572 The New Ministry. [JUNE, 



ever was a " crack " oration a two hours' speed), full of eloquence and 

 brilliancy made upon any side of the House of Commons, or upon any 

 subject not purely and essentially, and in detail, one of commerce and 

 " business !" from the passionate and unrebuked appeals to the House of 

 the honourable haronet, the member for Westminster whose addresses of 

 late years are so hasty and incoherent, that even the occasional streams of 

 real eloquence and beauty which burst forth in them would scarcely secure 

 their being listened to, were it not for the high constitutional English spirit 

 with which they are embued and that the argument, rambling and dis- 

 connected as it is, has always the charm of being obviously fresh and unpre- 

 meditated ; from these wild and rash, but never rude or discourteous, cavalry 

 reconnaissances of the member for Westminster, to the fierce, storm-menacing, 

 mischief-raising, attacks of the learned member for Winchelsea ! whose 

 war-cry, like the arms of the single soldier who captured his enemies by " sur- 

 rounding" them, seems to threaten his antagonists always from forty points 

 of the compass at once ! whose charge comes on with the sweeping rush of 

 a cloud of light-armed Arabs, or a whole nation of tomahawk-armed 

 American Indians startling, overwhelming, irregular, and remorseless 

 careless of safety incessantly various of weapon as of position unsparing, 

 unintermitting from the morning, when the sword is first drawn, to the 

 evening, when the scabbard is looked for (which was thrown away) and 

 always in attack ! whose fire seems to come upon the House, not by 

 broadsides or discharges of platoons not as the work of one man's will, 

 or the dealing of one man's hand but as the irregular exertion and inde- 

 pendent imagination of twenty men at once -making the whole area of 

 the House of Commons, as it were, one great field of battle, in which a 

 two-edged sword is whirling round, dealing great gashes right and left 

 not to speak of a left hand betimes at work with a dagger, or throwing up 

 rockets, shells, grenades, petards no matter what but always something 

 of danger ; and dealing all so carelessly or desperately, that allies had need 

 to look sharp with shield and helmet, or they (as well as enemies) may 

 chance of some mischief in the mellay ! and, again, from these extraor- 

 dinary, almost semi-barbarous, displays of strength of Mr. Brougham 

 the splendour of which, combined with the eccentricity, renders them 

 perhaps the most interesting that are to be witnessed in the House of 

 Commons to the more scholastic and courtly exhibitions of civilized gla- 

 diatorship of Mr. Canning ! whose style and temperament, though equally 

 bold, and even more violent, than that of 4iis honourable and learned late 

 opponent and present colleague, has less, outwardly, of bitterness and 

 seeming delight in misanthropic irony than that of the member for Win- 

 chelsea in it ! and who sets out in the battle always not like a partisan, 

 or a Croat or Pandour leader but as a British general, who has his self- 

 command entire, and all his arrangements made, to a hair, before he 

 enters the field ! his reserve posted his power duly marshalled and dis- 

 tributed his artillery in front, to meet the enemy's charge his cavalry 

 ready, to take advantage of their first moment of disorder and then sounds 

 trumpet to " advance!" as though he felt the eyes of Europe were upon 

 him ! From the harangues of the first of these orators who never thinks 

 or cares what it is he says; to those of the second whom opposition, the 

 mere spirit of controversy and contradiction, will lead to say almost any 

 thing ; and, again, to those of the third, who is betrayed (where he does 

 fail) by the excitation and triumph attendant upon success, arid whose 



