At the period of which I am speaking the House of Commons contained two or three orators surviving from a class which had almost died away. These were men who, having no gift for extempore speaking, used to study the earlier stages of a debate, prepare a tremendous oration, and then deliver it by heart. Such, in days gone by, had been the practice of Bulwer-Lytton, and, as far as one can see, of Macaulay. In my day it was followed by Patrick Smyth, Member for Tipperary, and by Joseph Cowen, Member for Newcastle. Both were real rhetoricians. Both could compose long discourses, couched in the most flowery English, interlarded with anecdotes and decorated with quotations; and both could declaim these compositions with grace and vigour. But the effect was very droll. They would work, say, all Tuesday and Wednesday at a point which had been exhausted by discussion on Monday, and then on Thursday they would burst into the debate just whenever they could catch the Speaker's eye, and would discharge these cascades of prepared eloquence without the slightest reference to time, fitness, or occasion. My uncle, Lord Russell, who entered Parliament in 1813, always said that the first Lord Plunket was, on the whole, the finest speaker he had ever heard, because he combined a most cogent logic with a most moving eloquence; and these gifts descended to Plunket's grandson, now Lord Rathmore, and, in the days of which I am speaking, Mr. David Plunket, Member for the University of Dublin. Voice, manner, diction, delivery, were all alike delightful; and, though such finished oratory could scarcely be unprepared, Mr. Plunket had a great deal too much of his nation's tact to produce it except when he knew that the House was anxious to receive it. In view of all that has happened since, it is curious to remember that Mr. Arthur Balfour was, in those days, a remarkably bad speaker. No one, I should think, was ever born with less of the orator's faculty, or was under heavier obligations to the Reporters' Gallery. He shambled and stumbled, and clung to the lapels of his coat, and made immense pauses while he searched for the right word, and eventually got hold of the wrong one. In conflict with Gladstone, he seemed to exude the very essence of acrimonious partisanship, and yet he never exactly scored. As Lord Beaconsfield said of Lord Salisbury, "his invective lacked finish."