[Sidenote: A muttered soliloquy.]
Finally, the speech also had the narrowness, shallowness, and unreality
of the hermit's soliloquy. In the main, there was no insight. A
logic-chopper, a dialectician--even in some respects a musing
philosopher--such Lord Salisbury is; but breadth, depth, clear
vision--of that there was not a trace in the whole speech. And then you
went back in memory to the other speech--so clear, so broad-directed,
yet uttered by a man who looked straight before him and all around
him--who felt the presence in his every nerve of that assembly there
which he was addressing; who lived and saw instead of dreaming--and you
could come to no other conclusion than that of the two leaders of the
House of Lords, the young man was the statesman and the man of action as
well as the orator, and that it was worth the spending even all the
weary hours of this past week in the House of Lords to learn so much of
these great protagonists in our Parliamentary struggles.
[Sidenote: Anti-climax.]
Of other speakers I say but little. I came in during the dinner hour to
see a very little man with what we call in Ireland a "cocked" nose, a
conceited mouth, and a curious mixture of the unctuousness and
benedictory manner of the pulpit and the limp twitterings of the curate
at a ladies' tea-fight.
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