the softness and brilliancy, and poetic and imaginative insight which are to be found in the speeches of the Duke of Argyll.  On September 6th the Duke used very vehement and some very whirling language about Mr. Gladstone; his reading of history was all wrong; his policy for Ireland was—­to put it plainly—­brutal.  But what cannot be forgiven to a man who has still such a beautiful voice—­who still gesticulates so beautifully—­and, above all, who is capable of rising to the height of some of the passages in the speech on this particular Wednesday?  For instance, what could have been more beautiful than that passage in which he put the argument that Ireland was too near to be treated in the same way as a distant colony—­the passage in which he spoke of seeing from the Scotch Highlands the sun shining on the cornfields and cottage windows of Antrim?

[Sidenote:  Rosebery’s great triumph.]

On September 7th a very great event happened in the House of Lords.  The mental mastership of that assembly was transferred from one man to another, from the master of many legions to the captain of a few thin and almost despised battalions.  I heard the whole of Lord Rosebery’s speech, and I heard three quarters of the speech of the Marquis of Salisbury, and no impartial man could deny the contrast between these two speeches on this occasion, the one being no less fine and complete, the other no less monotonous than I have set forth.  It was not merely that Lord Salisbury proved himself vastly inferior to Lord Rosebery in mere oratory, but the speech of the Foreign Secretary was that of a finer speaker, and of a more serious, intellectual, and sagacious politician.

[Sidenote:  A disadvantage conquered.]

Lord Rosebery had the disadvantage of following upon a speaker who had reduced the House to a state of somnolent despair.  Lord Selborne has an episcopal appearance, the manner of an author of hymns, and the unctuous delivery of a High Church speaker.  But like most of the orators of the House of Lords, he considered two hours was the minimum which he was entitled to occupy, and though he spoke with wonderful briskness, for an octogenarian, at the beginning of his observations, his voice soon became so exhausted as to be a mere senile and inaudible whisper.  Deeper and deeper it descended, and the House was in the blackest depths when the Foreign Secretary rose to speak.  Everybody knows how embarrassing and distressing it is to an orator to have to begin by rousing an assembly that has been thus depressed; and the difficulty was increased in the case of Lord Rosebery by the fact that he had to address an audience in which four hundred men were against him and about forty in his favour; and there is no orator whose nerve is so steady, and whose self-confidence is so complete, as not to be depressed and weakened by such a combination of circumstances.  This is partly the reason of the lighter tone of the earlier observations