t was arrayed against him.

{ENTERS THE LEGISLATURE}

Mr. Wilmot took his seat as a member of the House of Assembly on January
25th, 1835. Young as he was, he had already made a great reputation as a
public speaker, and there was no man in the legislature or in the
province who could stand any comparison with him in point of eloquence.
Indeed, it is doubtful whether the British North American provinces have
ever produced a man who was Wilmot's superior in that style of oratory
which is so telling on the hustings or where great masses of men are to
be moved. The evidence of this fact does not rest on the testimony of
his countrymen alone, for he acquired a wider fame for eloquence than
they could give him. At the Portland Railway Convention of 1850, where
the ablest men of the Northern States were gathered, he easily eclipsed
them all by his brilliant and powerful oratory. The reporters are said
to have thrown down their pencils in despair, being unable to keep pace
with him as he aroused the enthusiasm of all who heard him by his
burning words. Unfortunately, there is no form of ability which is so
transient in its effects as this perfervid style of oratory. So much of
its potency depends on the action of the speaker, on the glance of his
eye and the modulation of his voice, that no report could do justice to
it, even if there had been reporters at that time capable of putting
down every word he uttered. The speeches of even Gladstone, when
reported word for word, read but indifferently when seen in cold type,
and no speech of Wilmot's was ever properly reported. He was incapable
of writing out a speech after he had delivered it, so that we must take
the united testimony of his contemporaries, whether friends or enemies,
that he was, upon his own ground, an unequalled speaker.

The House in which he now found himself was not one that was remarkable
for its eloquence. Unlike most of the legislatures of the present day,
the proportion of lawyers was very small, there being only five in a
House of thirty members, and of these five the only one who was an
orator was Wilmot. The other twenty-five members were mostly business
men and farmers, some of whom could express their views on public
questions clearly enough, but had no pretensions to eloquence. Yet it
was a good House, and one of its best features was that its members were
able to appreciate the worth of the new representative from the county
of York.

The aim of