drinks whisky.' Lord Byron maintained that whatever Sheridan had done or chosen to do was always the best of its kind: 'to crown all, he delivered the very best oration (the famous Begum speech) ever conceived or heard in this country.' Burke, Fox, Pitt, Windham, Wilberforce, all spoke of it in the same unqualified terms of eulogy; and within twenty-four hours of the delivery Sheridan was offered a thousand pounds for the copyright if he would correct it for the press. That he refused, was probably fortunate for his fame. The most ambitious passages, which were carefully reported-the one on Filial Piety, and the one beginning, O faith! O justice!'-read like laboured efforts to gild and elevate commonplace. There are parts in which the author of The School for Scandal' stands confessed. example : For 'He remembered to have heard an honourable and learned gentleman (Mr. Dundas) remark, that there was something in the frame and constitution of the Company which extended the sordid principles of their origin over all their successive operations; connecting with their civil policy, and even with their boldest achievements, the meanness of a pedlar and the profligacy of pirates-alike in the political and military line, could be observed auctioneering ambassadors and trading generals;-and thus we saw a revolution brought about by affidavits; an army employed in executing an arrest; a town besieged on a note of hand; a prince dethroned for the balance of an account. Thus it was, they exhibited a government which united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre, and the little traffic of a merchant's countinghouse, wielding a truncheon with one hand, and picking a pocket with the other.' His parliamentary reputation could hardly have been maintained by his set speeches, although he devoted infinite pains to the preparation of them. Where he shone pre-eminent was in wit and humour. Pitt clearly got the worst of it when, by a contemptuous reference to the theatre, he provoked the comparison of the Angry Boy in the Alchymist;' and this was far from the only instance when Sheridan's light artillery opened with effect after the more powerful guns of his adversary had been ill-directed or missed fire. It will be found most convenient to divide the Palmerstonian epoch or cycle into three: taking Canning, Brougham, and Plunket for the first; the late Sir Robert Peel, the late Lord Derby, and Sheil for the second; Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Gladstone for the third. Of the first of these triumvirates, we can say little or nothing that has not been said already and very recently. Almost the only question touching them that has not been exhaustively treated, is this: will they bear a comparison with the illustrations of the Walpole and North cycles? Do they show any falling off in form or substance, in declamation or argument, in brilliancy or force? in Plunket was never surpassed as a debater. Equal cogency, he was superior in sustained closeness of reasoning to Fox. He often rose without effort to the loftiest heights of oratory. It is sufficient to refer to his Union speeches, to his speech on Catholic Emancipation in 1813, and his reply to Lord Lyndhurst in 1825.1 Brougham's greatest orations are models of magnificent invective, fierce irony, and fervid argumentation ; in which the passions and the reason are alternately or simultaneously addressed. They are streams of burning lava, scorching and destroying whatever comes across them in their course. To the many familiar examples, Lord Russell adds Brougham's speech on the conduct of the Continental Powers towards Spain, terming it 1 See the 'Essay on the Lord Chancellors of Ireland,' for specimens of Plunket's eloquence and wit. His fame might rest on his speeches in the English Parliament. Grattan's could not. Grattan properly belongs to that constellation of Irish orators that flourished during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. '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.' 6 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. 6 It was John Wilson in Blackwood,' we believe, who VOL. III. F 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- 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 |