model of the most artificial workmanship; yet of an art so happy in its results that itself is wholly concealed. The Englishman was negligent, careless, slovenly beyond most speakers; even his most brilliant passages were the inspirations of the moment; and he frequently spoke for half an hour at a time, sometimes delivered whole speeches, without being fluent for five minutes, or, excepting in a few sound and sensible remarks which were interspersed, rewarding the hearer with a single redeeming passage. Indeed, to the last, he never possessed, unless when much animated, any great fluency; and probably despised it, as he well might, if he only regarded its effects in making men neglect more essential qualities,-when the curse of being fluent speakers, and nothing else, has fallen on them and on their audience. Nevertheless, that fluency-the being able easily to express his thoughts in correct words-is as essential to a speaker as drawing to a painter. This we cannot doubt, any more than we can refuse our assent to the proposition, that though merely giving pleasure is no part of an orator's duty, yet he has no vocation to give his audience pain-which any one must feel who listens to a speaker delivering himself with difficulty and hesitation. The practice of composition seems never to have been familiar to Mr. Fox. His speeches show this; perhaps his writings still more; because there, the animation of the momentary excitement which often carried him on in speaking had little or no play. One of his worst speeches, if not his worst, is that upon Francis, Duke of Bedford; and it is known to be almost the only one he had ever much prepared, and the only one he ever corrected for the press. His 'History,' too, shows the same want of expertness in composition. The style is pure and correct, but cold and lifeless: it is even somewhat abrupt and discontinuous; so little does it flow naturally or with ease. Yet, when writing letters without any effort, no one expressed himself more happily, or with more graceful facility: and in conversation, of which he only partook when the society was small and intimate, he was a model of every excellence, whether solid or gay, plain or refined-full of information, witty and playful betimes, never illnatured for a moment;-above all, never afraid of an argument, as so many eminent men are wont to be; but, on the contrary, courting discussion on all subjects, perhaps without much regard to their relative importance; as if reasoning were his natural element, in which his great faculties moved the most freely. An admirable judge, but himself addicted to reasoning upon general principles, the late Mr. Dumont, used to express his surprise at the love of minute discussion, of argumentation upon trifling subjects, which this great man often showed. But the cause was clear; argument he must have; and as his studies, except upon historical and classical points, had been extremely confined, when matters of a political or critical cast were not on the carpet, he took whatever ordinary matter came uppermost, and made it the subject of discussion. To this circumstance may be added his playful good-nature, which partook, as Mr. Gibbon observed, of the simplicity of a child; making him little fastidious and easily interested and amused. Having premised all these qualifications, it must now be added, that Mr. Fox's eloquence was of a kind which, to comprehend, you must have heard himself. When he got fairly into his subject, was heartily warmed with it, he poured forth words and periods of fire that smote you, and deprived you of all power to reflect and rescue yourself, while he went on to seize the faculties of the listener, and carry them captive along with him whithersoever he might please to rush. It is ridiculous to doubt that he was a far closer reasoner, a much more argumentative speaker, than Demosthenes; as much more so as Demosthenes would perhaps have been than Fox had he lived in our times, and had to address an English House of Commons. For it is the kindred mistake of those who fancy that the two were like each other, to imagine that the Grecian's orations are long chains of ratiocination, like Sir William Grant's arguments, or Euclid's demonstrations. They are close to the point; they are full of impressive allusions; they abound in expositions of the adversary's inconsistency; they are loaded with bitter invective; they never lose sight of the subject; and they never quit hold of the hearer, by the striking appeals they make to his strongest feelings and his favourite recollections: to the heart, or to the quick and immediate sense of inconsistency, they are always addressed, and find their way thither by the shortest and surest road; but to the head, to the calm and sober judgment, as pieces of argumentation, they assuredly are not addressed. But Mr. Fox, as he went along, and exposed absurdity, and made inconsistent arguments clash, and laid bare shuffling or hypocrisy, and showered down upon meanness, or upon cruelty, or upon oppression, a pitiless storm of the most fierce invective, was ever forging also the long, and compacted, and massive chain of pure demonstration. Εν δ' εθετ ̓ ἄκμοθετῳ μεγαν ἄκμονα, κόπτε δε δεσμους There was no weapon of argument which this great orator more happily or more frequently wielded than wit, the wit which exposes to ridicule the absurdity or inconsistency of an adverse argument. It has been said of him, we believe by Sir Robert Grant,* that he was the wittiest speaker of his times; and they were the times of Sheridan and of Windham. This was Mr. Canning's opinion, and it was also Mr. Pitt's. There was nothing more awful in Mr. Pitt's sarcasm, * See Quarterly Review' for October, 1810. nothing so vexatious in Mr. Canning's light and galling raillery, as the battering and piercing wit with which Mr. Fox so often interrupted, but always supported, the heavy artillery of his argumentative declamation. "Nonne fuit satius, tristes Amaryllidis iras, Atque superba pati fastidia? Nonne, Menalcan ?" In debate he had that ready discernment of an adversary's weakness, and the advantage to be taken of it, which is, in the war of words, what the coup d'œil of a practised general is in the field. He was ever best in reply: his opening speeches were almost always unsuccessful: the one in 1805, upon the Catholic Question, was a great exception; and the previous meditation upon it, after having heard Lord Grenville's able opening of the same question in the House of Lords, gave him much anxiety: he felt exceedingly nervous, to use the common expression. It was a noble performance, instinct with sound principle; full of broad and striking views of policy; abounding in magnanimous appeals to justice; and bold assertions of right, in one passage touching and pathetic, the description of a Catholic soldier's feelings on reviewing some field where he had shared the dangers of the fight, yet repined to think that he could never taste the glories of command. greatest speeches were those in 1791, on the Russian armament, on Parliamentary Reform in 1797, and on the renewal of the war in 1803. The last he himself preferred to all the others; and it had the disadvantage, if it be not, however, in another sense, the advantage, of coming after the finest speech, excepting that on the slave-trade, ever delivered by his great antagonist But there are passages in the earlier speeches,particularly the fierce attack upon Lord Auckland in His To a great speaker, it is always an advantage to follow a powerful adversary. The audience is prepared for close attention, nay, even feels a craving for some answer. If and Chethan * the Russian speech,-and the impressive and vehement In most of the external qualities of oratory, Mr. Fox was certainly deficient, being of an unwieldy person, without any grace of action, with a voice of little compass, and which, when pressed in the vehemence *This is one main cause of the conciseness and rapidity of the Greek orations; they were all on a few simple topics thoroughly known to the whole audience. Much of their difficulty comes also from this source. |