refully prepared and committed any portion when special
effect was desired, merely to put down other things in the desired
order, leaving the wording of them to the moment."

The young man remembered this lesson, and acted upon it. He no longer
finds it best to learn any portions of his speeches by heart, but his
addresses show a remarkable thoroughness of preparation, else they could
not be so thickly sown as they are with pregnant facts, telling figures,
and apt illustrations. His pudding is too full of plums to be the work
of the moment. Such aptness of quotation as he displays is sometimes a
little too happy to be spontaneous; as when, in alluding to the
difference between men's professions out of office and their measures in
office, he quoted Thomas Moore:--

"As bees on flowers alighting cease to hum,
So, settling upon places, Whigs grow dumb."

So also, in referring to the aristocratic composition of the English
government, he quoted Mr. Lowell's "Biglow Papers":--

"It is something like fulfilling the prophecies
When the first families have all the best offices."

Again, when lamenting the obstacles put in the way of universal
education by the rivalries of sect, he produced a great effect in the
House of Commons by saying:--

"We are, after all, of one religion."

And then he quoted in illustration an impressive sentence from William
Penn, to the effect that just and good souls were everywhere of one
faith, and "when death has taken off the mask, they will know one
another, though the diverse liveries they wear here make them
strangers."

No man has less need to quote the brilliant utterances of others than
John Bright; for he possesses himself the power to speak in epigrams,
and to make sentences which remain long in the memory. Once in his life
he found himself in opposition to the workingmen of his district, and
during the excitement of an election he was greeted with hoots and
hisses. He made a remark on the platform which all public men making
head against opposition would do well to remember:--

"Although there are here many of the operative classes who consider me
to be their enemy, I would rather have their ill-will now, while
defending their interests, than have their ill-will hereafter because I
have betrayed them."

One of his homely similes uttered thirty years ago, to show the waste
and folly of the Crimean War, has become a familiar saying in Great
Britain.

"Some men