y supposed to be the mark of oratorical success, all the
evidence is that Burke generally failed. We have seen how his speech
against Hastings affected Miss Burney, and how the speech on the Nabob
of Arcot's debts was judged by Pitt not to be worth answering. Perhaps
the greatest that he ever made was that on conciliation with America;
the wisest in its temper, the most closely logical in its reasoning,
the amplest in appropriate topics, the most generous and conciliatory
in the substance of its appeals. Yet Erskine, who was in the House
when this was delivered, said that it drove everybody away, including
people who, when they came to read it, read it over and over again,
and could hardly think of anything else. As Moore says rather too
floridly, but with truth,--"In vain did Burke's genius put forth
its superb plumage, glittering all over with the hundred eyes of
fancy--the gait of the bird was heavy and awkward, and its voice
seemed rather to scare than attract." Burke's gestures were clumsy; he
had sonorous but harsh tones; he never lost a strong Irish accent;
and his utterance was often hurried and eager. Apart from these
disadvantages of accident which have been overcome by men infinitely
inferior to Burke, it is easy to perceive, from the matter and texture
of the speeches that have become English classics, that the very
qualities which are excellences in literature were drawbacks to the
spoken discourses. A listener in Westminster Hall or the House of
Commons, unlike the reader by his fireside in the next century, is
always thinking of arguments and facts that bear directly on the
special issue before him. What he wishes to hear is some particularity
of event or inference which will either help him to make up his mind,
or will justify him if his mind is already made up. Burke never
neglected these particularities, and he never went so wide as to
fall for an instant into vagueness, but he went wide enough into the
generalities that lent force and light to his view, to weary men who
cared for nothing, and could not be expected to care for anything, but
the business actually in hand and the most expeditious way through it.
The contentiousness is not close enough and rapid enough to hold the
interest of a practical assembly, which, though it was a hundred times
less busy than the House of Commons to-day, seems to have been eager
in the inverse proportion of what it had to do, to get that little
quickly done.

Then