re in analytic humour. For one thing,
the speeches were rallying battle-cries, not sermons, and everybody knew
the great invisible antagonist with whom the orator before them was with
all his might contending. It was a gleaming array of the political facts
of a political indictment, not an aerial fabric of moral abstractions.
Nor, again, had the fashion in which Mr. Gladstone seized opinion and
feeling and personal allegiance in Scotland, anything in common with the
violent if splendid improvisations that made O'Connell the idol and the
master of passionate Ireland. One of the most telling speeches of them all
was the exposure of the government finance in the Edinburgh corn-exchange,
where for an hour and a half or more, he held to his figures of surplus
and deficit, of the yield of bushels to the acre in good seasons and bad,
of the burden of the income-tax, of the comparative burden per head of new
financial systems and old, with all the rigour of an expert accountant. He
enveloped the whole with a playful irony, such as a good-humoured master
uses to the work of clumsy apprentices, but of the paraphernalia of
rhetoric there is not a period nor a sentence nor a phrase. Fire is
suppressed. So far from being saturated with colour, the hue is almost
drab. Yet his audience were interested and delighted, and not for a moment
did he lose hold,--not even, as one observer puts it, "in the midst of his
most formidable statistics, nor at any point in the labyrinthine evolution
of his longest sentences."

Let the conclusion be good or let it be bad, all was in groundwork and in
essence strictly on the plane and in the tongue of statesmanship, and
conformable to Don Pedro's rule, "What need the bridge much broader than
the flood?"(359) It was Demosthenes, not Isocrates. It was the orator of
concrete detail, of inductive instances, of energetic and immediate
object; the orator confidently and by sure touch startling into
watchfulness the whole spirit of civil duty in a man; elastic and supple,
pressing fact and figure with a fervid insistence that was known from his
career and character to be neither forced nor feigned, but to be himself.
In a word, it was a man--a man impressing himself upon the kindled throngs
by the breadth of his survey of great affairs of life and nations, by the
depth of his vision, by the power of his stroke. Physical resources had
much to do with the effect; his overflowing vivacity, the fine voice and
flas