Municipal eloquence has been time out of mind a storehouse of delight.  It was, according to tradition, a provincial mayor who, blessed with a numerous progeny, publicly expressed the pious hope that his sons might grow up to be better citizens than their father, and his daughters more virtuous women than their mother.  There was a worthy alderman at Oxford in my time who was entertained at a public dinner on his retirement from civic office.  In replying to the toast of his health, he said it had always been his anxious endeavour to administer justice without swerving to “partiality on the one hand or impartiality on the other.”  Surely he must have been near akin to the moralist who always tried to tread “the narrow path which lay between right and wrong;” or, perchance, to the newly-elected mayor who, in returning thanks for his elevation, said that during his year of office he should lay aside all his political prepossessions and be, “like Caesar’s wife, all things to all men.”  A well-known dignitary, rebuking his housemaid for using his bath during his absence from the Deanery, said, “I am grieved to think that you should do behind my back what you wouldn’t do before my face;” and it was related of my old friend Dean Burgon that once, in a sermon on the transcendent merits of the Anglican school of theology, he exclaimed, with a fervour which was all his own, “May I live the life of a Taylor, and die the death of a Bull!” The late Lord Coleridge, eulogizing Oxford, said in his most dulcet tone, “I speak not of this college or of that, but of the University as a whole; and, gentlemen, what a whole Oxford is!”

The admirable Mr. Brooke, when he purposed to contest the Borough of Middlemarch, found Will Ladislaw extremely useful, because he “remembered what the right quotations are—­Omne tulit punctum, and that sort of thing.”  And certainly an apt quotation is one of the most effective decorations of a public speech; but the dangers of inappositeness are correspondingly formidable.  I have always heard that the most infelicitous quotation on record was made by the fourth Lord Fitzwilliam at a county meeting held at York to raise a fund for the repair of the Minster after the fire which so nearly destroyed it in 1829.  Previous speakers had, naturally, appealed to the pious munificence of Churchmen.  Lord Fitzwilliam, as the leading Whig of the county, thought that it would be an excellent move to enlist the sympathies of the rich Nonconformists, and that he was the man to do it.  So he perorated somewhat after the following fashion:—­“And, if the liberality of Yorkshire Churchmen proves insufficient to restore the chief glory of our native county, then, with all confidence, I turn to our excellent Dissenting brethren, and I exclaim, with the Latin poet,

    ‘Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo.’”