full with gaseous matter, with whim and fancy, with alliteration and antithesis, with heated passion and bloated metaphors, that burst the slender, silken covering of sense; and the airy pageant, that glittered in empty space and rose in all the bliss of ignorance, flutters and sinks down to its native bogs!  If the Irish orator riots in a studied neglect of his subject and a natural confusion of ideas, playing with words, ranging them into all sorts of fantastic combinations, because in the unlettered void or chaos of his mind there is no obstacle to their coalescing into any shapes they please, it must be confessed that the eloquence of the Scotch is encumbered with an excess of knowledge, that it cannot get on for a crowd of difficulties, that it staggers under a load of topics, that it is so environed in the forms of logic and rhetoric as to be equally precluded from originality or absurdity, from beauty or deformity:—­the plea of humanity is lost by going through the process of law, the firm and manly tone of principle is exchanged for the wavering and pitiful cant of policy, the living bursts of passion are reduced to a defunct common-place, and all true imagination is buried under the dust and rubbish of learned models and imposing authorities.  If the one is a bodiless phantom, the other is a lifeless skeleton:  if the one in its feverish and hectic extravagance resembles a sick man’s dream, the other is akin to the sleep of death—­cold, stiff, unfeeling, monumental!  Upon the whole, we despair less of the first than of the last, for the principle of life and motion is, after all, the primary condition of all genius.  The luxuriant wildness of the one may be disciplined, and its excesses sobered down into reason; but the dry and rigid formality of the other can never burst the shell or husk of oratory.  It is true that the one is disfigured by the puerilities and affectation of a Phillips; but then it is redeemed by the manly sense and fervour of a Plunket, the impassioned appeals and flashes of wit of a Curran, and by the golden tide of wisdom, eloquence, and fancy, that flowed from the lips of a Burke.  In the other, we do not sink so low in the negative series; but we get no higher in the ascending scale than a Mackintosh or a Brougham.[A] It may be suggested that the late Lord Erskine enjoyed a higher reputation as an orator than either of these:  but he owed it to a dashing and graceful manner, to presence of mind, and to great animation in delivering his sentiments.  Stripped of these outward and personal advantages, the matter of his speeches, like that of his writings, is nothing, or perfectly inert and dead.  Mr. Brougham is from the North of England, but he was educated in Edinburgh, and represents that school of politics and political economy in the House.  He differs from Sir James Mackintosh in this, that he deals less in abstract principles, and more in individual details.  He makes less use of general topics, and more of immediate facts.  Sir James