I am not without a lurking suspicion that George Borrow must have been at times unbearable in his eloquence.  “We cannot refuse to meet a man on the ground that he is an enthusiast,” observes Mr. George Street, obviously lamenting this circumstance; “but we should at least like to make sure that his enthusiasms are under control.”  Borrow’s enthusiasms were never under control.  He stood ready at a moment’s notice to prove the superiority of the Welsh bards over the paltry poets of England, or to relate the marvellous Welsh prophecies, so vague as to be always safe.  He was capable of inflicting Armenian verbs upon Isopel Berners when they sat at night over their gipsy kettle in the dingle (let us hope she fell asleep as sweetly as does Milton’s Eve when Adam grows too garrulous); and he met the complaints of a poor farmer on the hardness of the times with jubilant praises of evangelicalism.  “Better pay three pounds an acre, and live on crusts and water in the present enlightened days,” he told the disheartened husbandman, “than pay two shillings an acre, and sit down to beef and ale three times a day in the old superstitious ages.”  This is not the oratory of conviction.  There are unreasoning prejudices in favour of one’s own stomach which eloquence cannot gainsay.  “I defy the utmost power of language to disgust me wi’ a gude denner,” observes the Ettrick Shepherd; thus putting on record the attitude of the bucolic mind, impassive, immutable, since earth’s first harvests were gleaned.

The artificial emotions which expand under provocation, and collapse when the provocation is withdrawn, must be held responsible for much mental confusion.  Election oratory is an old and cherished institution.  It is designed to make candidates show their paces, and to give innocent amusement to the crowd.  Properly reinforced by brass bands and bunting, graced by some sufficiently august presence, and enlivened by plenty of cheering and hat-flourishing, it presents a strong appeal.  A political party is, moreover, a solid and self-sustaining affair.  All sound and alliterative generalities about virile and vigorous manhood, honest and honourable labour, great and glorious causes, are understood, in this country at least, to refer to the virile and vigorous manhood of Republicans or Democrats, as the case may be; and to uphold the honest and honourable, great and glorious Republican or Democratic principles, upon which, it is also understood, depends the welfare of the nation.

Yet even this sense of security cannot always save us from the chill of collapsed enthusiasm.  I was once at a great mass meeting, held in the interests of municipal reform, and at which the principal speaker was a candidate for office.  He was delayed for a full hour after the meeting had been opened, and this hour was filled with good platform oratory.  Speechmaker after speechmaker, all adepts in their art, laid bare before our eyes the evils which consumed