As he spoke many of the assembled gentlemen of England were seen indignantly dashing away, or furtively wiping from their eyes, the tears of which no one need have been for one moment ashamed. When Lord Palmerston arose to answer the oration, and to repeat to the House its own predominant convictions, the bursts of cheering with which his entirely unoratorical speech was welcomed were heard even in the House of Lords. But what the members cheered was not Lord Palmerston's eloquence, for to eloquence he had scarcely the smallest pretence, but the British pluck which would not succumb to the intense feeling which the great orator had aroused by appeals that had held his audience "hushed as an infant at the mother's breast." [Illustration: A CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDE OF THE LATE MR. GLADSTONE.] On the evening before this speech Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden had been the guests of a former kind friend of mine, Mr. W. S. Lindsay, M.P., in his beautiful house on the banks of the Thames. Mr. Lindsay had been the warm ally of both these great leaders in the Free Trade agitation, and he told me this curious anecdote. Mr. Bright, as is well known, carefully studied his speeches and committed them to memory word for word, delivering them in such measured, yet often thrilling, tones as gave to each word its utmost force. Mr. Lindsay said that the evening before--knowing the extreme importance of the speech, and the fact that he would be trying to persuade a multitude of hearers against their will--Mr. Bright had recited to these two friends in the drawing-room the arguments which he intended to enunciate. But he had not then brought in the allusion to the Angel of Death. The three members were sitting side by side during the debate; and it was perhaps as a relief to his own over-burdened feelings that Mr. Cobden, when the tumult of applause which followed the speech had subsided, said to Mr. Bright, "Where did you get hold of that passage about the angel, John? You did not say it to us last night." "No," answered the orator; "I only thought of it while I was dressing this morning." "Now, if you had said 'the _flapping_ of his wings,' instead of 'the _beating_ of his wings,'" said Cobden, "everyone would have laughed." I have no doubt that in this apparently trivial criticism Cobden was only seeking to lighten the oppression of his own misgivings about the national policy of that time; but, curiously enough, I several times heard Dean Stanley allude to the great speech, both in conversation and in sermons, and he _always_ quoted the passage, "We may almost hear the _flapping_ of his wings." [Illustration: (_Photo: Elliott and Fry, Baker Street, W_.) RICHARD COBDEN.]