d in conflicts not less exciting. The great
talents of the late Lord Holland had no such advantage. This was the
more unfortunate, because the peculiar species of eloquence which
belonged to him in common with his family required much practice to
develop it. With strong sense, and the greatest readiness of wit, a
certain tendency to hesitation was hereditary in the line of Fox. This
hesitation arose, not from the poverty, but from the wealth of their
vocabulary. They paused, not from the difficulty of finding one
expression, but from the difficulty of choosing between several. It was
only by slow degrees and constant exercise that the first Lord Holland
and his son overcame the defect. Indeed neither of them overcame it
completely.

In statement, the late Lord Holland was not successful; his chief
excellence lay in reply. He had the quick eye of his house for the
unsound parts of an argument, and a great felicity in exposing them. He
was decidedly more distinguished in debate than any peer of his time who
had not sat in the House of Commons. Nay, to find his equal among
persons similarly situated, we must go back eighty years to Earl
Granville. For Mansfield, Thurlow, Loughborough, Grey, Grenville,
Brougham, Plunkett, and other eminent men, living and dead, whom we will
not stop to enumerate, carried to the Upper House an eloquence formed
and matured in the Lower. The opinion of the most discerning judges was
that Lord Holland's oratorical performances, though sometimes most
successful, afforded no fair measure of his oratorical powers, and that,
in an assembly of which the debates were frequent and animated, he would
have attained a very high order of excellence. It was, indeed,
impossible to listen to his conversation without seeing that he was born
a debater. To him, as to his uncle, the exercise of the mind in
discussion was a positive pleasure. With the greatest good nature and
good breeding, he was the very opposite to an assenter. The word
"disputatious" is generally used as a word of reproach; but we can
express our meaning only by saying that Lord Holland was most
courteously and pleasantly disputatious. In truth, his quickness in
discovering and apprehending distinctions and analogies was such as a
veteran judge might envy. The lawyers of the Duchy of Lancaster were
astonished to find in an unprofessional man so strong a relish for the
esoteric parts of their science, and complained that as soon as they had
s