[355] Prior's "Life of Malone," p. 361. It was said that it required great mental exertion to follow Fox while he was speaking, but none to remember what he had said; but that it was easy to follow Pitt, but hard to remember what there was in his speech that had pleased one. The difference between the two men was the difference between the orator and the debater. It resulted largely from the fact that the one gave much time to the preparation of his speeches, while the other relied upon the inspiration of the moment. Pitt, as Porson says, carefully considered his sentences before he uttered them; Fox threw himself into the middle of his, "and left it to God Almighty to get him out again."[356] If the former was the more dignified as a speaker, the latter scored by being always so terribly in earnest. Grattan, who affirmed that Pitt's eloquence marked an era in the senate, that it resembled "sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music, of the spheres," and admitted that Pitt was right nine times for once that Fox was right, declared that that once of Fox was worth all the other nine times of Pitt.[357] [356] Samuel Roger's "Recollections," p. 80. [357] "Memoirs of Thomas Moore," vol. iv. p. 215. (Francis Howard compared Pitt's eloquence to Handel's music, see "Memoirs of Francis Howard," vol. i. p. 149.) No doubt the Parliament of those days was not so critical a body as it has since become. Lord Chesterfield, at least, held it in the profoundest contempt. "When I first came into the House of Commons," he says, "I respected that assembly as a venerable one; and felt a certain awe upon me; but, upon better acquaintance, that awe soon vanished; and I discovered that, of the five hundred and sixty, not above thirty could understand reason, and that all the rest were _peuple_; that those thirty only required plain common-sense, dressed up in good language; and that all the others only required flowing and harmonious periods, whether they conveyed any meaning or not; having ears to hear, but not sense enough to judge."[358] This scathing indictment of the intelligence of the Commons may possibly have been true at the time when it was written: it would certainly not be applicable to-day. Meaningless periods, however harmonious, are no longer tolerated. In Lord Chesterfield's day, however, sound seems to have been more important than sense, as may be gathered from an account he gives elsewhere of a speech made in 1751 in the House of Lords. He was speaking upon a Bill for the Reform of the Calendar, a subject upon which he knew absolutely nothing. To conceal his ignorance he conceived the idea of giving the House an historical account of calendars generally, from Ancient Egyptian to modern times, being particularly attentive to the choice of his words, to the harmony of his periods, and to his elocution. The peers were enchanted. "They thought I informed," he explains, "because I pleased