[Sidenote:  A man of deeds, not words.]

Lord Spencer is not an orator.  Simple, unadorned, straightforward, he speaks just as he feels; and this lent a singular fascination to a speech which from other lips might have sounded thin and ineffectual, for the speech was nothing less than a revelation into the depths of a nature singularly rich in courage and experience.  One cannot help thinking of all that lay behind those plain and unadorned words in which Lord Spencer told the story of his conversion from the policy of coercion to that of self-government.  Here was the man who had looked out one summer evening on the spot where his close friend—­his chief subordinate—­was hacked to death; this was the man who had brought to conviction and then to the narrow square of the execution yard the members of one of the most powerful and sanguinary of conspiracies; here was the man who for years had passed through the streets of Dublin and the towns of Ireland amid the rattle of cavalcade, as necessary for his protection against popular hate as the troops that protect the person of the Czar in the streets of Poland.  Here was, indeed, a man not of words but of deeds; one who spoke not mere phrases coined from the imaginings of the brain, but one who had seen and heard and throbbed; had looked unappalled into the depths and the abysses of human life, and the dreadest political experiences; one who had visited the Purgatorio and conversed with the lost or the tortured souls, and come back from the pilgrimage with words of hope, faith, and charity.  Altogether it was a fine speech—­worthy of the man, worthy of his career, worthy of the great and historic occasion.

[Sidenote:  Funereal Devonshire.]

I wish I could say as much of the speech of the Duke of Devonshire.  It may be that his miserable failure was due to the fact that he is as yet unaccustomed to the House of Lords, and that the modesty which is undoubtedly one of his disadvantages as a public speaker has not yet been overcome; but his speech was a return to the very worst manner of his earlier days in the House of Commons.  I have heard the Duke of Devonshire in his early manner and in his late; and his early manner was about as detestable as a man’s manner could have been.  He had a habit of sinking his voice as he approached the end of a sentence, so that a sentence beginning on a high note gradually sank to a moan, and a murmur, and a gulp.  The whole effect was mournful in the extreme, and gave you a sense of the weariness and the worthlessness of all human life such as the most eloquent ascetic could never succeed in imparting.  In the House of Lords, the Duke of Devonshire suddenly returned to his early and bad manner, and delivered a speech which was more like a funeral oration than a call to arms.

[Sidenote:  Lord Ribblesdale.]