[367] "Don't quote Latin. Say what you have to say and then sit down!" was the Duke of Wellington's excellent advice to a young member. Walter Bagehot, on the other hand, stated that he had heard an experienced financier say, "If you want to raise a certain cheer in the House of Commons, make a general panegyric on economy; if you want to invite a sure defeat, propose a particular saving!" "The English Constitution," p. 136. [368] Dalling's "Historical Characters," vol. ii. p. 39. We live in a material age. The flowers of rhetoric bloom no longer in the cold business-like atmosphere of the parliamentary garden; only the more practical but unromantic vegetables remain. The rich embroideries of trope and metaphor have been roughly torn from modern speech, leaving the bare skeleton of reason exposed to the public gaze. The grandiose orator of the past, with his ornate phraseology, his graceful periods, his quotations from the poets, has been ousted by the passionless debater, flinging, like the improvident O'Connell, his brood of robust thoughts into the world, without a rag to cover them. No one to-day would dream of expending fifty shillings--let alone fifty guineas--for the privilege of hearing a modern Sheridan address a twentieth-century Parliament; no modern Grattan (as Sheil might say) shatters the pinnacles of this establishment with the lightning of his eloquence. The successful parliamentary speaker is no longer one who is able, in the words of Macaulay, to produce with rapidity a series of stirring but transitory impressions, to excite the minds of five hundred gentlemen at midnight, without saying anything that any of them will remember in the morning.[369] Rather is he the cold judicious politician who chooses his words less for their beauty than for their immunity from subsequent perversion, who can crystallise in a few brief sentences, within the compass of a few minutes, the opinions that it would have taken his ancestors as many hours to express in the turgid rhetoric of a bygone age. The orator--as the name was once understood--is now a _rara avis_, but seldom raising his tuneful voice above the raucous cawing of his fellows. And whoever feels with Gibbon that the great speakers fill him with despair, and the bad ones with terror, will leave the precincts of Parliament to-day more often terrorstricken than desperate. That this should be so is no reason for giving way to gloom or sorrow. Parliamentary eloquence is not necessarily the sign of a country's greatness. The English Parliament, which began by acclaiming Burke as the prince of orators, soon became indifferent to his powers, and ended by labelling him the "Dinner Bell." Fox has left no memorial of any good wrought by his oratory. "Neither the Habeas Corpus Act, nor the Bill of Rights, nor Magna Charta originated in eloquence," and if it be true that "a senate of orators is a symptom of material decay,"[370] we may look forward to