Through M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, a typical French statesman of the philosophical cast, I secured an invitation to the solitary meeting which Gambetta, as candidate for Belleville, was permitted to hold prior to the actual election. He was, as I have said, under remand in the prosecution by which the Government had sought to silence his voice in the Chamber of Deputies. They could not prevent his making this one speech to his constituents, for the law gave him the right to do so, and the meeting was therefore one of great importance. Gambetta spoke in a large circus which was crowded to excess. He was received with great enthusiasm, but before his speech was over he had wound up his audience to a still higher pitch of passionate fervour. He struck me as being, in some respects, the greatest of all the orators I had ever heard. He had that indispensable qualification of the orator, a voice at once clear, powerful, and melodious. His magnificent physique gave weight to the gestures in which he indulged so freely, and which enabled him to conceal the infirmity from which he suffered--blindness of one eye--whilst at the same time allowing him always to keep his living eye fixed on the crowd before him. I trembled for him when he began his great speech, for, unlike any English orator I ever heard, he did not warm to his subject gradually, taking care to make his audience accompany him step by step, but sprang in a moment to a height of passionate and tempestuous eloquence from which it seemed inevitable that he must quickly fall to an anti-climax. But no anticlimax came. For more than an hour he continued to pour forth a torrent of burning words that seemed to keep the vast multitude before him in a state of excitement and enthusiasm hardly to be exaggerated. Never before and never since have I witnessed such an effect as this produced by an orator, and though he lacked the stately and sonorous delivery of John Bright, and had no pretension to the intellectual persuasiveness of Mr. Gladstone, I have always felt, since hearing that speech, that Gambetta was the greatest orator to whom I ever listened.