Gough spoke for nearly two hours. Evidently the audience could have listened, had he gone on, till midnight. We often hear that the age of oratory has gone by—that the press supersedes the tongue—that the appeal must henceforth be made to the reader in his study, not to the hearer in the crowded hall. There is much truth in that. Nevertheless, the true orator will always please his audience, and true oratory will never die. The world will always respond to it. The human heart will always leap up to it. The finest efforts of the orator have been amongst civilised audiences. It was a cultivated audience before whom Demosthenes pleaded; to whom, standing on Mars-hill, Paul preached of an unknown God. The true orator, like the true poet, speaks to all. He gathers around him earth’s proudest as well as poorest intellects. Notwithstanding, then, the march of mind, oratory may win her triumphs still. So long as the heart is true to its old instinct—so long as it can pity, or love, or hate, or fear, it will be moved by the orator, if he can but pity or love, or hate or fear himself. This is the true secret. This is it that made Gough the giant that he is. Without that he might be polished, learned, master of all human lore; but he would be feeble and impotent as the “Lorn lyre that ne’er hath spoken Since the sad day its master chord was broken.” THE DERBY. Is there a finer sight in creation than a horse? I don’t speak of the wild horse of the prairie, as seen at Astley’s—nor of the wearied animal by means of which the enterprising greengrocer transports his wares from Covent-Garden to the Edgware-road—nor of the useful but commonplace looking cob on which Jones trusts himself timidly as he ventures on a constitutional ride, while his groom, much better mounted, follows scornfully behind—nor of the broken-down, broken-knee’d, spavined, blind roarer, all the summer of whose life has been passed in dreary drudgery, and for whom nought remains but the knacker’s yard, and the cold calculations of the itinerant vendors of cat’s-meat; but of a horse such as a monarch might pet, and the very queen of beauty might deign to ride—a horse such as Gamarra. “A noble steed, Strong, black, and of the desert breed, Full of fire and full of bone, All his line of fathers known, Fine his nose, his nostrils thin, But blown abroad by the pride within.” And who that has ever laid his leg across such, and bounded along the turf, does not feel that the bare memory of it is a joy for ever, thrilling almost as Love’s young dream? Such was our good fortune once; now we creep into town on the top of a ’bus, and our hair is grey, and our pluck is gone, and our heart no larger than a pin’s head.