No More Learning

Christie was himself a
scholar of the type to which he refers, and produced, besides other scholarly work,
his excellent monograph, Étienne Dolet, the Martyr of the Renaissance (1861). Cf. ,
ante, vol. XII, p. 333.
2 The lectures of William Smyth, who resided at Peterhouse for more than forty
years—the last of four modern history professors belonging to that college, of whom
two preceded Gray-form, together with those of Sir James Stephen, a link between
the earlier and the later days of history teaching in the English universities. At
Cambridge, the call for serious historical study had hardly begun to be raised in
6


## p. 110 (#140) ############################################

110 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [[
CH.
6
modern history chair at Cambridge, display high literary qualities,
with characteristic features of their own. To his legal training,
Stephen owed his introduction to administrative work, and he was
the maker of many constitutions, before, in his Lectures on the
History of France (which extended over the whole period from
the separation of Gaul from the Roman empire to Louis XIV), he
expounded at length the inner political history of that country.
The 'sociological' view of history was an abomination to him.
His early connection, strengthened by marriage, with the evan-
gelical school of religious thought, and, more especially, with
that 'Clapham sect,' to which one of the best known of his essays
offers a lasting tribute, lent force to his religious convictions
and warmth to his moral sympathies. He could not see more
than one side to the conflict between the rise of Christianity and
the decay of the Roman empire, and he perceived the retributive
hand of Providence in the troubles of the church of Rome
following on the persecution of the Albigenses. But, as time
went on, his wide reading, combined with the teachings of ex-
perience, broadened his sympathies, more especially as he did not
transfer his official dogmatism into his best literary work. "The
historian,' he says, “aims at one kind of praise, the lecturer in
history at another. ' In many of his essays, as well as in those of
his lectures which dealt with the Power of the Pen in France,' he
succeeded in blending with a vivid characterisation of real men
something of the imaginative power that projects itself into great
lives of the past.
There was, perhaps, more difference than resemblance in the
gifts which the two sons of Sir James Stephen respectively in-
herited from their father, or which were peculiar to themselves;
but, though Sir Leslie Stephen, in his Life of Sir James Fitzjames
Stephen, naturally dwelt on family features, the elder brother's
interests did not lie in the direction of biographical or other
history? Leslie, on the other hand, among his many claims to an
enduring literary fame, has none superior to those arising out of
Smyth's, or even in Stephen's, time. Yet, Smyth was not only a highly accomplished
man-a poet of some reputation and an excellent talker—but well-read and discerning,
a moderate whig, able to admire Burke without condemning Mackintosh. Thus, his
Lectures on the French Revolution (1840), considering the incompleteness of authentic
materials, may be described as one of the earliest adequate and dispassionate English
treatments of their subject.
1 His chief eminence was that of a jurist; as a Saturday reviewer, he dealt, mainly,
with subjects appertaining to moral, political, or social philosophy. His Story of
Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (1885) was an exceptional product
of his Indian life.
6


## p. 111 (#141) ############################################

11]
Collections of Lives
III
his work as a biographer, and as the first architect of the greatest
monument of national biography possessed by our literature.
Among collective works narrating in succession the lives of
occupants of particular offices, the precedence belongs to the
biographies of royal personages. Considerable popularity was
attained by Lives of the Queens of England (1840–8), by Agnes
and Elizabeth Strickland, published, by the wish of the latter and
elder sister, under the name of Agnes only. She followed it up by
Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses con-
nected with the Royal Succession of Great Britain and Lives of
the Bachelor Kings of England, from William Rufus to Edward VI,
to which series her sister Elizabeth was, again, a contributor.
Other series ensued, including both Tudor and Stewart princesses,
and the seven bishops. She was not a powerful writer, but inde-
fatigable in the accumulation of illustrative detail and conscientious
in the use of it. After the completion of Miss Strickland's chief
work, Mrs Mary Anne Everett Green, who, previously, under her
maiden name Wood, had published Letters of Royal Ladies of
Great Britain, brought out Lives of the Princesses of England
(1849—55), on which she had been long engaged. The very large
amount of valuable work done by her as one of the editors of the
Calendars of State Papers at the Record office left her little
leisure for literary activity of her own; but she produced, among
other books, Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria (1857), a volume
based entirely on original research, and collected much material
for a series of lives of our Hanoverian queens, to which was to
have been prefixed a life of the electress Sophia. It is to be
regretted that this plan remained unexecuted, for Mrs Everett
Green had sound historical judgment as well as extensive and
accurate knowledge of our national history, from the Elizabethan
age downwards.
A biographer of royalty, also, was Sir Theodore Martin, whose Life
of the Prince Consort (1875—80), undertaken by queen Victoria's
desire, is founded largely on original papers, in part of great value
for diplomatic history. Martin, who, while an active lawyer, was one
of the most accomplished as well as one of the most versatile men
of letters of his times—essayist, poetic translator and parodist-
also wrote, besides an early memoir of his comrade in satire,
William Edmonstoune Aytoun, a Life of Lord Lyndhurst (1883)
i The story of The Dictionary of National Biography is told in Memoir of George
Smith, by Sir Sidney Lee, prefixed to vol. 1 of the first supplement of the Dictionary
(1901). As to Sir Leslie Stephen, see, post, chap. III.


## p. 112 (#142) ############################################

112 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [CH.
>
a
and a memoir of his own adored wife, the great and beautiful
actress best known by her maiden name Helen Faucit (1900).
The Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury (1860—76) by
Walter Farquhar Hook, dean of Chichester, and previously vicar
of Leeds, form a characteristic memorial of the evening 'leisure'
of a long life devoted to the service of the church whose entire
history is surveyed in this long series of volumes ? .
An even
greater success than that obtained by this series, though partly
of the mixed kind which does not make for edification, attended
the publication of lord Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors
(1846—7) and Lives of the Lord Chief Justices of England
(1849—57). The Lives of Lord Lyndhurst and Lord Brougham,
which followed (1860), filled the cup of remonstrance to overflowing.
(The life of Lyndhurst had, as was just seen, to be, more or less
adequately, written over again by another hand); as for Brougham,
he had found time to add to his innumerable literary offspring his
own Life and Times, which was published posthumously (1871). )
Far more attractive, though their humour is by no means devoid
of occasional causticity, are the pen-and-ink portraits of the
Scottish bench and bar in the first quarter of the century
published in Memorials of His Time (1856), by lord Cockburn,
biographer of lord Jeffrey (1852).
The most important English biography produced in the mid-
Victorian age was David Masson's Life of Milton, narrated in
connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History
of his Time (1859–80). The full title of the book must be given
in order to indicate its range ; since, when the author had, at last,
brought the work to a conclusion, he was warranted in expressing
his satisfaction in having been able to persevere to the very end
in the original plan, omitting nothing, slurring nothing, that the plan
required. ' In a word, this classical book is a history of as momentous
a period of twoscore years as is to be found in the national life of
England-grouped, on the principle enunciated by Carlyle,round the
personal life and labours of one of its greatest men and one of the
greatest of English writers. Everything Milton wrote is here taken
into account: of every important poem or prose-work from his hand
a complete history and a critical analysis are supplied ; and he is
consistently viewed in connection with his times, with the move-
ments which shaped their course, and with the men from whom
those movements sprang, in state and in church, in peace and in
war, in learning and in literature. Whether it be in the fascinating
i Cf. , ante, vol. XII, p. 274.


