r--all
was easy and natural. He was speaking for the first time to a public
meeting in his native land--speaking to thousands who had come with the
highest expectations--who expected much and required much--speaking, by
means of the press, to the whole British public. Under such
circumstances, occasional nervousness would have been pardonable; but,
from the first, Gough was perfectly self-possessed. There are some men
who have prodigious advantages on account of appearance alone. We think
it was Fox who said it was impossible for any one to be as wise as
Thurlow looked. The great Lord Chatham was particularly favoured by
nature in this respect. In our own time--in the case of Lord Denman--we
have seen how much can be done by means of a portly presence and a
stately air. Gough has nothing of this. He is just as plain a personage
as George Dawson of Birmingham would be if he were to cut his hair and
shave off his moustache; but, though we have named George Dawson, Gough
does not speak like him, or any other living man. Gough is no servile
copy, but a real original. We have no one in England we can compare him
to. Our popular lecturers, such as George Dawson, Henry Vincent, George
Thompson, are very different men. They have all a studied quaintness or
a studied rhetoric. There is something artificial about them all. In
Gough there is nothing of this. He seems to speak by inspiration. As
the apostles spoke who were commanded not to think beforehand what they
should say--the spoken word seems to come naturally, as air bubbles up
from the bottom of the well. In what he said there was nothing
new--there could be nothing new--the tale he told was old as the hills;
yet, as he spoke, an immense audience grew hushed and still, and hearts
were melted, and tears glistened in female eyes, and that great human
mass became knit together by a common spell. Disraeli says, Sir Robert
Peel played upon the House of Commons as an old fiddle; Gough did the
same at Exeter Hall. At his bidding, stern, strong men, as well as
sensitive women, wept or laughed--they swelled with indignation or
desire. Of the various chords of human passions he was master. At times
he became roused, and we thought how

"In his ire Olympian Pericles
Thundered and lightened, and all Hellas shook."

At other times, in his delineation of American manners, he proved himself
almost an equal to Selsbee. Off the stage we have nowhere