; while, as for Lord
Brougham's genuflexions, we may agree that to emulate them would cost
Lord Haldane an effort. These and even far less flagrant or flamboyant
tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion. You could hardly
revive them to-day and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you a
fortnight ago. They would be out of tune; they would grate upon the
nerves; they would offend against the whole style of modern oratory,
which steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of quiet
business-like exposition, to adopt more and more the style of written
prose.

Let me help your sense of this change, by a further illustration. Burke,
as we know, was never shy of declaiming--even of declaiming in a
torrent--when he stood up to speak: but almost as little was he shy of
it when he sat down to write. If you turn to his "Letters on the
Regicide Peace" --no raw compositions, but penned in his latter days and
closing, or almost closing, upon that tenderest of farewells to his
country--

In this good old House, where everything at least is well aired, I
shall be content to put up my fatigued horses and here take a bed
for the long night that begins to darken upon me--

if, I say, you turn to these "Letters on the Regicide Peace" and consult
the title-page, you will find them ostensibly addressed to 'a Member of
the present Parliament'; and the opening paragraphs assume that Burke and
his correspondent are in general agreement. But skim the pages and your
eyes will be arrested again and again by sentences like these:--

The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing
the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are
purchased at ten thousand times their price--the blood of man should
never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for
our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our
kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Magnificent, truly! But your ear has doubtless detected the blank
verse--three iambic lines:--

Are purchased at ten thousand times their price...
Be shed but to redeem the blood of man...
The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Again Burke catches your eye by rhetorical inversions:--

But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact,

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar,

by repetitions:--

Never, no never