least an equivalent score; and the audience were there to applaud and to bet on the result.
Anyhow the tradition grew up that length and eloquence were inseparable, and we find that the majority of the great speeches of the late Georgian and even the early Victorian epochs were from three to four hours in duration. Sheridan's speech on the Begums of Oude was five hours and forty minutes in length; Burke frequently spoke for between three and four hours. Brougham's speech on Law Reform in the House of Commons in February, 1828, lasted for six hours; and it was of the well-known occasion when he sank on his knees in the House of Lords and implored the Peers to pass the Reform Bill of 1831 that Lord Campbell sarcastically remarked:
"The peroration was partly inspired by draughts of mulled port, imbibed by him very copiously towards the conclusion of the four hours during which he was on his legs or on his knees."
Mr. Gladstone, in introducing the Budget of 1853, spoke for five hours. Lord Palmerston's celebrated Don Pacifico speech in June, 1850, spoken, as Mr. Gladstone somewhat hyperbolically remarked, "from the dusk of one day to the dawn of the next," and delivered without the aid of a note—assuredly one of the most astonishing feats in the history of the British Parliament—occupied four hours and forty minutes. Some of Mr. Lowe's Reform Bill speeches were from two to three hours in duration.
Have we not, therefore, amid many symptoms of decline, one ground for honest congratulation in our increasing self-restraint? Cobden and Bright once supported a resolution that no one should speak for more than an hour. Latter-day reformers have attempted to fix the limit at twenty minutes. The two Front Benches are fellow conspirators in resisting any such reform. But the movement towards greater conciseness that has already set in spontaneously may be expected to make progress even if the House of Commons declines to accelerate it by arbitrary restrictions.
Many of the orators whom we have discussed had
