pe of oratory can be. Above
all things, it is difficult to take the itinerant lecturer seriously,
with his smoking meal at home as a reward for his philanthropic efforts.
The whole thing produces on the mind the impression of a clap-trap
performance, with no heart or soul underneath all its ravings,
bellowings, and dervish-like contortions.

Mr. Russell has ceased to be a teetotal lecturer, and has become a stump
orator for the Unionist party, but the scent of the teetotal platform
hangs round him still. He yells, bellows, and twists himself about, puts
all his statements with ridiculous exaggeration--altogether, so overdoes
the part that it is only the wildest and emptiest Tory who is taken in
by him. What spoils the whole thing to my mind is that it is all so
evidently artificial--so palpably pumped up. Clapping his hand on his
breast, lifting his shaky fingers to Heaven, Mr. Russell is always in a
frenzied protestation of honesty, of rugged and unassailable virtue, of
bitter vaticination against the wickedness of the rest of mankind. No
man could be as honest as he professes to be, and live. The whole thing
would be exquisite acting if, underneath all this conscious
exaggeration, you did not see the mere political bravo. You turn
sometimes, and sicken as though you were at the country fair, and saw
the poor raucous-throated charlatan eating fire or swallowing swords to
the hideous accompaniments of the big drum and the deafening cymbal.

[Sidenote: Mr. Carson.]

No--Mr. T.W. Russell is the mere play-actor. If you want one of the real
actualities in the more sinister side of Irish life, look at and study
Mr. Carson. It is he who winds up the debate on the commission of Mr.
Justice Mathew--a debate made memorable by the ablest debating speech
Mr. Morley has made in the whole course of his Parliamentary career. I
see men talking to Mr. Carson that belong to an opposite side of
politics. I confess that I never see him pass without an internal
shudder. Just as the sight of an abbe gave M. Homais, in "Madame
Bovary," an unpleasant whiff of the winding-sheet, there is something in
the whole appearance of Mr. Carson that conveys to me the dank smell of
the prison, and the suffocating sense of the scaffold. Do you remember
that strange, terrible day in the "Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin," in
which Balzac describes Vautrin's passage through the ranks of the
gaol-birds and gaol officials among whom he had passed so much of