ay was made memorable by a fine speech from Mr.
Stansfeld. Full of activity, with undimmed eye, with every mental
faculty keen and alert, with every lofty and generous aspiration as
fresh as in the days of hot and perilous youth, Mr. Stansfeld yet
appears something of a survival in the House of Commons. His appearance,
his style of speech, even the framework of his thought, seem to belong
to another--in some respects a finer and more passionate period than our
own. The long hair combed straight back--the strong aquiline nose--the
heavy-lined and sensitive mouth--the subdued tenderness and wrath of the
eyes--even the somewhat antique cut of the clothes--suggest the days
when the storm and stress of the youthful century were still in men's
souls, and were driving them to conspiracy, to prison, to scaffold, to
barricades, to bloody fields. There is also a deliberation in the
delivery--a sonorousness in the phraseology--that has something of a
bygone day. But all this adds to the impressiveness of the address. The
fervour is all there, the unalterable conviction, the lofty purpose.
There is reason for the warm note of welcome which comes from the Irish
benches; for this man--perhaps disappointed--perchance not too well
used--stands up to defend his principles with the same utter
forgetfulness of self which belongs only to the finest and the truest
natures.

[Sidenote: Commercial culture.]

Mr. Chamberlain has not a wide range of ideas, and his small stock has
not been increased by anything like extensive reading. The House was
relieved to find after his return to Westminster on the 10th of April
that he had just begun to read Tennyson. It is always easy to know when
Mr. Chamberlain is making the acquaintance of an author for the first
time. Strictly business-like in even his reading, he apparently first
thinks of reading a book when he has somewhere seen a quotation from it
which might be worked into a speech; the next and almost immediate
process is to transfer it to one of his speeches. This is one of the
many differences between him and the exhaustless brain and universal
reading of Mr. Gladstone. It was, therefore, not much of a surprise to
those who had watched Mr. Chamberlain for years, to see that he was
making a very bad and poor speech on the second reading of the Home
Rule Bill--a speech certainly far inferior to that which he had
delivered on the first reading. He had exhausted the poor soil; he had
really no m