ike, he does not care a jot;
He wants your vote, but your affections not.
Yet human hearts need sun as well as oats;
So cold a climate plays the deuce with votes.
But see our hero when the steam is on,
And languid Johnny glows to Glorious John;
When Hampden's thought, by Falkland's muses drest,
Lights the pale cheek and swells the generous breast;
When the pent heat expands the quickening soul,
And foremost in the race the wheels of genius roll."

As the general idea of these chapters has been a concatenation of Links
with the Past, I must say a word about Lord Palmerston, who was born in
1784, entered Parliament in 1807, and was still leading the House of
Commons when I first attended its debates. A man who, when turned
seventy, could speak from the "dusk of a summer evening to the dawn of a
summer morning" in defence of his foreign policy, and carry the
vindication of it by a majority of 46, was certainly no common performer
on the parliamentary stage; and yet Lord Palmerston had very slender
claims to the title of an orator. His style was not only devoid of
ornament and rhetorical device, but it was slipshod and untidy in the
last degree. He eked out his sentences with "hum" and "hah;" he cleared
his throat, and flourished his pocket-handkerchief, and sucked his
orange; he rounded his periods with "you know what I mean" and "all that
kind of thing," and seemed actually to revel in an anti-climax--"I think
the hon. member's proposal an outrageous violation of constitutional
propriety, a daring departure from traditional policy, and, in short, a
great mistake." It taxed all the skill of the reporters' gallery to trim
his speeches into decent form; and yet no one was listened to with
keener interest, no one was so much dreaded as an opponent, and no one
ever approached him in the art of putting a plausible face upon a
doubtful policy and making the worse appear the better cause.
Palmerston's parliamentary success perfectly illustrates the judgment of
Demosthenes, that "it is not the orator's language that matters, nor the
tone of his voice; but what matters is that he should have the same
predilections as the majority, and should entertain the same likes and
dislikes as his country." If those are the requisites of public
speaking, Palmerston was supreme.

The most conspicuous of all Links with the Past in the matter of
Parliamentary Oratory is obviously Mr. Gladstone. Like the younger Pitt,
he ha