government in general, had the advantages of expressing what many felt but few had ventured to say, and of being delivered from one side of the House and cheered by the other side. No position gives a debater in the House of Commons such a vantage ground for securing attention. Its rarity makes it remarkable. If the speaker who attacks his own party is supposed to do so from personal motives, the personal element gives piquancy. If he may be credited with conscientious conviction, his shafts strike with added weight, for how strong must conviction be when it turns a man against his former friends. Accordingly, nothing so much annoys a party and gratifies its antagonists as when one of its own recalcitrant members attacks it in flank. When one looks back now at the contents of these speeches--there were only five or six of them--and finds one's self surprised at their success, this favouring circumstance and the whole temper of the so-called "upper classes" need to be remembered. The bulk of the wealthier commercial class and a large section of the landed class had theretofore belonged to the Liberal party. Most of them, however, were then already beginning to pass through what was called Whiggism into habits of thought that were practically Tory. They did not know how far they had gone till Lowe's speeches told them, and they welcomed his ideas as justifying their own tendencies. In themselves, as pieces either of rhetoric or of "civil wisdom," the speeches are not first-rate. No one would dream of comparing them to Burke's, in originality, or in richness of diction, or in weight of thought. But for the moment they were far more appreciated than Burke's were by the House of his time, which thought of dining while he thought of convincing. Robert Lowe was for some months the idol of a large part of the educated class, and indeed of that part chiefly which plumed itself upon its culture. I recollect to have been in those days at a breakfast party given by an eminent politician and nominal supporter of the Liberal Ministry, and to have heard Mr. G. S. Venables, the leader of the _Saturday Review_ set, an able and copious writer who was a sort of literary and political oracle among his friends, deliver, amid general applause, including that of the host, the opinion that Lowe was an intellectual giant compared to Mr. Gladstone, and that the reputation of the latter had been extinguished for ever.