Page:Modern Parliamentary Eloquence.djvu/73

 seats successively in the two Houses of Parliament; and it seems to be widely thought that the House of Lords has had a chilling and deteriorating influence upon eloquence that glowed and flourished in the more stimulating atmosphere of the Lower Chamber. Chatham, it has been said, lost his power by going to the House of Lords; Walpole spoke there infrequently and with reluctance; Brougham declined in influence after he attained the Woolsack; Macaulay never spoke at all after becoming a Peer. The inference, which is probably in any case fallacious, does not seem to be borne out by the experience of our time. Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, lost nothing by going to the House of Lords. Indeed he was called up to it with his own consent seven years before he succeeded to the Earldom. The late Lord Salisbury's peculiar gifts of speech, which might have been thought especially suited to the Commons, were equally effective in the Lords. The Duke of Argyll deliberately preferred that House to any other audience. Certain well-known speakers in our own day, I may instance Lords St. Aldwyn, Loreburn, and Haldane, have spoken even better in the Upper Chamber than they did in the House of Commons. It is impossible to say what Lord Rosebery's eloquence might have achieved in the Lower House, where it was never heard. But no one can say that in the Upper House it has been deprived either of a worthy stage, or an admiring audience. The House of Commons could hardly have made a better or more finished debater of the present Lord Lansdowne. It is true that to a man accustomed to the electric atmosphere of the Lower Chamber, with its cheering and counter-cheering and all the excitement of a popular assembly, the still and motionless firmament of the Upper House, with its austere silences and its rare murmurs of Olympian applause, is like exchanging the temperature of a stokehole for that of a refrigerating chamber. But the freedom from interruption, the perfect fairness of the audience, and the hushed serenity of the scene, are compensations by no means to be despised. On the whole,