preparation of a speech on the disturbed condition in Ireland which he
was to deliver in the House of Lords that very day--a speech which
should enhance his great and rapidly growing reputation as an orator. He
spent some hours absorbed in polishing and repolishing his sentences,
and in verifying his facts; and, when he rose in the House, he was as
full of confidence as of his subject.

Never, it was the common verdict, had his lordship spoken with more
eloquence and lucidity or with more powerful grasp of his subject and
his hearers.

"Cast your eyes for a moment," he declared, amid
impressive silence, "on the state of the Empire.
America, that vast Continent, with all its advantages to
us as a commercial and maritime people--lost--for ever
lost to us; the West Indies abandoned; Ireland ready to
part from us. Ireland, my lords, is armed; and what is
her language? 'Give us free trade and the free
Constitution of England as it originally was, such as we
hope it will remain, the best calculated of any in the
world for the preservation of freedom.'"

It was the speech of a far-seeing statesman; and although it proved but
the "voice of one crying in the wilderness," Lord Lyttelton felt that he
had done his duty and had crowned his growing political fame with the
laurels of the patriot and the orator.

On the following morning Fortescue met his cousin sauntering in St
James's Park, as Mr Makower tells us, "with the idleness of one who has
never known what occupation means."