things, and could do them at an hour's notice, so vast and well
ordered was the arsenal of his mind.

His oratory had many conspicuous merits. There was a lively
imagination, which enabled him to relieve even dull matter by
pleasing figures, together with a large command of quotations and
illustrations. There were remarkable powers of sarcasm--powers,
however, which he rarely used, preferring the summer lightning of
banter to the thunderbolt of invective. There was admirable
lucidity and accuracy in exposition. There was great skill in the
disposition and marshaling of his arguments, and finally--a gift now
almost lost in England--there was a wonderful variety and grace of
appropriate gesture. But above and beyond everything else which
enthralled the listener, there were four qualities, two specially
conspicuous in the substance of his eloquence--inventiveness and
elevation; two not less remarkable in his manner--force in the
delivery, expressive modulation in the voice.

Of the swift resourcefulness of his mind, something has been said
already. In debate it shone out with the strongest ray. His
readiness, not only at catching a point, but at making the most of
it on a moment's notice, was amazing. Some one would lean over the
back of the bench he sat on and show a paper or whisper a sentence
to him. Apprehending its bearings at a glance, he would take the
bare fact and so shape and develop it, like a potter molding a bowl
on the wheel out of a lump of clay, that it grew into a cogent
argument or a happy illustration under the eye of the audience, and
seemed all the more telling because it had not been originally a
part of his case. Even in the last two years of his parliamentary
life, when his sight had so failed that he read nothing, printed or