le story with which Lord Lyttelton startled his
guests on the morning of 24th November 1779. In vain they tried to cheer
him, and to laugh away his fears. They could make no impression on the
despondency that had settled on him; they could not shake the conviction
that he was a doomed man. "You will see," was all the answer he would
vouchsafe, "I shall die at midnight on Saturday."

But in spite of this alarming experience and the gloomy forebodings to
which, in his shattered state of nerves, it gave birth, Lord Lyttelton
did not long allow it to interfere with the work he had in hand, the
preparation of a speech on the disturbed condition in Ireland which he
was to deliver in the House of Lords that very day--a speech which
should enhance his great and rapidly growing reputation as an orator. He
spent some hours absorbed in polishing and repolishing his sentences,
and in verifying his facts; and, when he rose in the House, he was as
full of confidence as of his subject.

Never, it was the common verdict, had his lordship spoken with more
eloquence and lucidity or with more powerful grasp of his subject and
his hearers.

"Cast your eyes for a moment," he declared, amid
impressive silence, "on the state of the Empire.
America, that vast Continent, with all its advantages to
us as a commercial and maritime people--lost--for ever
lost to us; the West Indies abandoned; Ireland ready to
part from us. Ireland, my lords, is armed; and what is
her language? 'Give us free trade and the free
Constitution of England as it originally was, such as we
hope it will remain, the best calculated of any in the
world for the preservation of freedom.'"

It was the speech of a far-seeing statesman; and although it proved but
the "voice of one crying in the wilderness," Lord Lyttelton felt that he
had done his duty and had crowned his growing political fame with the
laurels of the patriot and the orator.

On the following morning Fortescue met his cousin sauntering in St
James's Park, as Mr Makower tells us, "with the idleness of one who has
never known what occupation means."

"Is it because Hillsborough, the stupidest of your brother peers, paid
you such fine compliments on your speech?" he asked.

Lyttelton smiled faintly. "No, it was not of that I was thinking," he
answered. "Those are things of yesterday. Hillsborough was wrong; the
majority who voted with him were wrong; and I w