"Look at O'Connell with his people--for they are truly his people. He lives of their life, he smiles with their joys, he bleeds with their wounds, he groans with their pains. He transports them at his will from fear to hope, from slavery to liberty, from the fact to the right, from the right to duty, from supplication to invective, and from anger to mercy and pity. He directs the people to kneel on the ground and pray, and they all kneel and pray; to raise their faces to the skies, and they raise them; to curse their tyrants, and they curse them; to sing hymns to liberty, and they sing them; to bare their heads and swear on the holy Gospels, and they uncover, raise the hand, and swear; to sign petitions for the reform of abuses, to unite their forces, to pardon their enemies, and they sign, they forget, they embrace, they forgive. {152} "That which makes him incomparable among all the orators of this or any other country, is that, without any premeditation, and by impulse alone, by the sole force of his powerful and triumphant nature, he enters wholly into his subject, and appears to be more possessed by it than of himself. His heart overflows; it goes by bounds, by transports, bringing into play all its pulsations. Like a high-bred charger, suddenly pulled back on its nervous and quivering haunches, even so can O'Connell arrest himself in the unbridled course of his harangues, turn short and resume them--such versatility, spring, and vigor is there in his eloquence. You imagine at first that he is staggering, and about to succumb under the weight of the divinity which inwardly agitates him; but he rises again with a halo on his brow, an eye full of flame, and his voice, unlike that of a mortal, begins to resound in the air, and to fill all space. "He is lyrical as a poet, and familiar even to playfulness. He draws his audience to him, and then transfers them to the floor of the theatre; or descends himself and mixes with the spectators. He never allows the stage to be without speech or action for a single moment. {153} He distributes the parts to each. He himself sits as judge: he arraigns and he condemns; the people ratify, upraise the hand, and seem to believe that they are joining in a verdict. Some times O'Connell adapts the interior drama of a family to the external drama of political affairs. He calls up his aged father, his ancestors and the ancestors of the people. ... He disposes and extemporizes narratives, monologues, dialogues, _propoeia_, interludes, and peripatetics. Knowing that the Irish are both light-hearted and melancholy, that they are fond of metaphor, flourish, and sarcasm, he stifles laughter with tears, the grandiose by the grotesque. He attacks the House of Lords, and, chasing them from their aristocratic lairs, tracks them one by one like wild beasts. He is always popular, be his speech grave, sublime, or jocular:--