the public.  This, again, is quite intelligible.  When I first entered Parliament in 1885 (to which Parliament, by the way, all four Hamilton brothers had been elected), there were commanding personalities and great orators in the House:  Mr. Gladstone, John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Hartington, Henry James and Randolph Churchill.  When any of these rose to speak, the House filled at once, they were listened to with eager attention, and every word they uttered would be read by hundreds of thousands of people next day.  Nowadays proceedings in Parliament seem to be limited to a very occasional solo from the one star-performer, the rest of the time being occupied by uninteresting interludes by his understudies, all of which may serve to explain the decline in public interest.  At the time of the Peace of Paris in 1856, on the termination of the Crimean War, there were in the House of Commons such outstanding figures as Gladstone, Disraeli, Lord John Russell, John Bright, and Palmerston; the statesman had not yet dwindled into the lawyer-politician.

I only heard Mr. Gladstone speak in his old age, when his voice had acquired a slight roughness which detracted, I thought, from his wonderful gift of oratory.  Mr. Gladstone, too, had certain peculiarities of pronunciation; he always spoke of “constitootional” and of “noos.”  John Bright was a most impressive speaker; he obtained his effects by the simplest means, for he seldom used long words; indeed he was supposed to limit himself to words of Saxon origin, with all their condensed vigour.  Is not Newman’s hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light,” considered to be a model of English, as it is composed almost entirely of monosyllables, and, with six exceptions, of words of Saxon origin?  John Bright’s speaking had the same quality as Cardinal Newman’s hymn.  In spite of his eloquence, John Bright’s prophecies were invariably falsified by subsequent events.  I have never heard any one speak with such facility as Joseph Chamberlain.  His utterance was so singularly clear that, though he habitually spoke in a very low voice, every syllable penetrated to all parts of the House.  When Chamberlain was really in a dangerous mood, his voice became ominously bland, and his manner quieter than ever.  Then was the time for his enemies to tremble.  I heard him once roll out and demolish a poor facile-tongued professional spouter so completely and remorsely that the unfortunate man never dared to open his mouth in the House of Commons again.  I think that any old Member of Parliament will agree with me when I place David Plunkett, afterwards Lorth Rathmore, who represented for many years Trinity College, Dublin, in the very front rank as an orator.  Plunkett was an indolent man, and spoke very rarely indeed.  When really roused, and on a subject which he had genuinely at heart, he could rise to heights of splendid eloquence.  Plunkett had a slight impediment in his speech; when wound up, this impediment, so far