it.

One of the most vigorous orators whom I have ever heard, in the House of
Lords or out of it, was Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, and
afterwards Archbishop of York. He had made his fame by his speech on the
Second Reading of the Irish Church Bill, and was always at his best when
defending the temporal interests of ecclesiastical institutions. No
clergyman ever smacked so little of the pulpit. His mind was essentially
legal--clear, practical, logical, cogent. No one on earth could make a
better case for a bad cause; no one could argue more closely, or
declaim more vigorously. When his blood was up, he must either speak or
burst; but his indignation, though it found vent in flashing sarcasms,
never betrayed him into irrelevancies or inexactitudes.

A fine speaker of a different type--and one better fitted for a
Churchman--was Archbishop Tait, whose dignity of speech and bearing,
clear judgment, and forcible utterance, made him the worthiest
representative of the Church in Parliament whom these latter days have
seen. To contrast Tait's stately calm with Benson's fluttering
obsequiousness[48] or Temple's hammering force, was to perceive the
manner that is, and the manners that are not, adapted to what Gladstone
called "the mixed sphere of Religion and the _Saeculum_."

By far the greatest orator whom the House of Lords has possessed in my
recollection was the late Duke of Argyll. I have heard that Lord
Beaconsfield, newly arrived in the House of Lords and hearing the Duke
for the first time, exclaimed, "And has this been going on all these
years, and I have never found it out?" It is true that the Duke's
reputation as an administrator, a writer, a naturalist, and an amateur
theologian, distracted public attention from his power as an orator; and
I have been told that he himself did not realize it. Yet orator indeed
he was, in the highest implication of the term. He spoke always under
the influence of fiery conviction, and the live coal from the altar
seemed to touch his lips. He was absolute master of every mood of
oratory--pathos, satire, contemptuous humour, ethical passion, noble
wrath; and his unstudied eloquence flowed like a river through the
successive moods, taking a colour from each, and gaining force as it
rolled towards its close.

On the 6th of September, 1893, I heard the Duke speaking on the Second
Reading of the Home Rule Bill. He was then an old man, and in broken
health; the speech attempted litt