Lord John Russell entered the House of Commons in 1813, and left it in 1861.  He used to say that in his early days there were a dozen men there who could make a finer speech than any one now living; “but,” he used to add, “there were not another dozen who could understand what they were talking about.”  I asked him who was, on the whole, the best speaker he ever heard.  He answered, “Lord Plunket,” and subsequently gave as his reason this—­that while Plunket had his national Irish gifts of fluency, brilliant imagination, and ready wit very highly developed, they were all adjuncts to his strong, cool, inflexible argument.  This, it will be readily observed, is a very rare and a very striking combination, and goes far to account for the transcendent success which Plunket attained at the Bar and in the House, and alike in the Irish and the English Parliament.  Lord Brougham said of him that his eloquence was a continuous flow of “clear statement, close reasoning, felicitous illustration, all confined strictly to the subject in hand; every portion, without any exception, furthering the process of conviction;” and I do not know a more impressive passage of sombre passion than the peroration of his first speech against the Act of Union:  “For my own part, I will resist it to the last gasp of my existence, and with the last drop of my blood; and when I feel the hour of my dissolution approaching, I will, like the father of Hannibal, take my children to the altar and swear them to eternal hostility against the invaders of their country’s freedom.”

Before the death of Pitt another great man had risen to eminence, though the main achievement of his life associates him with 1832.  Lord Grey was distinguished by a stately and massive eloquence which exactly suited his high purpose and earnest gravity of nature, while its effect was enormously enhanced by his handsome presence and kingly bearing.  Though the leader of the popular cause, he was an aristocrat in nature, and pre-eminently qualified for the great part which, during twenty years, he played in that essentially aristocratic assembly—­the unreformed House of Commons.  In a subsequent chapter I hope to say a little about parliamentary orators of a rather more recent date; and here it may not be uninteresting to compare the House of Commons as we have seen it and known it, modified by successive extensions of the suffrage, with what it was before Grey and Russell destroyed for ever its exclusive character.

The following description is taken from Lord Beaconsfield, who is drawing a character derived in part from Sir Francis Burdett (1770-1840), and in part from George Byng, who was M.P. for Middlesex for fifty-six years, and died in 1847:—­“He was the Father of the House, though it was difficult to believe that from his appearance.  He was tall, and kept his distinguished figure; a handsome man with a musical voice, and a countenance now benignant, though very bright and Once haughty.  He still retained the