Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/59

 In nothing has he shown such marked improvement as in his style of public speaking. Though twice president of the Union Debating Society at Cambridge, he was at first a most unimpressive speaker: I hesitate to use his own term, "lugubrious:" But now it is not so. He is fluent, easy, and agreeable,—one of the best level business speakers in Parliament. As for the matter, that has at all, times been such as to redeem the worst faults of manner; just a little too much of it at a time, perhaps,—more, at least, than can be well digested by a mass meeting even of Chelsea electors,—but not one word in bad taste, "nothing extenuated, nothing set down in malice."

When he has been reviled,—and who ever was more villanously overwhelmed by a hurricane of abuse?—he reviled not again. Like the soul of honor that he is, he has never stooped to personal invective. Under the severest provocation he has said nothing to wound the susceptibilities of the most sensitive. In this respect he has set an example to some of our foremost public men. Comes this extraordinary forbearance of grace or of nature? it maybe asked. By nature, I should say. To him opposition from men or things is of exactly the same character. It is something to be overcome by patience and pressure in the line of the least resistance. In other words, the member for Chelsea is lacking in sympathy. He is fitted to become a great parliamentary leader rather than a popular agitator. His political aims, it is true, are much the same as were those of passionate old Peter Wentworth, his ancestor; but it would never for a moment occur to him to wish that the most impudent of royal begging messages should be incontinently buried in