in the street--looked far more of a Puritan
divine than of the literary man, or the chief of the advanced thinkers in
Church and State, or an M.P. At a later time what pleasure it gave me to
listen to this distinguished East Anglian as he appeared at the crowded
Anti-Corn Law meetings held in Covent Garden or Drury Lane! Ungainly in
figure, monotonous in tone, almost without a particle of action, regarded
as free in his religious opinions by the vast majority of his audience,
who were, at that time, prone, even in London, to hold that Orthodoxy,
like Charity, covered a multitude of sins. What an orator he was! How
smoothly the sentences fell from his lips one after the other; with what
happy wit did he expose Protectionist fallacies, or enunciate Free Trade
principles, which up to that time had been held as the special property
of the philosopher, far too subtle to be understood and appreciated by
the mob! With what felicity did he illustrate his weighty theme; with
what clearness did he bring home to the people the wrong and injustice
done to every one of them by the landlord's attempt to keep up his rent
by a tax on corn; and then with what glowing enthusiasm did they wait and
listen for the climax, which, if studied, and perhaps artificial, seemed
like the ocean wave to grow grander and larger the nearer it came, till
it fell with resistless force on all around. It seems to me like a
dream, all that distant and almost unrecorded past. I see no such
meetings, I hear no such orators now. As Mr. Disraeli said of Lord
Salisbury when he was Lord Robert Cecil, there was a want of finish about
his style, and the remark holds good of the orator of to-day as
contrasted with the platform speaker of the past. It is impossible to
fancy anyone in our sober age attempting, to say nothing of succeeding in
the attempt (my remarks, of course, do not apply to Irish audiences or
Irish orators), to get an audience to rise _en masse_ and swear never to
fold their arms, never to relax their efforts, till their end was gained
and victory won; yet Mr. Fox did so, and long as I live shall I remember
the night when, in response to his impassioned appeal, the whole
house--and it was crowded to the ceiling--rose, ladies in the boxes,
decent City men in the pit, gods in the gallery--to swear never to tire,
never to rest, never to slacken, till the peasant at the plough, the
cotton-spinner in the mill, the collier in the mine, the lone wido