## p. 113 (#143) ############################################

11]
Masson's Life of Milton.
Church
113
picture of Milton in his youth, pure as the Castalian fount from
which his soul drank inspiration, and rich with ten talents and the
resolve to multiply by cultivating them--or in the complete
review of the prose-works which Pattison and others deplored,
but which Masson preferred to explain—or in the survey of
the last seven years, and of Milton's surroundings in life and
literature, and his solitude in the presence of Paradise Lost—this
biography nowhere loses sight of its subject or contracts it within
narrower limits than are necessary in relating the life of a great
man who, while his name belongs to all times, was himself part of
his own. Though the magnitude of the scheme necessitates frequent
surveys or retrospects, which sometimes look like digressions, but
are not really such, the general arrangement is clear; here and
there, perhaps, the scaffolding is still visible. Masson's style,
rather conspicuously, lacked ease and grace, without possessing
that irresistible note of individuality—the individuality of genius
-which belonged to the style of his friend Carlyle. But, in
candour and sincerity, at all events, the biographer of Milton
was equal to the editor of Cromwell's letters, and he surpassed
the greater writer in assiduity of research and in the simplicity of
his attitude towards the facts of history,
Of the great masters of continental literatures, Dante missed
an English biographer of the highest qualities in Richard William
Church, though the essays on him by this delightful writer and
admirable critic are among the most notable of his literary pro-
ductions, which include short lives of St Anselm and of Spenser? .
Goethe, to whom, from Henry Crabb Robinson, the author of the
Diary, onwards, a growing body of English readers had, largely under
the influence of Carlyle, come to look up with veneration, found in
George Henry Lewes the most widely popular of all his biographers.
Lewes had made a name for himself by his Biographical History
of Philosophy (1845–6), as well as by less ambitious work; in his
Life of Goethe (1855) he produced a work of great literary skill ;
yet it unmistakably lacks the deeper note, which he may have been
well-judged in not attempting to force.
John Forster, by his Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (1854),
| For Masson's other biographical works, see bibliography. A biographical historian
of considerable merit, who also produced a useful edition of Dryden, was William
Dougal Christie, whose Life of the First Earl of Shaftesbury (1871) deserves com.
mendation as a book of value as well as of capacity, though the ‘rehabilitation of
Achitophel may not be regarded as complete.
? As to dean Church, cf. , ante, vol. XII, pp. 271—2. The distinguished Italian
scholar, Arthur James Butler, published, in 1885, a short Dante, his Times and his Work.
5
E. L XIV.
CH. II.
8


## p. 114 (#144) ############################################

114 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [CH. .
his Life of Walter Savage Landor (1869) and his Life of Charles
Dickens(1872–4), together with some admirable biographical essays
and the first volume of a Life of Swift, took a place in the first rank
of English biographers, and was, for a long time, the friend and
oracle of many eminent English men of letters of his day. In
his earlier years, he had cherished a more concentrated kind of
ambition. So far back as 1830, he had thought of writing the life
of Cromwell; and, although this was not to become the chief work
of his maturity, it was included in his valuable series entitled
Lives of the Statesmen of the Commonwealth (1836–9). The
life of Sir John Eliot was afterwards (1864) expanded by him
into a larger biography, and he had previously (1860) published a
brace of monographs (one of them enlarged from an earlier essay)
based on a careful examination of parliamentary material and
dealing with two critical episodes of the struggle between Charles I
and the Long parliament. Forster had entered deeply into the
spirit of the great struggle of the Stewart age, as is shown by the
essay On English Freedom under Plantagenets and Tudors pre-
fixed to the second of these works. Altogether, whatever may
have been his, in the circumstances very excusable, foibles, his
literary life was one of generous purpose, and of rare energy.
Among the numerous memoir-writers proper of the century,
there can be no doubt that, notwithstanding the habit of self-
depreciation, at times truly pathetic, to which his fastidious and
complicated nature was secretly prone, Charles Cavendish Fulke
Greville bears away the palm. The three series of The Greville
Memoirs (1874–87), which comment on the course of English
politics and society from the accession of George IV to the year
1860, in some measure differ from one another; in the earlier
volumes, the writer adheres to the principle of leaving time to
soften, and even to arrest, his judgments; in the second, and, no
doubt, in the third, series occasional suppression was, in con-
sequence of the relative nearness of events, found necessary by
the editor, Henry Reeve; while, on the other hand, the years
brought with them a gentler tone, together with an occasional
weariness of the great world. For the rest, Charles Greville
was always ready to play the part of mediator as well as that of
confidant; and his essential qualities as a memoir-writer re-
mained to him throughout. He was gifted with an insight into
character hardly surpassed by any of the great predecessors whom
he could never quite keep out of view. His style, though, as it were,
instinctively polished, was free from all desire for epigrammatic


## p. 115 (#145) ############################################

11]
Croker and Creevey
I15
effect; he never says either too much or too little. Neither
personal goodwill nor personal dislike hindered him from perceiving
the failings of Wellington or ignoring the merits of Peel; and the
vagaries of Brougham diverted him too much to allow of his
even here lapsing into caricature. The set characters which, on
the occasion of their deaths, he drew of the former two, and of
personages so diverse as Melbourne, Althorp and Harrowby,
Talleyrand and Macaulay, lord George Bentinck and Charles
Butler, lady Harrowby and Mme de Lieven, Luttrell, Alvanley and
D'Orsay, are all, more or less, masterly, and this list is by no means
exhaustive. When he occasionally tried his hand at a political
pamphlet or letter, neither his force nor his self-restraint deserted
him, and his anonymous book The Policy of England to Ireland
(1845), in which he advocated a policy of concurrent religious
endowments in Ireland, was a rare instance of political foresight
as well as of historical judgment.
The Croker Papers, not published till 1884, when nearly a
generation had passed after John Wilson Croker's death (1857),
and more than half a century since his retirement from active
public life (1832) throw a great deal of light upon the bitter
party conflicts of the twenty-two years during which he held the
secretaryship to the admiralty. In this office, his first important
task was to defend the Walcheren expedition ; but attack rather
than defence was his métier. He was of the inner councils of
.
his party on most of the great political questions of these years,
and among the unconvinced opponents both of parliamentary
reform and the repeal of the corn-laws. But his chief services to
the conservatives (he was the inventor of this name, scouted by
Disraeli, who had no love to spare for him) were rendered in the
pages of The Quarterly Review. The Croker Papers, which are
held together by a very thin biographical thread, derive their
chief interest from the letters comprised in them from the duke of
Wellington, lord George Bentinck and others, and from Croker's
occasional journal addressed to his patron, the marquis of
Hertford.
The Creevey Papers, published in 1903, about seventy years
after the death of the writer or recipient of the letters of which,
together with fragments of diaries, they mainly consist, have no
pretension to rank in historical significance by the side of The
Croker Papers, or in literary value by that of The Greville
Memoirs. Thomas Creevey, though born in Liverpool, seems to
have regarded Ireland as his native country, but was an absentee
8-2


