said all that can be urged in his disparagement.  As a parliamentary speaker of the second and perhaps most useful class he has never been excelled.  Firmly though dispassionately persuaded of certain political and economic doctrines, he brought to the task of promoting them unfailing tact, prompt courage, intimate acquaintance with the foibles of his hearers, unconquerable patience and perseverance, and an inexhaustible supply of sonorous phrases and rounded periods.  Nor was his success confined to the House of Commons.  As a speaker on public platforms, in the heyday of the ten-pound householder and the middle-class franchise, he was peculiarly in his element.  He had beyond most men the art of “making a platitude endurable by making it pompous.”  He excelled in demonstrating the material advantages of a moderate and cautious conservatism, and he could draw at will and with effect upon a prodigious fund of constitutional commonplaces.  If we measure the merit of a parliamentary speaker by his practical influence, we must allow that Peel was pre-eminently great.

In the foremost rank of orators a place must certainly be assigned to O’Connell.  He was not at his best in the House of Commons.  His coarseness, violence, and cunning were seen to the worst advantage in what was still an assemblage of gentlemen.  His powers of ridicule, sarcasm, and invective, his dramatic and sensational predilections, required another scene for their effective display.  But few men have ever been so richly endowed by Nature with the original, the incommunicable, the inspired qualifications which go to make an orator.  He was magnificently built, and blessed with a voice which, by all contemporary testimony, was one of the most thrilling, flexible, and melodious that ever vibrated through a popular assembly.  “From grave to gay, from lively to severe” he flew without delay or difficulty.  His wit gave point to the most irrelevant personalities, and cogency to the most illogical syllogisms.  The most daring perversions of truth and justice were driven home by appeals to the emotions which the coldest natures could scarcely withstand; “the passions of his audience were playthings in his hand.”  Lord Lytton thus described him:—­

    “Once to my sight the giant thus was given: 
    Walled by wide air, and roofed by boundless heaven,
    Beneath his feet the human ocean lay,
    And wave on wave flowed into space away. 
    Methought no clarion could have sent its sound
    Even to the centre of the hosts around;
    But, as I thought, rose the sonorous swell
    As from some church tower swings the silvery bell. 
    Aloft and clear, from airy tide to tide
    It glided, easy as a bird may glide;
    To the last verge of that vast audience sent,
    It played with each wild passion as it went;
    Now stirred the uproar, now the murmur stilled,
    And sobs or laughter answered as it willed.