Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/118

 Lowe was at this time one of the most remarkable men in the House of Commons, and never rose to speak without attracting wide attention. He was unusually tall and erect, and so distinguished by the white hair and pink eyes of an albino that the House always recognised him. His speeches were excellent for sense and spirit, but he contended with physical impediments which only a powerful will could overcome or hold in check. You observed in a moment that he did not see anything which was going on around him, and was completely ignorant of the impression he was making. He spoke philosophical and epigrammatical sentences in a monotone which plainly betrayed that he was speaking language committed to memory. Since Edmund Burke no one had probably delivered speeches so intrinsically important with so little of the art of a rhetorician. He was not popular, a mischance which I have always attributed to his blindness, for such a deficiency renders a man habitually silent, leaves him incapable of recognising his acquaintances when he casually encounters them, and perhaps impatient of being accosted by persons whom he may fail to identify.

We fought the interests of the colonies with persistency and some success, but I am not writing history.

When Lucas was rested a little I went to visit him at