In readiness of debate I suppose he had no superior on either side of the House, but the complexity of his mind, with its ever-watchful care to temper each direct and simple statement with what the speaker conceived to be its necessary qualifications, was mirrored in the often overburdened structure of his lengthened periods; and yet even in this defect the unflagging energy and sustained intellectual agility of the speaker were constantly exhibited. I fancy no orator of his own or any other time could so safely conduct himself through the sinuous ways of a prolonged sentence with a sense of such security to the hearers that there would be no lapse or failure in the ordered arrangement of its many modifying clauses. On constant provocation he often spoke with a fire that enabled him to liberate himself from the entangled meshes of parenthesis which haunted him in his more considered utterances, and I remember being present in the House during the dramatic little scene between him and Disraeli which showed these two parliamentary gladiators at their best. Somewhat rashly, perhaps, Disraeli had indulged in a sarcastic reference to Mr. Gladstone’s earlier adherence to Tory principles, and at the conclusion of his speech Mr. Gladstone, springing to his feet, retorted upon his opponent with telling effect by reminding the Conservative statesman that he himself had once sought to win the Liberal vote. The right honourable gentleman, secure I suppose in the knowledge of his own consistency, has taunted me with the political errors of my boyhood. The right honourable gentleman, when he addressed the honourable member for Westminster [J. Stuart Mill], took occasion to show his magnanimity, for he declared that he would not take the philosopher to task for what he wrote twenty-five years ago. But when he caught one who thirty-five years ago, just emerged from boyhood and still an undergraduate at Oxford, had expressed an opinion adverse to the Reform Bill of 1832, of which he had so long and bitterly repented, then the right honourable gentleman could not resist the temptation that offered itself to his appetite for effect. He, a parliamentary champion of twenty years’ standing, and the leader, as he informs us to-night, of the Tory party, is so ignorant of the House of Commons, or so simple in the structure of his mind, that he positively thought he would obtain a parliamentary advantage by exhibiting me to the public view for reprobation as an opponent of the Reform Bill of 1832. Sir, as the right honourable gentleman has done me the honour thus to exhibit me, let me for a moment trespass on the patience of the House to exhibit myself. What he has stated is true. I deeply regret it. But I was bred under the shadow of the great name of Canning; every influence connected with that name governed the first political