"One after one, the Lords of Time advance;
Here Stanley meets--how Stanley scorns!--the glance.
The brilliant chief, irregularly great,
Frank, haughty, rash, the Rupert of Debate;
Nor gout nor toil his freshness can destroy,
And time still leaves all Eton in the boy.
First in the class, and keenest in the ring,
He saps like Gladstone, and he fights like Spring!
Yet who not listens, with delighted smile,
To the pure Saxon of that silver style;
In the clear style a heart as clear is seen,
Prompt to the rash, revolting from the mean."

I turn now to Lord Derby's most eminent rival--Lord Russell. Writing in
1844, Lord Beaconsfield thus described him:--"He is not a natural
orator, and labours under physical deficiencies which even a Demosthenic
impulse could scarcely overcome. But he is experienced in debate, quick
in reply, fertile in resource, takes large views, and frequently
compensates for a dry and hesitating manner by the expression of those
noble truths that flash across the fancy and rise spontaneously to the
lip of men of poetic temperament when addressing popular assemblies."
Twenty years earlier Moore had described Lord John Russell's public
speaking in a peculiarly happy image:--

"An eloquence, not like those rills from a height
Which sparkle and foam and in vapour are o'er;
But a current that works out its way into light
Through the filtering recesses of thought and of lore."

Cobden, when they were opposed to one another in the earlier days of the
struggle for Free Trade, described him as "a cunning little fox," and
avowed that he dreaded his dexterity in parliamentary debate more than
that of any other opponent.

In 1834 Lord John made his memorable declaration in favour of a liberal
policy with reference to the Irish Church Establishment, and, in his own
words, "The speech made a great impression; the cheering was loud and
general; and Stanley expressed his sense of it in a well-known note to
Sir James Graham: 'Johnny has upset the coach.'" The phrase was
perpetuated by Lord Lytton, to whom I must go once again for a perfectly
apt description of the Whig leader, both in his defects of manner and in
his essential greatness:--

"Next cool, and all unconscious of reproach,
Comes the calm Johnny who "upset the coach"--
How formed to lead, if not too proud to please!
His fame would fire you, but his manners freeze;
Like or disl