Gladstone, John
Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Hartington, Henry James and
Randolph Churchill. When any of these rose to speak, the House
filled at once, they were listened to with eager attention, and
every word they uttered would be read by hundreds of thousands of
people next day. Nowadays proceedings in Parliament seem to be
limited to a very occasional solo from the one star-performer, the
rest of the time being occupied by uninteresting interludes by his
understudies, all of which may serve to explain the decline in
public interest. At the time of the Peace of Paris in 1856, on the
termination of the Crimean War, there were in the House of Commons
such outstanding figures as Gladstone, Disraeli, Lord John
Russell, John Bright, and Palmerston; the statesman had not yet
dwindled into the lawyer-politician.
I only heard Mr. Gladstone speak in his old age, when his voice
had acquired a slight roughness which detracted, I thought, from
his wonderful gift of oratory. Mr. Gladstone, too, had certain
peculiarities of pronunciation; he always spoke of
"constitootional" and of "noos.
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