so bad if Mr. Chamberlain had not intervened at the last moment. Opinion
is unanimous that up to the time he spoke the feeling in the House was,
though boisterous, rather good humoured. There was a conflict of
opinion, there were some shouts, there was that general din in the air
which always marks the inspiration of a momentous event, but there was
no ill-temper. In a few moments Mr. Chamberlain had, to a certain
extent, changed this; but even as to the period when he was speaking, I
feel bound to correct the general impression and to say that my own
opinion was that the general spirit was one of frolicksome enjoyment
rather than of the seriousness of real passion. Mr. Chamberlain himself,
to do him justice--though he had elaborated a series of the most
taunting observations, though sentence after sentence was intended to be
an assault and a barbed taunt--Mr. Chamberlain, I say, seemed himself to
regard the whole affair rather from a comic than a tragic point of view.
Under the bitterness of his language, the tone was not that of
seriousness--and, indeed, it is very hard for any man to be perfectly
serious when he knows that he is speaking for a certain number of
allotted minutes, and instead of addressing himself to the particular
question before the House, he has to make something in the shape of a
last dying speech and declaration. The speech, however, was admirable in
form, and still more admirable in delivery; the cold, clear voice
penetrated to every ear, and some of the sentences were uttered with
that deep, though carefully subdued swell which adds intense force by
its very reserve, to the rhetoric of passion.

[Sidenote: Joe's beautiful elocution.]

Indeed, if I were a professor of elocution, I should feel bound to say
that if a pupil required a lesson in the highest art of delivery, he
could do nothing better than listen to Mr. Chamberlain's delivery of
this bitter little speech of his; and, above all, that he could nowhere
and in nowise better learn the lesson of the extraordinary increase
there is in the force of a speech by careful self-suppression on the
part of the speaker. There were one or two marvellous examples of Mr.
Chamberlain's extraordinary readiness in taking a point. I think Mr.
Chamberlain an extremely shallow man. I believe his knowledge to be
slatternly, his judgment to be rash, his temper to be dictatorial and
uncertain, but as a debater he stands, in readiness, alertness, and
quickness