in its give-and-take. Again we still--some of us--deliver sermons from
pulpits and orations in Parliament or upon public platforms. Yet I am
told that the vogue of the sermon is passing; and (by journalists) that
the leading article has largely superseded it. On that point I can offer
you no personal evidence; but of civil oratory I am very sure that the
whole pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day of Chatham, Burke,
Sheridan; since the day of Brougham and Canning; nay, ever since the day
of Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli. Burke, as everyone knows, once brought
down a Brummagem dagger and cast it on the floor of the House. Lord
Chancellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the assembled peers,
'_Here the noble lord inclined his knee to the Woolsack_' is, if I
remember, the stage direction in Hansard. Gentlemen, though in the course
of destiny one or another of you may be called upon to speak daggers to
the Treasury Bench, I feel sure you will use none; while, as for Lord
Brougham's genuflexions, we may agree that to emulate them would cost
Lord Haldane an effort. These and even far less flagrant or flamboyant
tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion. You could hardly
revive them to-day and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you a
fortnight ago. They would be out of tune; they would grate upon the
nerves; they would offend against the whole style of modern oratory,
which steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of quiet
business-like exposition, to adopt more and more the style of written
prose.

Let me help your sense of this change, by a further illustration. Burke,
as we know, was never shy of declaiming--even of declaiming in a
torrent--when he stood up to speak: but almost as little was he shy of
it when he sat down to write. If you turn to his "Letters on the
Regicide Peace" --no raw compositions, but penned in his latter days and
closing, or almost closing, upon that tenderest of farewells to his