## p. 116 (#146) ############################################

116 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [CH.
till he had turned sixty. His position in the political and social
world was really due to himself, and to a combination of fidelity
and adaptability which made him, at one time, a member of the
extreme radical faction, and, at another, commended him to the
goodwill of the sovereign whom he had previously mentioned as
'perfidious Billy. ' He had a caustic style, not untouched with
the grossness fashionable in the days of the regency, and his use
of nicknames is appalling in its irreverence. His notices of
Brougham ('Wickedshifts') are even more vivid than Greville's ;
but he rarely rises to a higher tone, though his account of
lord Grey (to whom he loyally adhered) in his latter days does
honour to both. Creevey, at one time, contemplated writing a
history of his times, and, in 1826, published, as a pamphlet, a series
of letters on reform addressed to lord John Russell (whom he
could not abide).
A novel form of political memoir—though it had, of course,
been previously used for other ends—was that of Conversations
with M. Thiers, M. Guizot and other distinguished persons
during the Second Empire, recorded by the wellknown economist
Nassau William Senior and posthumously published in two series,
covering together the years 1852 to 1863. Senior's interlocutors
were largely, but not altogether, political opponents of the empire,
and they include many literary celebrities; so that the Conversa-
tions faithfully mirror the thoughts of the intellectual flower of
contemporary France. These volumes had been preceded by
Journals kept in France and Italy, and by Correspondence and
Conversations of A. de Tocqueville, who pronounced Senior's the
most enlightened of English minds. The rather earlier Journals,
Conversations and Essays relating to Ireland (1868) comprise,
with reprinted earlier papers on a subject always full of interest to
the author, journals of visits to Ireland in 1852, 1858 and 1862, and
conversations with people of all sorts whom he met on his travels,
up to his former tutor and lifelong friend archbishop Whately.
This rapid and unavoidably incomplete review of the progress
of English historical literature in the nineteenth century could not
be more fitly concluded than by a reference to the eminent
teacher and scholar, the very type of modern historical learning in
its maturest development, with whose literary ideas and designs
the present work may claim a kind of collateral kinship. To
speak of lord Acton as a teacher might seem to attach an undue
significance to the exertions of six years out of a full life, great as


## p. 117 (#147) ############################################

11]
Lord Acton
117
those exertions were, and marked by a touching desire to be,
within academic limits, all things to all men. ' But it is not to his
professorial work that the tribute suggested should be limited.
His inaugural lecture (though he had not devoted several years to
the preparation of it, as Gray did to that of a discourse he
never delivered), besides being, in elevation of tone, as noble an
utterance as has, perbaps, ever been made on a similar occasion,
indicates, partly with playful irony, partly with high moral dignity,
the purposes and qualities needing to be combined in the study of
history at the stage of progress now reached. Acton's own
historical learning has often been represented as barren ; and it
is true that, notwithstanding his extraordinary diligence in the
daily increase of his store, its accumulation resulted in the pro-
duction of no great historical work. The plan of a history of
liberty which he had formed early in life was never carried out by
him, and there remain only the hints given in two popular lectures
delivered by him at Bridgnorth, so early as 1877, to show his
conception of the theme.
By liberty he meant the assurance that every man should be protected
in doing what he believed to be his duty against the influence of authority
and majorities, custom and opinion 1.
The problem of his personal life was how to reconcile this principle
with submission to the authority of the church of which, through-
out life, he was a devout member. The influence of Döllinger
had long dominated his mind, and it reflects itself even in his
literary manner. But, as a writer, he held the principle of liberty,
as above defined, sacred in great things and in small, and in
the affairs of both church and state. The edict of Nantes, he
told his Cambridge class, 'forms an epoch in the progress of
toleration, that is, in the history of liberty, which is the marrow of
all modern history? ' The struggle against absolute monarchy in
England ‘is the point where the history of nations turned into its
modern bed. It is the point also where the Englishman became
the leader of the world. '
Undoubtedly, the task of Acton's life, as he had set it to him-
self, fell short of accomplishment because of the actual endlessness
of the method, which, for a long time only half consciously, he had
pursued in making ready for it. "Eotiv 0áraooa—but to no mortal
is it given to exhaust that sea, though his knowledge may cover,
besides a wide range of theology, the whole field of history, and
1 Cf. Gooch, G. P. , English History and Historians (1913), p. 384.
· Lectures on Modern History (1906), p. 171.
3 Ibid. p. 205.
1


## p. 118 (#148) ############################################

118 Biographers and Memoir-Writers [ch. .
а
include an intimate acquaintance with the by-paths and hidden lanes
that lead to it, and though he may possess, and turn over with daily
and nightly hand, four libraries owned by him at the same time in
four distinct counties or countries. Yet it would be a mistake to
suppose that Acton found difficulty in making good literary use of
the knowledge he was thus incessantly acquiring, and that, while
one of the fullest of historical writers and critics, he had not, at
the same time, a ready pen, or one possessed of a humour which
only a feeling of reverence prevented from running rapidly into
sarcasm. Many a distinguished author has taught himself the calm
.
dignity of manner which came naturally to Acton, both in writing
and in personal intercourse ; his foible was rather to let his
text wear the aspect of notes (at times the more enjoyable the
more carefully they are studied), or, at least, of apophthegms
following one another so closely as to produce the effect of over-
loading
Acton's literary career began (a little before his parliamentary)
in 1859, with his nominal editorship of The Rambler, in succession
to Newman, the main editorial work being still carried on by
Richard Simpson, the biographer of Edmund Campion. Acton's
contributions to this journal, which began with an article ‘Mill
On Liberty,' were by no means confined to the discussion of
topics connected with the growth of liberal catholicism ; and
the same was the case with his numerous articles and reviews
(under the heading contemporary literature') in The Home
and Foreign Review, which, in 1862, took the place of the
departed Rambler? Three years later, The Chronicle made its
appearance, for which Acton wrote many articles of political and
historical interest, ending with a notable paper on the massacre
of St Bartholomew, besides carrying on a succession of notes on
the political situation in the papal and other Italian states, and a
continuous comment in the shape of reviews, on contemporary
literature. ' When, to these, are added his contributions to The
North British and The Quarterly Review, as well as to The
English Historical Review", together with occasional lectures
and addresses, it will be seen that Letters of Quirinus and the
subsequent Open Letter to a German Bishop on the Vatican
Council (1870), and his letters to The Times on the Vatican
1 See lord Bryce's account in Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903), p. 382.
2 Acton wrote its final word, Conflicts with Rome. '
3 The first number contained a characteristically comprehensive article by Acton
entitled “German Schools of History,' followed in a later number by Döllinger's
Historical Work. '


## p. 119 (#149) ############################################

11] Acton's Historical Principles 119
decrees-or, rather, on Gladstone's celebrated letter about them
(1874), form only a part of a prolonged many-sided literary activity.
After his removal to Cambridge, his lectures (of which two series
have been published since his death) proved the firmness of his
grasp not less than the wellknown width of his learning, and
reawakened the expectation of further historical work of an
enduring character from his hands.
It had been hoped, by Acton himself, and by many who would
have taken pride in working under his leadership, that The
Cambridge Modern History would, besides embodying some of
his historical ideas, offer an opportunity to its projector of laying
down in its opening chapter his conception of the legacy of the
middle ages, and that his editorship and successive contributions
would inspire the progress of the work as a whole. Neither hope
was destined to be fulfilled. But his elucidation of its plan remains
to demonstrate what, to a great scholar, whose opportunities had
surpassed those of any previous or contemporary historian, seemed
the range of the sphere in which modern history moved and had
its being, and in what spirit the materials now open to historical
criticism should, in his judgment, be transfused into historical
narrative. Across the century, the spirit of the greatest of modern
writers on ancient history-Niebuhr-seems in contact with the
spirit of him who had most closely scanned the course of modern
history ; and, together, they seem to vindicate the right and duty
of the advance made in historical studies and literature during
the century's course in England and elsewhere. The historians
of former ages, lord Acton said, in the incomparable inaugural
lecture already cited, “unapproachable for us in knowledge and
in talent, cannot be our limit,' because 'we have the power to
be more rigidly impersonal, disinterested and just than they. '
C. POLITICAL ORATORS AND WRITERS OF PAMPHLETS
The great age of English political oratory might seem to have
passed away with the fatal year (1806) which removed both Pitt
and Fox from the scene of their mighty conflicts; a greater orator
than either-Burke—had died nearly a decade earlier. When, in
1802, James Mill arrived in London, he at first thought the
eloquence of the house of commons inferior to that of the
general assembly (though nearly a generation was to elapse before
the chair of that assembly was filled by Chalmers, the most brilliant
of all luminaries of the Scottish pulpit). But Mill listened with


