Among moderns, some French preachers, Edmund Burke, Macaulay, and
Daniel Webster are perhaps the only speakers whose discourses have
passed into classics and find new generations of readers. Twenty
years hence Mr. Gladstone's will not be read, except, of course, by
historians. They are too long, too diffuse, too minute in their
handling of details, too elaborately qualified in their enunciation
of general principles. They contain few epigrams and few of those
weighty thoughts put into telling phrases which the Greeks called
[Greek text].

The style, in short, is not sufficiently rich or finished to give a
perpetual interest to matters whose practical importance has
vanished. The same oblivion has overtaken all but a very few of the
best things of Grattan, Pitt, Canning, Plunket, Brougham, Peel,
Bright. It may, indeed, be said--and the examples of Burke and
Macaulay show that this is no paradox--that the speakers whom
posterity most enjoys are rarely those who most affected the
audiences that listened to them.

If, on the other hand, Mr. Gladstone be judged by the impression he
made on his own time, his place will be high in the front rank. His
speeches were neither so concisely telling as Mr. Bright's nor so
finished in diction; but no other man among his contemporaries--
neither Lord Derby nor Mr. Lowe nor Mr. Disraeli nor Bishop
Wilberforce nor Bishop Magee--deserved comparison with him. And he
rose superior to Mr. Bright himself in readiness, in variety of
knowledge, in persuasive ingenuity. Mr. Bright required time for
preparation, and was always more successful in alarming his
adversaries and stimulating his friends than in either instructing
or convincing anybody. Mr. Gladstone could do all these four