le, intellectualise what is
purely technical, delocalise what is local, generalise what is
personal! And with what result? Doubtless to the absolute
contemporaries of those speeches, steeped to the very lips in the
passions besetting their topics, even to those whose attention was
sufficiently secured by the domineering interest, friendly or hostile,
to the views of the speaker--even to these I say, that, in so far as
they were at all capable of an intellectual pleasure, those parts
would be most attractive which were least occupied with the present
business and the momentary details. This order of precedency in the
interests of the speech held even for them; but to us, removing at
every annual step we take in the century, to a greater distance from
the mere business and partisan interests of the several cases, this
secondary attraction is not merely the greater of the two--to us it
has become pretty nearly the sole one, pretty nearly the exclusive
attraction.

As to religious oratory, _that_ stands upon a different footing--the
questions afloat in that province of human speculation being eternal,
or at least essentially the same under new forms, receives a strong
illustration from the annals of the English senate, to which also it
gives a strong and useful illustration. Up to the era of James I., the
eloquence of either House could not, for political reasons, be very
striking, on the very principle which we have been enforcing.
Parliament met only for dispatch of business; and that business was
purely fiscal, or (as at times it happened) judicial. The
constitutional functions of Parliament were narrow; and they were
narrowed still more severely by the jealousy of the executive
government. With the expansion, or rather first growth and development
of a gentry, or third estate, expanded, _pari passu_, the political
field of their jurisdiction and their deliberative functions. This
widening field, as a birth out of new existences, unknown to former
laws or usages, was, of course, not contemplated by those laws or
usages. Constitutional law could not provide for the exercise of
rights by a body of citizens, when, as yet, that body had itself no
existence. A gentry, as the depository of a vast overbalance of
property, real as well as personal, had not matured itself till the
latter years of James I. Consequently the new functions, which the
instinct of their new situation prompted them to assume, were looked
upon by the C