## p. 120 (#150) ############################################

I 20
[CH.
Political Orators
admiration to Fox and Sheridan, as well as to some other well-
known parliamentary speakers of the time.
One of these was William Wilberforce, then in the midst of his
immortal efforts for the abolition of the slave trade, accomplished
in 1807. The all but unique position which, after this, he held in
public estimation was by no means due only to his self-devotion
to a cause appealing to the deepest instincts of humanity, and to
his detachment from all party motives of action, in 'any under-
taking which had the welfare of mankind for its object? ' It, also,
owed much to the charm of his personality, the modest dignity of
his bearing and the unaffected ease and simple grace of his delivery.
Among other parliamentary figures prominent in the early years
of the century was William Windham, whose birth and breeding as
a country gentleman of ancient descent had implanted in him,
together with an unextinguishable interest in the peasantry, a
spirit of unflinching patriotism and of independence which refused
to bend before any pressure of court or party. A school-fellow of
Fox, and a follower of Burke, he had imbibed a love of literature
which induced Johnson to describe him as, in that region, inter
stellas Luna minores. His oratory, however, found its proper
sphere in the house of commons, and it was when he led the
Grenville party in opposition that his ability as a debater was
most conspicuous. His speeches, of which a considerable col-
lection remains, are full of apt, rather than striking, Latin quo-
tations, besides occasional native sallies. In a different key from
his attacks upon the peace of Amiens, and his stern comments on
the seizure of the Danish fleet, is his long and temperate speech
on the scandal which drove the duke of York from office. No
politician was ever more free from self-interest, or orator from rant.
‘Nothing,' he said, 'is more agreeable than to praise the Athenians
among the Athenians; but I rather consider it the duty of public
men to speak wholesome truths. '
Samuel Whitbread had been educated with the same care as
Windham and, by his marriage with the sister of his school-
fellow, afterwards earl Grey, was brought near to the innermost
whig circle, though his wealth was derived from the great
trading concern in which he was a partner. Long a devoted
follower of Fox, he was fearless in the denunciation of all kinds of
abuses; during the last six years of his life, he is said to have
been the most frequent speaker in the house of commons, and
i See the admirable essay on Wilberforce in Sir James Stephen's Essays in
Ecclesiastical Biography.


## p. 121 (#151) ############################################

II]
Erskine. Tierney
I 2 I
was the soul of the agitation in favour of the princess of Wales. His
vehemence of manner was a constant source of derision to satirists
with pen or picture, who always remembered the brewery; but,
though his impetuosity reflected his enthusiasm for what he held
right, he could, as both Sheridan and Burdett found, be prudent
on occasion.
Thomas, afterwards lord, Erskine seems never to have quite
caught the tone of the house of commons, though a consistent
member of the whig party, whose principles he, also, upheld with
his pen? But his fame rests on his forensic oratory, which entitled
him to choose for the motto of his peerage the words 'trial by
jury. He was engaged in a series of cases bearing on the liberty
of the press and the charge of constructive treason; and defended
in turn lord George Gordon, Thomas Paine, the publisher Stock-
dale, who had incurred the wrath of the house of commons, and
the radical founder of the London Corresponding society, Thomas
Hardy, whom he brought off amidst the wildest popular enthusiasm.
That his triumphs, described by earl Russell as those of the
sword and buckler' which 'protected justice and freedom,' were
free from meretricious glitter seems to be borne out by those of
his speeches that have been preserved out of an enormous mass
of oratory, if allowance be made for the egoism which seems
inseparable from the Ciceronian manner and which was certainly
not alien to Erskine's nature.
George Tierney, on the other hand, was a parliamentary poli-
tician proper, whose course of public action was determined by
personal interest as well as by political opinions. Though of Irish
descent, he was educated at Eton and Cambridge (Peterhouse);
and though, from 1797 onwards, a declared opponent of Pitt (with
whom he fought a blank duel in the following year), he was not a
favourite of Fox, and, indeed, for a time, carried on the struggle
against Pitt on his own account, as nobody's friend, unless it was
as the friend of humanity. His later career was equally varied,
though he attained to a leading, rather than a commanding,
position. His ability as a debater made him a most formidable,
as he was a most vigilant and tenacious, adversary and he may be
regarded as the last of the great parliamentarians of the revo-
lutionary period. His speeches seem to have been often colloquial
in manner, but never deficient in point, and to have excelled in
the art of restating an adversary's case so as to turn it inside out.
Unlike lord Castlereagh, the extraordinary faultiness of whose
1 See his Defence of the Whigs in vol. xv of The Pamphleteer (1820).


## p. 122 (#152) ############################################

I 22
[CH.
Political Orators
style, in both speech and writing, seems to reflect shortcomings
which have been allowed to weigh too heavily against such merits
as should be conceded to his foreign policy, George Canning,
whose star shone forth in full splendour as that of Castlereagh
sank below the horizon, had long been famed for the force of his
political oratory as well as for the irresistible wit of his political
writing. He gained a place among the foremost orators of the
day by his great speech in December 1798 against the resumption
of negotiations with France; among the tributes paid to the mighty
spirit of Pitt after his death in 1806, Canning's soared into the
loftiest sphere of eulogy. In 1808, he vindicated the seizure of
the Danish fleet-for which, as foreign secretary, he was primarily
responsible—in a speech of extraordinary power. But his great
popularity began with his addresses to the constituency of
Liverpool; and it was, in the first instance, the fire of his oratory
which prepared the triumph of his statesmanship.
After he
had begun to rise to the height of his parliamentary position,
and had delivered the great speech (28 April 1825) upholding the
principle of pacific non-intervention in the case of Spain, he
returned to the subject in a memorable address at Plymouth
which strikes a note of far-sighted grandeur such as no other
political orator has reached in England since the days of Burke.
When the recognition of the Spanish American colonies was an
accomplished fact, Canning, in the famous defence of his policy,
12 December 1826, spoke of himself as having called in the new
world to redress the balance of the old. When he became prime
minister of Great Britain, without even then commanding the
firm support of either king or parliament, his strength still lay
in the popularity which, in a free community-be it Athens or
England-always sustains the statesman who has mounted to the
foremost place among its leaders; and this Periclean supremacy
was the direct offspring of his oratory as well as of his states-
manship. The duke of Wellington—at least a candid critic-
pronounced Canning the finest speaker he had ever heard; and
this admiration extended to his state papers. Although, in his
published speeches, it is not often, except in the greatest of them,
that we can catch a notion of his completeness in matter united
1 A characteristic example of Canning at his best will be found in the long speech
On unlawful Societies in Ireland' in vol. v of the 6 vol. edition of his Speeches (1828).
The grand personal note (in regard to himself as part cause of the Peninsular war) is
not wanting here, nor are humorous quotations, ranging from Dr Johnson to Mrs
Malaprop.


