It has been my privilege to have heard all the great orators of America who have become singularly famed about the world's circumference. I know what was the majesty of Webster; I know what it was to melt under the magnetism of Henry Clay; I have seen eloquence in the iron logic of Calhoun; but O'Connell was Webster, Clay, and Calhoun in one. Before the courts, logic; at the bar of the senate, unanswerable and dignified; on the platform, grace, wit, and pathos; before the masses, a whole man. Emerson says, "There is no true eloquence, unless there is a man behind the speech." Daniel O'Connell was listened to because all England and Ireland knew that there was a man behind the speech,--one who could be neither bought, bullied, nor cheated. When I was in Naples, I asked Thomas Fowell Buxton, "Is Daniel O'Connell an honest man?" "As honest a man as ever breathed," said he, and then he told me the following story: "When, in 1830, O'Connell first entered Parliament, the anti-slavery cause was so weak that it had only Lushington and myself to speak for it, and we agreed that when he spoke I should cheer him up, and when I spoke he should cheer me, and these were the only cheers we ever got. O'Connell came with one Irish member to support him. A large party of members (I think Buxton said twenty-seven) whom we called the West India interest, the Bristol party, the slave party, went to him, saying, 'O'Connell, at last you are in the House, with one helper. If you never go down to Freemason's Hall with Buxton and Brougham, here are twenty-seven votes for you on every Irish question. If you work with those Abolitionists, count us always against you.' "It was a terrible temptation. How many a so-called statesman would have yielded! O'Connell said, 'Gentlemen, God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if to help Ireland--even Ireland--I forget the negro one single hour.' From that day," said Buxton, "Lushington and I never went into the lobby that O'Connell did not follow us." And then, besides his irreproachable character he had what is half the power of a popular orator, he had a majestic presence. A little O'Connell would have been no O'Connell at all. In youth he had the brow of a Jupiter and a stature of Apollo. Sydney Smith says of Lord John Russell's five feet, when he went down to Yorkshire after the Reform Bill had passed, the stalwart hunters of Yorkshire exclaimed, "What, that little shrimp, he carry the Reform Bill!" "No, no!" said Smith, "he was a large man, but the labors of the bill shrunk him."