e of a trained athlete rather
than the figure one would associate with a nobleman in the end of a
self-indulgent and ever-eating and over-drinking century. The features,
strong yet gentle, though far from regular, have considerable
distinction, and the flowing red beard makes the face stand out in any
assembly. Carefully but plainly dressed, erect, perfectly composed, and
courteous in every word and look and gesture, Lord Spencer made his plea
for justice to the nation where once his name was the symbol for hatred
and wrong.

[Sidenote: A man of deeds, not words.]

Lord Spencer is not an orator. Simple, unadorned, straightforward, he
speaks just as he feels; and this lent a singular fascination to a
speech which from other lips might have sounded thin and ineffectual,
for the speech was nothing less than a revelation into the depths of a
nature singularly rich in courage and experience. One cannot help
thinking of all that lay behind those plain and unadorned words in which
Lord Spencer told the story of his conversion from the policy of
coercion to that of self-government. Here was the man who had looked out
one summer evening on the spot where his close friend--his chief
subordinate--was hacked to death; this was the man who had brought to
conviction and then to the narrow square of the execution yard the
members of one of the most powerful and sanguinary of conspiracies; here
was the man who for years had passed through the streets of Dublin and
the towns of Ireland amid the rattle of cavalcade, as necessary for his
protection against popular hate as the troops that protect the person of
the Czar in the streets of Poland. Here was, indeed, a man not of words
but of deeds; one who spoke not mere phrases coined from the imaginings
of the brain, but one who had seen and heard and throbbed; had looked
unappalled into the depths and the abysses of human life, and the
dreadest political experiences; one who had visited the Purgatorio and
conversed with the lost or the tortured souls, and come back from the
pilgrimage with words of hope, faith, and charity. Altogether it was a
fine speech--worthy of the man, worthy of his career, worthy of the
great and historic occasion.

[Sidenote: Funereal Devonshire.]

I wish I could say as much of the speech of the Duke of Devonshire. It
may be that his miserable failure was due to the fact that he is as yet
unaccustomed to the House of Lords, and that the modesty which is
undoubt