## p. 123 (#153) ############################################

11] Canning. Brougham 123
to perfection in manner-of the 'rich, gay, aspiring eloquence'
ascribed to him by lord Morley—there is a family likeness in
them all. Imaginative power and wit, often inimitably apt, are
sustained by a scholarship which abhors an unpolished corner in
the structure; and, through all, there is visible a large-mindedness
beyond the common range of public oratory, and a large-heartedness
inviting that kind of popularity which Canning was not ashamed
to allow he loved. Of vagueness or of violence, there is nothing
in his speeches; and, when defending himself against misrepre-
sentation, he could grandly say: 'If you have not heard me in
vain, it is well; if you have, I have troubled you too long, but
it has been for the last time. '
The other great orator of Canning's later years, and beyond,
was Henry lord Brougham, whose oratorical powers, exercised, in
one way or another, during a period of some years, are, together
with his other gifts, to be described only by the word prodigious.
His resources were infinite, and the aptness of his use of them
unrivalled; but his forte—we should rather say his fortissimo
-must have lain in conversation, in which his exuberance of life
and spirit were altogether incomparable. His speeches, on the
other hand, as Greville, whose pages sparkle with Broughamiana,
happily puts it, were too long by reason of the perpetual bubbling-up
of new ideas. And there was (can it be denied ? ) something else
which interfered with his full success as an orator, as, of course
in a profounder sense, it did with the completeness of his political
career. He was, in public life, trusted by neither friend nor foe;
and, with all his brilliancy and all his force, he conveyed an
undefinable impression that he had no strong opinions on any
subject that he took up for attack or defence. Yet, when all
deductions have been made, the power and the versatility of his
oratory, due, in no small measure, to the care which he bestowed
upon his efforts, remain one of the wonders in the history of genius.
The scornful fire of his invective burnt itself into the hearts and
souls of its victims, and he was not less himself in long and
elaborate discourses, on subjects outside the ordinary range of
political controversy. His eloquence associated itself with his
labours as a law reformer, with his services to education and the
advance of science and with a vast miscellaneous literary produc-
tivity; but its fame outstripped that of all his other achievements,
and will make him remembered when much that he did and all
that he wrote will have fallen into oblivion.
One of the few speakers, whether on legal or on other themes,


## p. 124 (#154) ############################################

124
[CH.
Political Orators
whom Brougham was unable to crush was John Singleton Copley,
lord Lyndhurst, who, according to Greville, was master of the one
thing, which, in the end, the house of lords preferred to every-
thing else, and which Brougham could never compass-conciseness.
Lyndhurst, whose career and views present certain points of
resemblance to those of his friend Disraeli, made his way to
eminence by an unusual union of qualifications, which included an
oratory of rare polish and point. It showed itself to particular
advantage in those annual reviews which adorned the close, and
pointed the failure, of many a parliamentary session, and which,
though Melbourne called them Lyndhurst's exercitationes, were
certainly not academical in the sense of innocuousness. On the
udicial bench, he had excelled in summing up; and a famous
judgment of his', though afterwards reversed on an appeal which
he resisted in a second address of extraordinary ability, is
described, by one who was no kindly chronicler (lord Campbell),
as 'by all accounts the most wonderful ever heard in Westminster
Hall. '
Among later luminaries of the bar and bench who played a
prominent part in English political life, it is impossible to pass by
Sir Richard Bethell, afterwards lord Westbury, who combined with
extraordinary acumen and lucidity of statement a gift of sarcastic
innuendo which voice and manner rendered absolutely intolerable.
Sir Roundell Palmer, afterwards first earl of Selborne, a refined
scholar and devout churchman, who, as an equity pleader, was
inferior neither to Westbury nor to Hugh M Calmont, afterwards
first earl, Cairns, became one of the greatest judicature reformers
of the age. Like Selborne, Cairns, though of an austere nature,
was a most effective speaker in parliament (as in his defence of
Ellenborough) and might have led his party had he chosen. Sir
Alexander, afterwards lord, Cockburn, in the greatest crisis of lord
Palmerston's career, proved his most valuable ally, and rendered
other political services at the close of a brilliant legal career.
In the great reform movement, with whose triumph a new era
in English political life began, the foremost figure is that of Charles
second earl Grey, to whose courage and sincerity the chief credit of
the passing of the bill is, above all, due. Since, in 1786, he had
(though matters of finance were never much to his taste) in an
admired maiden speech attacked Pitt's commercial treaties, he
never faltered, either in the days of the eclipse of the whig party,
or in those of catholic emancipation (in which he delivered a speech
1 In the case of Small v. Attwood.


## p. 125 (#155) ############################################

11] Orators of the Reform Bill Period 125
which Stanley (Derby) said he would rather have made than
four of Brougham's) and of reform. It was thought regrettable
that lord Grey allowed the fiery nature of John George Lambton,
first earl of Durham, to domineer over him; but this was, chiefly, a
matter of temper. Durham's own career was brief and stormy? ;
the celebrated report on Canadian affairs by which he is most
generally remembered is said to have been mainly written by
his secretary Charles Buller, a young liberal of great personal
popularity, a lively orator and an acute reasoner in both speech
and pamphlet.
In the debates on the Reform bill, Macaulay's renown as an
orator was first established; although, perhaps, he never quite
fulfilled the exorbitant expectations formed of him at the time
of his first entrance into the parliamentary arena. It was but
natural that what was most admirable in his speeches should
be their literary qualities; they were usually of the nature of
harangues or set orations, carrying away in their rush the argu-
ments of his adversaries. But they were not designed as replies
and, thus, lack some of the most stimulating qualities of parlia-
mentary oratory. Among his later speeches, those on the question
of copyright, to which he could contribute a most extraordinary
wealth of illustration, are notable as having not only influenced
but actually determined legislation.
Outside parliament, the Reform bill campaign was carried on
in innumerable speeches, among which those of Henry ('Orator')
Hunt should, perhaps, not be passed by. When, after the great
bill had passed, he entered parliament, he soon sank into a non-
entity, and was said by Cobbett to be really as inoffensive as
Pistol or Bardolph. ' Hunt and Cobbett died in the same year
(1835); but no comparison is possible between their powers.
To oratorical distinction, neither John Charles, viscount Althorp
(afterwards earl Spencer), lord Grey's lieutenant in the house of
commons, where he enjoyed a unique personal regard, nor his
successor in the leadership of the whig party and as prime-minister,
William Lamb, viscount Melbourne, had any wish to attain. The
latter, indeed, though he went so far as to declare that 'the worst
thing about the Spaniards was their speaking so well,' could him-
self do this as most other things well when obliged to do them.
The two statesmen, in turn colleagues and rivals, who succeeded
lord Melbourne as heads of the liberal party, lord John, afterwards
1 His advanced radicalism is reflected in his speech of 1822, explaining his own
reform project, printed in The Pamphleteer, 'no. XLI, vol. XXI.


