rown, most sincerely, as unlawful usurpations. This led,
as we know, to a most fervent and impassioned struggle, the most so of
any struggle which has ever armed the hands of men with the sword. For
the passions take a far profounder sweep when they are supported by
deep thought and high principles.

This element of fervid strife was already, for itself, an atmosphere
most favourable to political eloquence. Accordingly, the speeches of
that day, though generally too short to attain that large compass and
sweep of movement without which it is difficult to kindle or to
sustain any conscious enthusiasm in an audience, were of a high
quality as to thought and energy of expression, as high as their
circumstantial disadvantages allowed. Lord Strafford's great effort is
deservedly admired to this day, and the latter part of it has been
often pronounced a _chef-d'oeuvre_. A few years before that era, all
the orators of note were, and must have been, judicial orators; and,
amongst these, Lord Bacon, to whom every reader's thoughts will point
as the most memorable, attained the chief object of all oratory, if
what Ben Jonson reports of him be true, that he had his audience
passive to the motions of his will. But Jonson was, perhaps, too
scholastic a judge to be a fair representative judge; and, whatever he
might choose to say or to think, Lord Bacon was certainly too
weighty--too massy with the bullion of original thought--ever to have
realized the idea of a great popular orator--one who

'Wielded at will a fierce democracy,'

and ploughed up the great deeps of sentiment, or party strife, or
national animosities, like a Levanter or a monsoon. In the schools of
Plato, in the _palaestra Stoicorum_, such an orator might be potent;
not _in faece Romuli_. If he had laboured with no other defect, had he
the gift of tautology? Could he say the same thing three times over in
direct sequence? For, without this talent of iteration--of repeating
the same thought in diversified forms--a man may utter good heads of
an oration, but not an oration. Just as the same illustrious man's
essays are good hints--useful topics--for essays; but no approximation
to what we, in modern days, understand by _essays_: they are, as an
eminent author once happily expressed it to myself, '_seeds, not
plants or shrubs; acorns, that is, oaks in embryo, but not oaks_.'

Reverting, however, to the oratory of the Senate, from the era of its
proper birth, whic