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 penetrating intonation was an equally admirable vehicle for close reasoning or for withering scorn.

John Morley, the present Lord Morley of Blackburn, should be mentioned here, not as an orator, for he would make no such claim, but as the last or almost the last exponent; of the classical literary style. Just as his great Biography of Mr. Gladstone teems with splendid phrases, original without being extravagant, imaginative without being ornate, so in some of his platform speeches, delivered in the days when he addressed great popular audiences, the principles of his political creed were expounded in a garb that reminds one of the school of literary orators that ended with Canning and Macaulay. It was not rhetoric, because the sense was never sacrificed to the form, but it was an inspired form of spoken prose. Sometimes but less often in the House of Commons he performed a similar feat. I quote one passage only, as a model of fine phrasing, from a speech delivered on the South African War in May, 1901. A striking passage in the earlier part of this speech about "a hateful war, a war insensate and infatuated, a war of uncompensated mischief and irreparable wrong," was followed by this peroration:

I pass to the three living statesmen who have been Prime Ministers, We may be sure, from what has been