hotels, and which looked
like dens for the exhibition of wild beasts. They had to speak at
meetings of Committees, meetings of electors, go the nightly round of
enthusiastic public-houses, and appeal to the sense of an enlightened
people through wreaths of smoke and odours of beer.

The alleged indisposition of Audley Egerton had spared him the
excitement of oratory, as well as the fatigue of canvassing. The
practised debater had limited the display of his talents to a concise,
but clear and masterly exposition of his own views on the leading public
questions of the day, and the state of parties, which, on the day after
his arrival at Lansmere, was delivered at a meeting of his general
Committee, in the great room of their hotel, and which was then printed
and circulated amongst the voters.

Randal, though he expressed himself with more fluency and
self-possession than are usually found in the first attempts of a public
speaker, was not effective in addressing an unlettered crowd; for a
crowd of this kind is all heart--and we know that Randal Leslie's heart
was as small as heart could be. If he attempted to speak at his
own intellectual level, he was so subtle and refining as to be
incomprehensible; if he fell into the fatal error--not uncommon to
inexperienced orators--of trying to lower himself to the intellectual
level of his audience, he was only elaborately stupid. No man can speak
too well for a crowd,--as no man can write too well for the stage; but
in neither case should he be rhetorical, or case in periods the dry
bones of reasoning. It is to the emotions or to the humours that the
speaker of a crowd must address himself; his eye must brighten with
generous sentiment, or his lip must expand in the play of animated fancy
or genial wit. Randal's voice, too, though pliant and persuasive in
private conversation, was thin and poor when strained to catch the ear
of a numerous assembly. The falsehood of his nature seemed to come out
when he raised the tones which had been drilled into deceit. Men like
Randal Leslie may become sharp debaters, admirable special pleaders;
they can no more become orators than they can become poets. Educated
audiences are essential to them, and the smaller the audience (that is,
the more the brain supersedes the action of the heart) the better they
can speak.

Dick Avenel was generally very short and very pithy in his addresses.
He had two or three favourite topics, which always told. H