that Absolutist arch of which Miguel, the Portuguese usurper, and Spain, and Austria, and the Sultan Mahmoud were the component parts. He complained that Greece had been treated with scanty generosity; that with regard to the conflict between Russia and Turkey, the Wellington ministry had not made bona fide efforts to bring about peace, and so to prevent the conflagration from spreading over Europe, by "setting their faces on the one hand against territorial acquisition by Russia, and, on the other hand, by resisting stoutly and firmly the intrigues of other powers to stimulate the obstinacy of Turkey." Three-fourths of the speech dealt with the condition of affairs in Portugal, and the speaker undoubtedly made out a very strong case for censure. The Government had professed to act on the principle of non-interference; in reality, they had interfered constantly, "only on the wrong side." In a sketch of the relations which had prevailed of late years between England and Portugal, Palmerston pointed out that it was on English advice that Dom Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, had acted when he abdicated his rights to the throne of Portugal in favour of his little daughter, Donna Maria. The conditions of that abdication had been the marriage of the young queen, when she was of age, with her uncle, Dom Miguel, who swore at Vienna, in the presence of the British Ambassador, to maintain as Regent the laws of Portugal and the institutions granted by Dom Pedro. Having taken these vows with the intention of breaking them, Miguel paid a visit to the English court on his way to Lisbon, and so "the King of England had been made a stalking-horse under whose cover this royal poacher had crept on his unsuspecting prey." Miguel had marched to his palace. surrounded by British troops, and so encouraged the

constitutional party to make no secret of their aims and aspirations; but when he had broken his oath, dissolved the constitutional chambers, and proclaimed himself king, the contingent of British troops, after playing a tacitly acquiescent part, had been withdrawn from Lisbon. During the reign of terror which followed, under which no less than five British subjects had been imprisoned without trial, the English Government had indeed remonstrated, but without the slightest result; "Buonaparte, in the plenitude and insolence of his power, never treated the humble representative of a petty German principality with more contemptuous disregard than that which our remonstrances had met with at the hands of Dom Miguel." If Dom Miguel had been treated as "a spoiled and favourite child," great harshness had, on the other hand, been employed by the Wellington administration towards the Loyalist party. When Miguel had declared their stronghold, Oporto, to be in a state of blockade, the British Government had hastened to acknowledge the blockade. When the Loyalist refugees in England had demanded to be allowed to go to the assistance of Terceira in the Azores, which still held out for Donna Maria, permission had been refused on the ground that they could not be allowed to sail from a British port; and when they had fitted out an expedition in defiance of the Duke's command, they had been stopped by a British vessel, "the blood of unarmed and defenceless men was shed in the only harbour of their sovereign, and under the shadow of her flag; and the navy of England, heretofore accounted the protector and the avenger of the injured, was made the subservient tool of injury and oppression."

This speech is perhaps as characteristic an example as there exists of Palmerston's earlier oratory.

On

the whole, it must be pronounced decidedly second-rate when compared with the great masterpieces of British forensic art. The reader searches in vain for the concentrated brilliancy of phrase which has given immor tality to the utterances of Chatham. The purpurei panni are there, and on occasion passages of the most arrant clap-trap—for instance, when the kissing of little Donna Maria by George IV., on the occasion of her visit to England, is termed "a recognition in which the inborn nobleness of royal nature contrived to infuse into the dry forms of State ceremonial something almost partaking of the charm and the spirit of chivalrous protection." Still less should the reader expect to find any of those profound deductions, drawn from the knowledge of mankind and the headsprings of philosophy, which are features of the style of Burke. He is favoured instead with the following reminiscence of Dugald Stewart's pupil-room :-"There is in nature no moving power but mind, and all else is passive and inert; in human affairs this power is opinion, in political affairs it is public opinion; and he who can grasp the power, with it will subdue the fleshly arm of physical strength, and compel it to work out its purpose." In short, the speech seldom rises above the commonplace, either in thought or in language; an elaborate metaphor resolves itself on examination into our old friends the great ship and the " puny insect" at the helm.

Still, with certain deductions, the speech must be pronounced a performance of genuine and peculiar merit. It is evidently, like all of the more elaborate of Palmerston's earlier efforts, the result of very careful preparation, and, taken as a whole, it contains a wellarranged and complete statement of the grounds of righteous indignation entertained by the people at large

against the Wellington administration. Throughout his life, Lord Palmerston's main strength lay in his exposition of a case, whether for the prosecution or the defence; and this strength is exhibited even more markedly in his despatches than in his set speeches. It is, as Greville acutely remarks, "when he takes his pen in his hand that his intellect seems to have full play "; but in his speeches, though in a less degree, is to be seen an instinctive skill in putting points in their most telling manner, in gliding over awkward admissions, and in gauging the intellect and disposition of his audience, whom he was in the habit of tickling with jokes and local allusions. Spoken entirely for the moment, they have not much permanent value, in themselves and considered apart from their results; and Palmerston's oratory, like that of all statesmen who aim chiefly at being "Parliamentary hands," was in its day over-estimated, and afterwards consigned to a somewhat too complete oblivion. For in spite of much fustian and not a little insincerity, his are the speeches of a gentleman; of a brave man, who knew exactly what his aim was, and how it was to be accomplished; of one who, except when led astray by personal prejudices, had really large views on political morality, and who firmly believed that it was England's mission to help the oppressed of the earth, and that she was thoroughly able to execute that mission.

Though Wellington can hardly have been grateful to Palmerston for constituting himself censor-in-chief of the Tory foreign policy, he made several overtures of reconciliation to the ex-Secretary at War during the last days of his career as Premier. The first was through Melbourne, who, however, declined to join without Huskisson and Grey. The second, made after

the death of Huskisson, was through Lord Clive; but Palmerston insisted on the admission of Grey and Lansdowne to office as a sine quâ non, proving thereby how closely he was now linked with the Whigs. The third, made through Croker, was brought to a dramatic conclusion. "Well," said Croker, "I will bring the matter to a point. Are you resolved, or are you not, to vote for Parliamentary Reform?" Palmerston said, . "I am." Well, then," said Croker, "there is no use in talking to you any more on the subject." The Canningites were irresistibly compelled, as were the Peelites after them, to throw in their lot with Liberalism.

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