“One after one, the Lords of Time advance;
    Here Stanley meets—­how Stanley scorns!—­the glance. 
    The brilliant chief, irregularly great,
    Frank, haughty, rash, the Rupert of Debate;
    Nor gout nor toil his freshness can destroy,
    And time still leaves all Eton in the boy. 
    First in the class, and keenest in the ring,
    He saps like Gladstone, and he fights like Spring! 
    Yet who not listens, with delighted smile,
    To the pure Saxon of that silver style;
    In the clear style a heart as clear is seen,
    Prompt to the rash, revolting from the mean.”

I turn now to Lord Derby’s most eminent rival—­Lord Russell.  Writing in 1844, Lord Beaconsfield thus described him:—­“He is not a natural orator, and labours under physical deficiencies which even a Demosthenic impulse could scarcely overcome.  But he is experienced in debate, quick in reply, fertile in resource, takes large views, and frequently compensates for a dry and hesitating manner by the expression of those noble truths that flash across the fancy and rise spontaneously to the lip of men of poetic temperament when addressing popular assemblies.”  Twenty years earlier Moore had described Lord John Russell’s public speaking in a peculiarly happy image:—­

    “An eloquence, not like those rills from a height
      Which sparkle and foam and in vapour are o’er;
    But a current that works out its way into light
      Through the filtering recesses of thought and of lore.”

Cobden, when they were opposed to one another in the earlier days of the struggle for Free Trade, described him as “a cunning little fox,” and avowed that he dreaded his dexterity in parliamentary debate more than that of any other opponent.

In 1834 Lord John made his memorable declaration in favour of a liberal policy with reference to the Irish Church Establishment, and, in his own words, “The speech made a great impression; the cheering was loud and general; and Stanley expressed his sense of it in a well-known note to Sir James Graham:  ‘Johnny has upset the coach.’” The phrase was perpetuated by Lord Lytton, to whom I must go once again for a perfectly apt description of the Whig leader, both in his defects of manner and in his essential greatness:—­

  “Next cool, and all unconscious of reproach,
  Comes the calm Johnny who “upset the coach”—­
  How formed to lead, if not too proud to please! 
  His fame would fire you, but his manners freeze;
  Like or dislike, he does not care a jot;
  He wants your vote, but your affections not. 
  Yet human hearts need sun as well as oats;
  So cold a climate plays the deuce with votes. 
  But see our hero when the steam is on,
  And languid Johnny glows to Glorious John;
  When Hampden’s thought, by Falkland’s muses drest,
  Lights the pale cheek and swells the generous breast;
  When the pent heat expands the quickening soul,
  And foremost in the race the wheels of genius roll.”