Then did I know what spells of infinite choice,
    To rouse or lull, hath the sweet human voice;
    Then did I seem to seize the sudden clue
    To that grand troublous Life Antique—­to view,
    Under the rockstand of Demosthenes,
    Mutable Athens heave her noisy seas.”

A remarkable contrast, as far as outward characteristics went, was offered by the other great orator of the same time.  Sheil was very small, and of mean presence; with a singularly fidgety manner, a shrill voice, and a delivery unintelligibly rapid.  But in sheer beauty of elaborated diction not O’Connell nor any one else could surpass him.  There are few finer speeches in the language than that in which he took Lord Lyndhurst to task for applying the term “aliens” to the Irish in a speech on municipal reform:—­

“Aliens!  Good God! was Arthur Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords, and did he not start up and exclaim, ’Hold!  I have seen the aliens do their duty’?...  I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an intrepid bosom—­tell me, for you needs must remember, on that day when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while death fell in showers—­tell me if for an instant, when to hesitate for an instant was to be lost, the ‘aliens’ blenched....  On the field of Waterloo the blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland flowed in the same stream and drenched the same field.  When the chill morning dawned their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep pit their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from heaven upon this union in the grave.  Partakers in every peril, in the glory shall we not be permitted to participate?  And shall we be told as a requital that we are ‘aliens’ from the noble country for whose salvation our life-blood was poured out?”

By the time which we are now considering there had risen to eminence a man who, if he could not be ranked with the great orators of the beginning of the century, yet inherited their best traditions and came very near to rivalling their fame.  I refer to the great Lord Derby.  His eloquence was of the most impetuous kind, corresponding to the sensitive fierceness of the man, and had gained for him the nickname of “The Rupert of Debate.”  Lord Beaconsfield, speaking in the last year of his life to Mr. Matthew Arnold, said that the task of carrying Mr. Forster’s Coercion Bill of 1881 through the House of Commons “needed such a man as Lord Derby was in his youth—­a man full of nerve, dash, fire, and resource, who carried the House irresistibly along with him”—­no mean tribute from a consummate judge.  Among Lord Derby’s ancillary qualifications were his musical voice, his fine English style, and his facility in apt and novel quotation, as when he applied Meg Merrilies’s threnody over the ruins of Derncleugh to the destruction of the Irish Church Establishment.  I turn to Lord Lytton again for a description:—­