Closely connected with the subject of Politics, of which we were speaking in the last chapter, is that of Parliamentary Oratory, and for a right estimate of oratory personal impressions (such as those on which I have relied) are peculiarly valuable.  They serve both to correct and to confirm.  It is impossible to form from the perusal of a printed speech anything but the vaguest and often the most erroneous notion of the effect which it produced upon its hearers.  But from the testimony of contemporaries one can often gain the clue to what is otherwise unintelligible.  One learns what were the special attributes of bearing, voice, or gesture, the circumstances of delivery, or even the antecedent conditions of character and reputation, which perhaps doomed some magnificent peroration to ludicrous failure, or, on the contrary, “ordained strength” out of stammering lips and disjointed sentences.  Testimony of this kind the circumstances of my life have given me in great abundance.  My chain of tradition links me to the days of the giants.

Almost all the old people whose opinions and experience I have recorded were connected, either personally or through their nearest relations, with one or other of the Houses of Parliament.  Not a few of them were conspicuous actors on the stage of political life.  Lord Robert Seymour, from whose diary I have quoted, died in 1831, after a long life spent in the House of Commons, which he entered in 1771, and of which for twenty-three years he was a fellow-member with Edmund Burke.  Let me linger for a moment on that illustrious name.

In originality, erudition, and accomplishments Burke had no rival among Parliamentary speakers.  His prose is, as we read it now, the most fascinating, the most musical, in the English language.  It bears on every page the divine lineaments of genius.  Yet an orator requires something more than mere force of words.  He must feel, while he speaks, the pulse of his audience, and instinctively regulate every sentence by reference to their feelings.  All contemporary evidence shows that in this kind of oratorical tact Burke was eminently deficient.  His nickname, “The Dinner-bell of the House of Commons,” speaks for his effect on the mind of the average M.P.  “In vain,” said:  Moore, “did Burke’s genius put forth its superb plumage, glittering all over with the hundred eyes of fancy.  The gait of the bird was heavy and awkward, and its voice seemed rather to scare than attract.”

Macaulay has done full justice to the extraordinary blaze of brilliancy which on supreme occasions threw these minor defects into the shade.  Even now the old oak rafters of Westminster Hall seem to echo that superlative peroration which taught Mrs. Siddons a higher flight of tragedy than her own, and made the accused proconsul feel himself for the moment the guiltiest of men.  Mr. Gladstone declared that Burke was directly responsible for the war with France, for “Pitt could not have resisted him.”