description was originally applied—"thunder clothed his brow," and the House listened in hushed awe. When he did make a speech on being elected or re-elected to the Chair, it was evident that he might have greatly excelled in the classical style of an earlier generation.
Second Sir Robert Peel.His elder brother, the second Sir Robert Peel, though he made no mark in public life, had also inherited no mean rhetorical and dramatic attainments. Standing up to speak, as I saw him, on the benches below the gangway on the Conservative side, his almost foreign appearance, rich voice, animated gestures, and humour that seldom erred on the side of refinement, suggested great gifts which, if controlled and directed, might have led to influence and fame.
Earl Cairns.In the 'seventies the Conservative party produced and were led for five years in the Upper House by a great lawyer who was also a statesman, a fine speaker, almost at moments an orator. This was the first Lord Cairns. An intellectual countenance, a distinguished and weighty manner, and a cultured diction, enabled him to overcome the drawbacks from which lawyers in Parliament are generally, though perhaps unfairly, believed to suffer. I heard his powerful speech on the evacuation of the Transvaal in the House of Lords in 1880, which he concluded with the apposite quotation from Abraham Cowley:—
"We grieved, we sighed, we wept—we never blushed before."
At this point he rose to genuine eloquence. More commonly he was self-restrained, passionless, and cold.
Charles Bradlaugh.Perhaps I should not omit to mention a Parliamentary figure of a very different type. This was Charles Bradlaugh, with whom I sat in the House of Commons for some years. Known as the "boy orator" of secular and atheistic circles in his youth, trained in the rough school of public disputation, a professional agitator of the most accomplished type, he created an extraordinary effect by the speech which he made when called to the bar of the House in June, 1880—a speech described by Mr. Gladstone in his
