‘His ruddy complexion was crowned by a shock of milk-white hair. His usual dress was a light grey coat, a white waistcoat, and kerseymere breeches of sandy colour, into whose pockets he used to thrust his hands when he walked about the House. There was something so dull and heavy about his whole appearance that anyone who did not know him would have set him down for a country clodpoll—to use a favourite expression of his own—who not only never read a book or had a single idea in his head, but was a mere mass of mortality without a particle of sensibility of any kind.’ Lord John Russell, at this time a member of Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet equally with Jeffrey, had nothing in common with Cobbett except a light-coloured waistcoat and kerseymere trousers of a sandy complexion. His height was even less than that attained by the famous editor of the ‘Edinburgh.’ Q describes him as ‘Considerably below middle size, slenderly made, and presenting the appearance of a person of weakened constitution. His features are large and broadly marked, his complexion pale, his countenance of a pensive cast. He scarcely ever indulges in a smile.’ He is roundly described as one of the worst speakers in the House. His voice was weak and his enunciation imperfect, hampered by stammer or stutter at every fourth or fifth sentence. He had a habit of repeating frequently three or four times the first two or three words of a sentence. His oratorical style was further embellished by a hesitating cough. Q supplies a verbatim note taken down as Lord John stood inanimate at the table, his voice inaudible to one-half of his audience. ‘I—I—I—hem—think the motion of the honourable member is—is ill-timed at the—at the—hem—present moment.’ Q is inexplicably hard on Palmerston, who at the early age of forty-five attained the position of Foreign Secretary. ‘The situation he fills in the Cabinet,’ he writes with solitary touch of personal rancour, ‘gives him a certain degree of prominence in the eyes of the country which he certainly does not possess in Parliament. His talents are by no means of a high order.’ He is described as an indifferent speaker, handicapped like his colleague Lord John Russell by a vocal trick of stuttering and stammering. ‘He is very indolent, irregular in his attendance upon his parliamentary duties, and when in the House by no means active in defence of his principles or his friends.’ Tall and handsome in person, he was always dressed in the height of fashion, a habit which we are told suggested to _The Times_ the sobriquet of ‘Cupid,’ by which, with levity unknown in Printing House Square in these later days, it was accustomed to make editorial allusion to the Foreign Secretary. Hume is described as head of the country Liberal Party.