Its rarity makes it remarkable. If the speaker who
attacks his own party is supposed to do so from personal motives,
the personal element gives piquancy. If he may be credited with
conscientious conviction, his shafts strike with added weight, for
how strong must conviction be when it turns a man against his former
friends. Accordingly, nothing so much annoys a party and gratifies
its antagonists as when one of its own recalcitrant members attacks
it in flank. When one looks back now at the contents of these
speeches--there were only five or six of them--and finds one's self
surprised at their success, this favouring circumstance and the whole
temper of the so-called "upper classes" need to be remembered. The
bulk of the wealthier commercial class and a large section of the
landed class had theretofore belonged to the Liberal party. Most
of them, however, were then already beginning to pass through what
was called Whiggism into habits of thought that were practically
Tory. They did not know how far they had gone till Lowe's speeches
told them, and they welcomed his ideas as justifying their own
tendencies.

In themselves, as pieces either of rhetoric or of "civil wisdom," the
speeches are not first-rate. No one would dream of comparing them to
Burke's, in originality, or in richness of diction, or in weight of
thought. But for the moment they were far more appreciated than
Burke's were by the House of his time, which thought of dining while
he thought of convincing. Robert Lowe was for some months the idol of
a large part of the educated class, and indeed of that part chiefly
which plumed itself upon its culture. I recollect to have been in
those days at a breakfast party given by an eminent politician and
nominal supporter of the Liberal Ministry, and to have heard Mr. G. S.
Venables, the leader of the _Saturday Review_ set, an able and copious
writer who was a sort of literary and political oracle among his
friends, deliver, amid general applause, including that of the host,
the opinion that Lowe was an intellectual giant compared to Mr.
Gladstone, and that the reputation of the latter had been extinguished
for ever.

This period of glory, which was enhanced by the fall of Lord Russell
and Mr. Gladstone from power in June 1866--the defeat came on a minor
point, but was largely due to Lowe's speeches--lasted till Lowe, who
had now become a force to be counted with, obtained office as
Chancellor of the Exchequer in