had learned his art in “the great Walpolean battles,” on nights when Onslow was in the chair seventeen hours without intermission, when the thick ranks on both sides kept unbroken order till long after the winter sun had risen upon them, when the blind were led out by the hand into the lobby and the paralytic laid down in their bed-clothes on the benches.  The powers of Charles Fox were, from the first, exercised in conflicts not less exciting.  The great talents of the late Lord Holland had no such advantage.  This was the more unfortunate, because the peculiar species of eloquence which belonged to him in common with his family required much practice to develop it.  With strong sense, and the greatest readiness of wit, a certain tendency to hesitation was hereditary in the line of Fox.  This hesitation arose, not from the poverty, but from the wealth of their vocabulary.  They paused, not from the difficulty of finding one expression, but from the difficulty of choosing between several.  It was only by slow degrees and constant exercise that the first Lord Holland and his son overcame the defect.  Indeed neither of them overcame it completely.

In statement, the late Lord Holland was not successful; his chief excellence lay in reply.  He had the quick eye of his house for the unsound parts of an argument, and a great felicity in exposing them.  He was decidedly more distinguished in debate than any peer of his time who had not sat in the House of Commons.  Nay, to find his equal among persons similarly situated, we must go back eighty years to Earl Granville.  For Mansfield, Thurlow, Loughborough, Grey, Grenville, Brougham, Plunkett, and other eminent men, living and dead, whom we will not stop to enumerate, carried to the Upper House an eloquence formed and matured in the Lower.  The opinion of the most discerning judges was that Lord Holland’s oratorical performances, though sometimes most successful, afforded no fair measure of his oratorical powers, and that, in an assembly of which the debates were frequent and animated, he would have attained a very high order of excellence.  It was, indeed, impossible to listen to his conversation without seeing that he was born a debater.  To him, as to his uncle, the exercise of the mind in discussion was a positive pleasure.  With the greatest good nature and good breeding, he was the very opposite to an assenter.  The word “disputatious” is generally used as a word of reproach; but we can express our meaning only by saying that Lord Holland was most courteously and pleasantly disputatious.  In truth, his quickness in discovering and apprehending distinctions and analogies was such as a veteran judge might envy.  The lawyers of the Duchy of Lancaster were astonished to find in an unprofessional man so strong a relish for the esoteric parts of their science, and complained that as soon as they had split a hair, Lord Holland proceeded to split the filaments into filaments still finer.  In a mind less happily constituted, there might have been a risk that this turn for subtilty would have produced serious evil.  But in the heart and understanding of Lord Holland there was ample security against all such danger.  He was not a man to be the dupe of his own ingenuity.  He put his logic to its proper use; and in him the dialectician was always subordinate to the statesman.