grace, wit, and pathos; before the masses, a whole man.
Emerson says, "There is no true eloquence, unless there is a man behind
the speech." Daniel O'Connell was listened to because all England and
Ireland knew that there was a man behind the speech,--one who could be
neither bought, bullied, nor cheated.

When I was in Naples, I asked Thomas Fowell Buxton, "Is Daniel
O'Connell an honest man?" "As honest a man as ever breathed," said he,
and then he told me the following story: "When, in 1830, O'Connell first
entered Parliament, the anti-slavery cause was so weak that it had only
Lushington and myself to speak for it, and we agreed that when he spoke
I should cheer him up, and when I spoke he should cheer me, and these
were the only cheers we ever got. O'Connell came with one Irish member
to support him. A large party of members (I think Buxton said
twenty-seven) whom we called the West India interest, the Bristol party,
the slave party, went to him, saying, 'O'Connell, at last you are in the
House, with one helper. If you never go down to Freemason's Hall with
Buxton and Brougham, here are twenty-seven votes for you on every Irish
question. If you work with those Abolitionists, count us always against
you.'

"It was a terrible temptation. How many a so-called statesman would have
yielded! O'Connell said, 'Gentlemen, God knows I speak for the saddest
people the sun sees; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if to help Ireland--even
Ireland--I forget the negro one single hour.' From that day," said
Buxton, "Lushington and I never went into the lobby that O'Connell did
not follow us."

And then, besides his irreproachable character he had what is half the
power of a popular orator, he had a majestic presence. A little
O'Connell would have been no O'Connell at all. In youth he had the brow
of a Jupiter and a stature of Apollo. Sydney Smith says of Lord John
Russell's five feet, when he went down to Yorkshire after the Reform
Bill had passed, the stalwart hunters of Yorkshire exclaimed, "What,
that little shrimp, he carry the Reform Bill!" "No, no!" said Smith, "he
was a large man, but the labors of the bill shrunk him."

I remember the story Russell Lowell tells of Webster; when a year or two
before his death, the Whig party thought of dissolution, Webster came
home from Washington and went down to Faneuil Hall to protest, and four
thousand of his fellow Whigs came out