flowery English, interlarded with
anecdotes and decorated with quotations; and both could declaim these
compositions with grace and vigour. But the effect was very droll. They
would work, say, all Tuesday and Wednesday at a point which had been
exhausted by discussion on Monday, and then on Thursday they would burst
into the debate just whenever they could catch the Speaker's eye, and
would discharge these cascades of prepared eloquence without the
slightest reference to time, fitness, or occasion.

My uncle, Lord Russell, who entered Parliament in 1813, always said that
the first Lord Plunket was, on the whole, the finest speaker he had ever
heard, because he combined a most cogent logic with a most moving
eloquence; and these gifts descended to Plunket's grandson, now Lord
Rathmore, and, in the days of which I am speaking, Mr. David Plunket,
Member for the University of Dublin. Voice, manner, diction, delivery,
were all alike delightful; and, though such finished oratory could
scarcely be unprepared, Mr. Plunket had a great deal too much of his
nation's tact to produce it except when he knew that the House was
anxious to receive it. In view of all that has happened since, it is
curious to remember that Mr. Arthur Balfour was, in those days, a
remarkably bad speaker. No one, I should think, was ever born with less
of the orator's faculty, or was under heavier obligations to the
Reporters' Gallery. He shambled and stumbled, and clung to the lapels of
his coat, and made immense pauses while he searched for the right word,
and eventually got hold of the wrong one. In conflict with Gladstone, he
seemed to exude the very essence of acrimonious partisanship, and yet he
never exactly scored. As Lord Beaconsfield said of Lord Salisbury, "his
invective lacked finish."

A precisely opposite description might befit Sir Robert Peel, the
strangely-contrasted son of the great Free Trader. Peel was naturally an
orator. He could make the most slashing onslaughts without the
appearance of ill-temper, and could convulse the House with laughter
while he himself remained to all appearance unconscious of the fun. His
voice, pronounced by Gladstone the most beautiful he ever heard in
Parliament, was low, rich, melodious, and flexible. His appearance was
striking and rather un-English, his gestures were various and animated,
and he enforced his points with beautifully shaped hands. If voice and
manner could make a public speaker great, Sir