## p. 126 (#156) ############################################

I 26
[ch.
Political Orators
earl, Russell and Henry Temple, viscount Palmerston, were, neither
of them, born to sway senates by the force or grace of their
eloquence. But the extraordinary self-confidence inbred in the
former and his early services to the cause of parliamentary
reform, helped him over the repeated breakdowns, at times self-
provoked, of his career, and occasionally seemed to warm up
the outward coldness of a courageous and patriotic nature. Lord
Palmerston, whose easy disposition, great capacity for affairs and
quick perception of the mainsprings of personal popularity esta-
blished him in the end as a national favourite, made at least one
great speech in his life (the Civis Romanus speech of 1850),
besides many other successful, and some unsuccessful, efforts; he
neither shrank from claptrap, nor always avoided flippancy, but
the ring which found an echo in English hearts was not wanting
where there was a need for it. In Palmerston's early days, Byron
had called his oratory unconvincing; but he had learnt something
from Canning, besides the traditions of his foreign policy.
It is not as an Irishman that it is usual to remember Palmerston;
but not a few orators of Irish birth were the descendants of an
age when the art of oratory had been fostered by the spirit of
parliamentary independence, or themselves lived at a time
when the Irish bar, as the one high-road to a career of public
distinction, encouraged an eloquence directly appealing, in manner
as well as in matter, to broad popular sympathies. Among the
successors of Grattan, William Conyngham, afterwards lord,
Plunket-to whom, in spite of O'Connell and the anti-vetoists,
the conduct of the catholic relief movement was, in the first
instance, entrusted—was probably, the most finished speaker. His
career at the Irish bar reaches back some years into the eighteenth
century, and he did not resign the Irish lord chancellorship (in
which he had exhibited very high judicial qualities) till 1841.
One of the finest of his speeches was that of 21 February 1829,
on the catholic claims, which, while demonstrating that the ex-
clusion of catholics from the legislature was a constitutional
innovation, upheld the Irish church establishment as, historically,
part of the constitution. This and other speeches by him which
.
remain are, certainly, on a very high level of both argument and
style. The gravity of his eloquence frequently rose to imaginative
loftiness; and, in the opinion of a cultivated critic', he would, had
he been bred in parliament, have been the greatest speaker that
1 The first earl of Dudley. See The Life, Letters and Speeches of Lord Plunket, by
Plunket, D. , with an introductory preface by lord Brougham (2 vols. 1867), p. 67.
a


## p. 127 (#157) ############################################

II]
Plunket,
O'Connell. Sheil
127
ever appeared in it. Lord Brougham compares his twofold
eminence, at the bar and in parliament, to that of Berryer,
perhaps the most exquisite speaker to whom it has been the lot
of anyone now living to listen. But, from the point of view
of popular effect-effect exercised not upon this or that assembly
only, but upon the nation as a whole, the name of every other
Irish orator—perhaps that of any orator of whatever people
or age-pales before that of Daniel O'Connell. There is
little if any exaggeration in this statement, albeit exaggeration
was his element. He told Jeremy Bentham that, in his opinion,
it was right to speak of one's friends in the strongest language
consistent with truth'; and, as to his adversaries, from Wellington
and Peel downwards-apart from the magnificent scurrilities
which he hurled at such offenders as lord Alvanley and Disraeli-
the vituperative habit had, as we read, grown upon him in ordinary
talk till such words as 'rogue,'' villain,' scoundrel,' had, in the end,
lost all precise significance for him. But, as an orator, he had his
vocabulary as he had the whole of his armoury of action under
control; nor was there ever a demagogue so little led away either
by his tongue or by the passion within him. Rude, when it suited
him to be rude, and coarse, when coarseness was expected from
him, he was irresistible as an orator; first, because he never lost
sight of his purpose, and, secondly, because he was never out of
sympathy with the whole of his audience-indeed, speaker and
audience were one. That he should have remained true both to
the aspirations of the Irish people and to his principle of ex-
cluding illegal means or violence from the action which he urged,
was, perhaps, the greatest triumph of his oratory. It was forensic
in both origin and features; but the orator, like the man-his wit,
his ardour, his impudence, his piety-were racy of the soil to
which he belonged by blood and indissoluble congeniality, and,
though he held his own against the foremost debaters of the house
of commons, he was at his best, from first to last, in his native
surroundings, in law courts or city hall, or facing the multitudes
at Limerick or on Tara hill.
The third name in the triad of great Irish orators who strove,
though not always in concord, for the welfare of their country
was that of Richard Lalor Sheil. Educated under old-fashioned
legitimist and, Jesuit influences, he had literary gifts, which, in his
younger days, made a name for him in poetic drama. But the
life's work of this ‘iambic rhapsodist,' as O'Connell—not felicitously
-called him, was, both at the bar (where his most brilliant, and


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128
[CH.
Political Orators
surely longest, speech was in defence of the ‘liberator's 'son, 1844)
and in the house of commons, devoted to the cause of Ireland,
and to that of catholic emancipation in particular. His parlia-
mentary position was never either an uncompromising or a
commanding one, though his fire and fluency alike called forth
admiration and made Gladstone, in his youthful days, avow himself
unwilling to follow him in debate. Nor is it easy even now to
resist the effect of such a speech as that in which in October
1828) he advocated the catholic claim before a Kentish audience
on Pennenden heath and taunted England with being, in the
matter of religious tolerance, 'behind almost every nation in
Europe. ' He shone both in exordium and in peroration; but his
taste was less pure than Plunket's, and his invective less torrential
than O'Connell's.
We pass abruptly to the other side of politics, though the first
name to be mentioned is still that of an Irishman. But the duke
of Wellington made no pretence of figuring among the orators of
his age. Insensible as he was to popular applause, he sometimes
spoke well without knowing it, and, also, at times (as in the great
reform debate of 1831), spoke very badly. His oratory, in every
sense of the word, was unstudied, and, on constitutional ques-
tions, quite out of its element. His despatches would suffice to
show that he was not without style; but he reserved it for matter
of which he was master.
With the great name of Wellington is inseparably associated
that of Sir Robert Peel, whose political life more distinctly, perhaps,
than that of any English statesman since Walpole, centred in the
house of commons. Outside that assembly, a certain stiffness,
born of reserve rather than of haughtiness, may, at times, have stood
in his way; and he could be set down as 'a cold feeler and a
cautious stepper. ' But the house of commons he knew, and came
to sway for a long time with an undisputed pre-eminence; and the
list is long of his speeches which mark momentous advances in
our political history and attest his extraordinary personal as-
cendancy. His maiden speech, delivered in 1810 at the age of
twenty-two, was thought to have been the best since the younger
Pitt's; and, nine years afterwards (when the question was under
discussion whether Canning or he was fittest for the leader-
ship of the house), Canning described the speech in which Peel
6
1 His eldest brother, Richard marquis of Wellesley, a brilliant classical scholar
and a lover of literature (Italian in especial), was also a highly accomplished orator,
though he spoke but little in parliament.


