of Commons in February, 1837, was an unmeditated effort produced by the sight of Lord Lyndhurst, who had applied the expression to Irishmen, seated under the gallery as he was making his speech. I cannot believe that this was the case. It is difficult to credit the unstudied and spontaneous origin of the references to the "steeps and moats of Badajos," or the catalogue of victories—Vimiera, Salamanca, Albuera, Toulouse, Waterloo,—or the peroration:
"When the chill morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark together, in the same deep pit their bodies were deposited, the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust, the dew falls from heaven upon their union in the grave."
And if I wanted a confirmation for this view I should find it in the even more amazing example of the same style by the same speaker in his denunciation of the dying Duke of York in 1827, when he followed, so to speak, the corpse of the still living object of his invective from the death chamber to the funeral vault in St. George's—a gruesome and incredible example of perverted art.
Sir E. Bulwer Lytton.I have only dwelt upon Sheil, who died in 1851, because he was the most accomplished professor of this academy. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the novelist who was Secretary for the Colonies in 1857, for a short time excited a wonderful sensation by similar displays. Men crowded to the House of Commons to hear the latest performance of " the orator of the century." Epigrams, antithesis, alliteration all the conscious tricks of the trade were packed into his ornate harangues, which no one now remembers.
Robert Lowe.A little later there appeared a far more accomplished exponent of the same art. This was Mr. Robert Lowe, afterwards Lord Sherbrooke, who, in the Session of 1866, rose to real fame by the burnished and scathing brilliance of his attacks upon the Reform Bill of that year. Scholarship, irony, paradox, wit, studied elaboration of form, all were weapons in the hands of the man who had the supreme advantage of attacking his party with the sympathy of the greater portion of the House behind him.
