à Gand. This speech,' he repeated, is one which must be answered, and answered at the moment. The character of England, involved in that of her public men-the character of England is at stake.' After indignantly repelling Mr. Disraeli's charges and invectives, he ended a masterly analysis of the budget by describing it as based on principles against which all true Conservatives stood pledged.

Mr. Gladstone is more Ciceronian than Demosthenic. Amplification, not condensation, is his forte; but he can be fanciful or pithy on occasions; as when in a budget speech he compared his arrival at the part in which the remissions of taxation were to be announced, to the descent into the smiling valleys of Italy after a toilful ascent of the Alps; or when he said that it was the duty of the minister to stand like a wall of adamant' between the people and the Crown.

Nor is pathos beyond his range. In the course of his speech on Parliamentary Reform, April 27, 1866, he turned to the Liberal party and said:

'I came amongst you an outcast from those with whom I associated, driven from their ranks, I admit, by no arbitrary act, but by the slow and resistless forces of conviction. I came among you, to make use of the legal phraseology, in forma pauperis. I had nothing to offer you but faithful and honourable service: you received me as Dido received the shipwrecked Æneas :

And I only trust you may not hereafter at any time have to complete the sentence in regard to me:

“net regni, demens! in parte locavi.”

You received me with kindness, indulgence, generosity, and I may even say with some measure of your confidence. And the relation between us has assumed such a form that you can never be my debtors, but that I must be for ever in your debt.'

An old and highly esteemed member of the Liberal party (Mr. Philips, member for Bury) said that the delivery of this passage brought tears into his eyes; and he added: "I was not ashamed to own it, when I observed that several friends near me were similarly moved.'1

We must stop here. The walls of our portrait gallery are covered. We are like the Hanging Committee of the Academy, driven to exclusion by selection; and we shall doubtless be suspected of prejudice or partiality, like them. The high claims of the excluded, however, form one among many reasons for looking hopefully to the future, after reverting proudly to the past. There are no rising orators, it is true; nor (as we recently noticed) are there any rising poets, painters, or actors, any rising men of first-rate genius of any kind. Yet England is replete with intellectual life: it must still contain hearts pregnant with celestial fire: and there never existed a more appreciating public; so appreciating, indeed, that in default of real genius, it is often content to put up with counterfeits.

With a rich soil and good seed, why should there be

Since this was written, Mr. Gladstone's reputation as a parliamentary speaker and statesman has rather advanced than declined. Instance upon instance might be cited in which he has shone preeminent in debating power as well as in elevation and comprehensiveness of view.

no harvest, or a blighted one? The destiny of the rising generation may be that of Banquo: Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.' If Gray might ennoble his country churchyard with the dust of imaginary departed worthies, why may we not people our senate with the animated forms of worthies to come? It is good not to despair of the commonwealth, and we do not despair of it. The scene at St. Paul's on Thanksgiving Day has indefinitely postponed the arrival of the New Zealander to sketch its ruins. Whatever may become of the Manchester School, British eloquence, statesmanship, patriotism, and loyalty will not fade like the Tyrian dye: the British Houses of Parliament will not moulder like the Venetian palaces; nor (for it all comes to that) have the people of this little isle' shown the slightest symptom of abandoning or forfeiting the grand position which Mr. Gladstone claimed for them at Blackheath, among the small and select company of great nations that have stamped their names on the page of history, as gifted with the qualities that mark the leaders of mankind.' This recals the fine lines of Goldsmith:

'Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by.'

Have they in any respect degenerated since then?

99

1 versity c

THE PEARLS AND MOCK PEARLS OF
HISTORY.

(FROM THE QUARTERLY REVIEW, APRIL 1861.)

1. L'Esprit des Autres, recueilli et raconté par Edouard Fournier. Troisième édition. Paris, 1857.

2. L'Esprit dans l'Histoire. Recherches et Curiosités sur les Mots historiques. Par Edouard Fournier. Deuxième édition, revue et considérablement augmentée. Paris, 1860.

MANY years before 'aerated bread' was heard of, a company was formed at Pimlico for utilising the moisture which evaporates in the process of baking, by distilling spirit instead of letting it go to waste. Adroitly availing himself of the popular suspicion that the company's loaves must be unduly deprived of alcohol, a readywitted baker put up a placard inscribed 'Bread with the Gin in it,' and customers rushed to him in crowds. We strongly suspect that any over-scrupulous writer who should present history without its pleasant illusions, would find himself in the condition of the projectors who foolishly expected an enlightened public to dispense (as they thought) with an intoxicating ingredient in their bread.

'Pol, me occidistis, amici!

Non servastis, ait, cui sic extorta voluptas,

Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error.'1

'A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that if there were taken from men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?' So says Lord Bacon; and few aphorisms in prose or verse are more popular than Gray's 'Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.' The poet may have been true to his vocation when he rhymed, rather than reasoned, in this fashion; but the philosopher would have been lamentably untrue to his, had he seriously propounded a doctrine which any looseness of interpretation could convert or pervert into an argument against truth, knowledge, or intelligence. Fortunately, the context shows that he was speaking of what is, not what ought to be; that he was no more prepared to contend that credulity and falsehood are legitimate or lasting sources of mental gratification, than that the largest amount of physical enjoyment may be ensured by drunkenness. After speculating a little on the prevalent fondness for delusion, he concludes: Yet howsoever these things are in men's depraved judgments

Horace. Epistles, Lib. 2, Ep. 2, thus translated by Francis: 'My friends, 'twere better you had stopped my breath; Your love was rancour, and your cure was death;

To rob me thus of pleasure so refined,

The dear delusion of a raptur'd mind.'