## p. 129 (#159) ############################################

11]
Peel. Derby
129
introduced the resolutions providing for the resumption of cash
payments, on which 'Peel's act' was founded, as the greatest
wonder he had ever witnessed. Ten years later, in March 1829,
Peel delivered one of the greatest, and, at the same time, one of
the most characteristic, speeches of his entire career—that on
catholic emancipation, ending with a noble peroration fitly
described as eloquent with the spirit of duty. Yet, the most
memorable part of his career as a parliamentary statesman and
orator only set in with his definitive return to office in 1841. In
the following year, he made his first great budget speech-a
complete course of political economy'—and to this period, too,
belongs his speech (1843) on the Factory acts and the existing
distress, which, to baron Brunnow, seemed 'eloquence as the
ancients understood the word. ' After his historic resignation,
he made one further great speech-on 28 June 1850, the day
before that of his fatal accident-against the vote of confidence
in Palmerston's foreign policy. Bright commemorated it as Peel's
"last, most beautiful and most solemn' utterance; and it was as
worthy of him in its moderation as it was in its truthfulness.
Peel's greatest quality—his moral courage, to which he owed the
self-confidence that made him, in his own words, 'pique himself
on having never failed in carrying anything proposed by him’-
is reflected in his oratory. It is neither impassioned nor richly
ornamented (though he was a good scholar); but it never falls
short of its purpose and can rise with the greatness of the issues
which it is directly designed to bring about.
During the long period of waiting which followed after Peel
had broken up the party, the conservatives were under the
leadership of Stanley, with lord George Bentinck (who died in 1848)
and Disraeli as his lieutenants in the house of commons. Edward
Stanley-lord Stanley from 1834, and (fourteenth) earl of Derby
from 1851–had, after distinguishing himself at Oxford, begun his
political life as a whig, and, in the Reform bill debates, opposed
Peel, and put down Croker in a most successful speech (1831);
but he separated from that party in 1833, and became a supporter
of Peel, whose Irish policy he championed with great spirit against
O'Connell. He twice filled the office of prime-minister, but was in
opposition during most of his later political life. Though far from
reckless in the guidance of the counsels of his party, as a speaker,
the 'Rupert of debate,' as Bulwer Lytton called him in The New
Timon, was, beyond doubt, one of the most splendid, as he was
one of the most impetuous, foemen in the field. His oratory was,
E. L. XIV.
CH. II.
9


## p. 130 (#160) ############################################

130
[CH.
Political Orators
however, under the control of a well-trained taste', and free from
the artifices of rhetoric. While his vivacity caused him, at sixty,
to be thought one of the cleverest young men in parliament, he
was occasionally accused of a levity of tone recalling other contests
than those of the political arena. The earl of Derby's colleague, the
earl of Ellenborough, remained one of the foremost orators of the
house of lords, even after he had resigned the presidency of the
board of control in 1858. He was a man of brilliant gifts ; but his
oratory reflects the masterfulness of disposition which he had
most prominently displayed as governor-general of India.
In the revolt against Peel, of which the house of commons
was, necessarily, the chief scene, the leading parts were played
by lord George Bentinck and Disraeli. Lord George had made
a high-minded sacrifice of his interest in the turf, and, during
his short political career, proved a very effective, if not always
highly refined, speaker, who took great trouble with facts and
figures. The parliamentary career of Benjamin Disraeli, first earl
of Beaconsfield, really began with those attacks upon Peel which
left their mark upon the political history of the country. They,
also, left their mark upon his style of oratory, which, after, at
first, deriving its significance from its invective, retained the
original seasoning even when it was applied to the unfolding or
defence of a positive policy. Disraeli's power of sarcasm (which no
orator ever more successfully heightened by scornfulness of manner
and by mimicry of gesture) was, however, only one of the gifts
conspicuous in a long succession of speeches—some delivered,
as it were, at bay, some, in the moment of triumph. None of
these gifts was more assiduously cultivated by their possessor
than the imaginative faculty, with which he was sumptuously
endowed and which, in great matters and in small, though in
imperial, in preference to 'parochial,' questions, he constantly
turned to the fullest account, but always with consummate dis-
crimination and often, as it was said, 'behind a mask. Thus,
the splendour of his ideals, which, in his younger days, had been
largely associated with fantastic conceptions or racial traditions,
became, in the end, one of the most valuable of his political ways
and means, took captive queen and country, and, for a time, made
the world listen to his eloquence as to the messages of an oracle.
Among the politicians to whom the name of Peelites clung
even after their leader had passed away, Sir James Graham,
who, at first, was regarded as their leader and who, at one time,
1 As to his translation of the Iliad, see, ante, vol. XII, p. 334.


## p. 131 (#161) ############################################

1]
Granville, Devonshire.
.
Cobden
131
seemed likely to rise to a foremost position in the conduct of
affairs, was a fine speaker, though rather inclined to pompousness,
and the best in the house on financial and economical subjects
(William Huskisson, whose knowledge of these had been most
valuable to Peel, was without oratorical power). But, with all
his ability and statesmanlike insight, he could not gain the full
confidence of his contemporaries, perhaps because he seemed to
be without perfect trust in himself. The most brilliant (except
one) of his political associates, Sidney Herbert, afterwards first
lord Herbert of Lea, died before his oratorical and other gifts
had secured to him the highest political honours.
Among ministers whose attention was chiefly, though, in
neither case, exclusively, given to foreign affairs, the earl of
Clarendon and earl Granville were the most conspicuous; they
were alike men of great personal charm and accomplished
speakers, skilled in the art of diplomatic composition and in
the use of forms and turns of courteous speech, an art which has
often been missing in English statesmen who lacked their cosmo-
politan training. To these qualifications, Granville, whose unselfish
services were of the utmost value to his chief, added that of a
popular vein, which won him many friends outside the foreign
offices of Europe, and made him singularly winning as an orator.
During many a long year of party conflict, Gladstone had no more
loyal adjutant than the marquis of Hartington, afterwards duke
of Devonshire, who possessed in a degree never surpassed the
power, invaluable in debate, of bringing home to friends and
opponents the absolute sincerity of his utterances.
Inseparably linked together in political history, and most of
all by the isolation in which the pair found themselves at more
than one stage of their political career, are the great radical
names of Cobden and Bright. From the days when the elder
of them, Richard Cobden, first entered parliament, in order there
to prosecute, with a single-mindedness as complete as that of the
platform, the campaign for cheapening the food of the people,
an absorbing care for the condition of the people, remained, from
first to last, the note of his oratory, and of the remarkable
political writings in which he gave occasional expression to his
principles. In all his deliverances, he is found transparently
sincere, perfectly definite in purpose and as free from ad cap-
tandum devices as any orator who has commanded the applause
of vast popular audiences or has conquered the attention of
a vigilantly antipathetic house of commons. His persuasiveness,
9-2


## p. 132 (#162) ############################################

132
Political Orators
[ch.
which Bright described as irresistible, was based on a ground-
work of facts, and their logic convinced his hearers, as his
imperturbable sureness of himself showed them to have con-
vinced the speaker. Although a self-taught orator as well as
politician, Cobden was not wholly without a literary sense the
notorious reference to the Ilissus was a mere bit of mischief;
but, neither fancy nor humour, nor even the deeper movements
of indignation, entered much into the spirit of his speeches,
which, penetrating to the kernel of the matter, scattered all the
mistakes and false doctrines by which it was enveloped. In the
Corn law meetings, he left it to his indefatigable coadjutor
William Johnson Fox (Browning's far-sighted friend), who was
always intent upon the interests of the working classes, to draw
touching pictures of the social suffering which the leaguers were
seeking to remedy. Even his antagonism to war, to which he
gave thoughtful expression long before he inveighed against the
concrete example of the conflict with Russia, rested, primarily,
on other than humanitarian grounds. He was not an enthusiast
in either love or hate, and could believe in the sincerity of
others-even of Palmerston-as he was absolutely sincere him-
self. John Bright_Cobden's comrade in the earliest and most
unequivocally successful phase of their public lives, and in their
opposition to a national war which reason and conscience made
them deem unjust, but virtually without his steadfast associate's
support in the long campaign for that extension of the franchise
on which modern democracy is based—was, beyond all doubt, one
of the greatest orators of his own or any other age of English life.
The individuality which mirrored itself in his eloquence, and the
ascendancy which it exercised, were those of genius. Although
he insisted on yielding to Fox, who spoke less frequently and with
more elaboration of art, the palm of orator of the anti-Corn-law
league, he displayed, even in this early period of his life, those
qualities which gradually developed into majestic grandeur. In
many respects, the simplest of men, and an adherent of many
of the homely ways of his community, he seemed to tower among
those around him by an unquestioned, half-heroic, dignity of
personality and presence. The arts of flattery were as strange
to his oratory as they were to his daily converse ; and irony aud
sarcasm seemed alien to the pure truthfulness of his nature. He
was well-read—though not, perhaps, in the common sense of the
phrase. His mind was steeped in the Bible; in his loftier flights,
he seemed to be breathing the atmosphere of the Old Testament;


