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.[1]
We fought the interests of the colonies with persistency and some success, but I am not writing history.[2]
When Lucas was rested a little I went to visit him at
- ↑ This note will indicate the moderate and reasonable grounds taken up by the friends of Australia:—
"34, Lowndes Square, May 12, 1855.
"My dear Sir,—If you will fix with your friends any hour on Tuesday or Wednesday that is most convenient to them I shall be very happy to attend, to give them such information as I can on the subject.
" Please let me know what you decide. My impression is that we ought not to oppose the Second Reading of the Victoria Bill, the objections to which are rather to its form than to its substance, and that can be put right in Committee.
"The New South Wales Bill, should, I think, be opposed at every stage.—Believe me, my dear sir, very truly yours,
"R. Lowe." - ↑ To my Sydney friends I wrote:— "I did my best to have your nominee Upper House abolished. The reports in the papers give you no notion of any one's speeches except Lowe's, whom they report fully because he was connected with the colonies. But on colonial subjects they do not take the trouble of being either full or accurate with any one else. Lowe, Alderley, Lord Lyttleton, Walpole, myself, and others had a consultation on the best course to be taken, but the obstinacy of Lord John rendered all our operations useless, and now, before the Bill has received the Royal assent, he is no longer Colonial Minister."—Letter from C. G. Duffy to Edward Butler, published in the Sydney Empire.
