two days, or, as I have sometimes done, for three days, you
must remember that our days are days of only three hours each.'

'How long,' I asked, 'was your last speech?'

'About five hours,' he answered. 'Three hours the first day and two hours
the second.'

'That,' I said, 'is not beyond our remotest limit. Brougham indeed, on
the amendment of the law, spoke for six hours, during the greater part of
the time to an audience of three. The House was filled with fog, and
there is an H.B. which represents him gesticulating in the obscurity and
the solitude.'

'He,' said Lord Granville, 'put his speech on the Reform Bill at the
top.'

'The speech,' I said, 'at the end of which he knelt to implore the Peers
to pass the bill, and found it difficult to rise.'

[Footnote 1: Barthelemy de St-Hilaire is now Thiers' private secretary
and right hand.--ED.]

_Tuesday, April_ 14.--Z., Sumner, Lord Granville, Tocqueville, M.
Circourt, St.-Hilaire, and Corcelle breakfasted with us.

The conversation took the same turn as yesterday.

'May I venture,' said Lord Granville to Z., 'to ask whom of your
opponents you feared the most?'

'Beyond all comparison,' answered Z., 'Thiers.'

'Was not D.' I asked, 'very formidable?'

'Certainly,' said Z. 'But he had not the wit, or the _entrainement_ of
Thiers. His sentences were like his action. He had only one gesture,
raising and sinking his right arm, and every time that right arm fell, it
accompanied a sentence adding a link to a chain of argument, massive and
well tempered, without a particle of dross, which coiled round his
adversary like a boa constrictor.'

'And yet,' said M., 'he was always languid and embarrassed at starting;
it took him ten minutes to get _en train_.'

'That defect,' said Lord Granville, 'belonged to many of our good
speakers--to Charles Fox--to Lord Holland. Indeed Fox required the
excitement of serious business to become fluent. He never made a
tolerable after-dinner speech.'

'Among the peculiarities of D.,' said M., 'are his perfect tact and
discretion in the tribune, and his awkwardness in ordinary life. In
public and in private he is two different men.'

'It is impossible,' said Tocqueville, 'to deny that D. was great in a
deliberative body, but his real scene of action is the bar. He was only
_among_ the best speakers in the Constituent Assembly. He is _the_
greatest advocate at the bar.'

'Although,' said M----, 'at the bar, where he represen