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II]
John Bright. Robert Lowe
133
the thoughts and cadences of Milton were ever on his lips;
and he was familiar with a few other great writers capable of
inspiring noble passages of his eloquence. Solemn reproof, lofty
appeal, sympathy with woe and awe of the divine all these are
to be found in his speeches, where they touch the heights and
depths of human feeling. Of himself, unlike many great orators,
he says little; but the whole history of his public life reveals itself
in his speeches on free trade, or peace and reform, on Ireland,
on India and on that great transatlantic republic whose cause
he upheld, by the side of John Stuart Mill, in the critical hour.
His oratory resembled his life in the grandeur of its simplicity-
hardly a gesture to heighten the effect of the magical voice, only
an occasional sally of wit or humour to relieve the earnestness in
which moral force was naturally blended with human-kindness,
and the whole a self-consistent and unfaltering advance, and a
repose on the heights, when they had been reached, of prophetic
faith. Milton, he said, had taught him, when in his youth he was
beginning to think about public affairs, that true eloquence is
'but the serious and hearty love of truth? '; and the precept,
from first to last, shone like a beacon on his path.
A place of his own among the political orators of his day
must be assigned to Robert Lowe, afterwards viscount Sherbrooke,
a liberal in the general tendency of his ideas and texture of his
intellect, but raised to the height of his political influence and
oratorical renown as the protagonist of the struggle against
democratic reform, with Edward Horsman as the second spokesman
of the Cave (1866–7). In Lowe's speeches, as in his conversation
(his writings were few), bis academical training found very distinct
expression, though antithetically mixed with a stinging wit and
with a knowledge of registration and administration taught by
eight years of colonial, followed by a long and varied home,
experience of parliamentary and official life. But the intrinsic
power of his oratory was such as to enable him to fight with un-
paralleled effect the battle on which he had chosen to enter against
what he called the sentimental, the fatalistic and the aggressive
or compulsory democracy, as represented by Mill, Gladstone and
Bright; and his brief autobiography remains to illustrate the
nature of his wit, under which all sentiment withered away.
In this enumeration, we must pass by those whose public life was
mainly occupied with questions, whether of foreign or home policy,
which did not reach their solution in the nineteenth century and
1 Cf. Trevelyan, G. M. , The Life of John Bright (1913), p. 386.


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134
[CH.
Political Orators
some of which remain unsolved at the present day? Among
these were, on the conservative side, at least one statesman of com-
manding personality—Robert Cecil, third marquis of Salisbury-
who, without ever quite laying aside the 'fouts' and 'gibes' of less
responsible days, and often, seemingly, careless of the immediate
effect of indiscretions which would have shaken the trust in the
self-control of a lesser man, impressed large audiences as well
as the discerning few with his fitness to guide the vessel of state
through storms or shoals.
The life of Joseph Chamberlain ended only yesterday, but
in the chief campaign which it was pot given to him to carry
to an issue, he had exercised too potent an influence upon the
future of the British empire to make it easy to pass by his name
in silence in the present connection. But the whole of his parlia-
mentary career, shortened as it was by physical failure, falls outside
the limits within which we judge it right to confine this chapter.
On the other hand, the main transactions and interests of two
generations of the national history seem to gather themselves
into the threescore years of the public career of William Ewart
Gladstone, and into the oratory which gives expression to every
stage and aspect of it; though it is only the earlier portion of that
career on which we can here dwell. Brought up, as he said, in
his native Liverpool under the shadow of the name of Canning,
welcomed at the outset of his parliamentary life by Peel, the
most talented member of Aberdeen’s new ministry of all the
talents, wooed by the tories and indispensable to the whigs,
and head of four successive administrations, he ended as the
chosen chief of the democracy which he had helped to call into
life. To very few other great statesmen of any age has it been
given so indissolubly to unite with his name and fame as a states-
man those of the orator who expounded, commended and placed
on record the chief undertakings of his political genius—unless,
indeed, it be thought fit to compare him to the master-spirit who
of old both perfected and controlled the Attic democracy. In
the year before Gladstone's death, he made the remark that, as to
politics, the basis of his mind was laid principally in finance and
in philanthropy-no very strange combination if, by the side
of some of the most brilliant triumphs of his oratory, the series
of budget speeches, be placed his ardent efforts on behalf of the
Of some distinguished divines, lawyers and men of letters whose parliamentary
oratory added to their renown, the names will be found in other chapters, and in the
bibliography.


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II] William Ewart Gladstone
135
suffering Christian subjects of the Turk. But the saying cannot
be accepted as adequately indicating either his chief intellectual
interests or all the most vitalising elements of his inexhaustible
eloquence. On the threshold of manhood, the bent of his mind
had been towards the clerical profession; and for some time he
continued to contemplate secular affairs ‘chiefly as a means of
being useful in church affairs. ' When, six years after entering
parliament, he produced his celebrated book entitled The State in
its Relations with the Church (1838), he took his stand on the
principle that the state must have one religion, and that must, of
course, be the religion which it had recognised as the true. From
this view, he gradually passed to the acceptance of freedom of
religious opinion, coupled with the conviction that the preservation
of truth may be left in other hands than ours, and thus fulfilled
Sheil's prophecy that the champion of free trade would become
the advocate of the most unrestricted liberty of thought. But,
even after he had ceased to stand forth as the champion of the
church he loved, religious feeling continued to be the woof that
crossed the warp of his noblest and most stirring eloquence.
Nor, again, is it possible, in considering the characteristics
of bis oratory, to mistake the extraordinary fineness of its texture,
or to refuse to attribute this, in part, to the congenial dialectical
training of a singularly subtle mind. Gladstone was a classical
scholar, whose imagination delighted to feed on Homer', and whom
a stronger intellectual affinity had familiarised with the pearls of
Vergilian diction; while, among modern literatures, he loved the
Italian with a fervency that inspired in him his earliest incursion
into the domain of foreign affairs and his first endeavours on behalf
of oppressed national aspirations. But he could not be called
either a man of letters, or thoroughly trained in the methods of
scholarship. On the other hand, he was, as a logician, trained in
the use of the whole armoury of the schools, and employed it
habitually and without effort. It was a humorous criticism which,
in the days of his still incomplete economic conversion, described
one of his speeches as consisting of arguments for free trade and
of parentheses in favour of protection; but, in his later, as well as
in his earlier, days, he thoroughly understood, and applied with
consummate skill, the defensive side of the science of debate,
including the use of reservation. No doubt he had what may be
described as the excesses of some of his qualities, and there was
1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. II, p. 19 (speech on Affirmation bill).
2 Cf. ante, vol. XII, p.