course of concession, or decided resistance to French ferocity, and supplicants for mercy; or else of pledging every resource. and every energy against the foe, and a determination to conquer or be conquered. At the commencement of the struggle, many or most of the powers of Europe took this lofty ground, and the war was declared "bellum internecinum." It was forgotten that it was a war of principle, in which the parties were the governed and their governors; the one seizing the occasion to put forward claims to which heretofore all expression had been closed; the other driven for their own preservation, however they might feel the justice of those demands, to oppose them through all extremities. England the abuses under which men suffered, and the restraints they produced, made the freedom they really enjoyed a source of danger; for the people knew what they had, and what they had not, what they should have, and what was kept from them; and, in this way, adding to excitement, by making their wants and deficiencies yet more evident. This appeared at the opening of the French revolution. The discontented of England took advantage of the occasion to urge their claims on the government. All classes had some wish to gratify; the disappointed and profligate, rich and poor, wanted power, and the government, in the midst of this turbulent state of feeling, was compelled to strengthen itself by appealing to patriotism, ambition, and fear. The great question was, whether the way in which this was done, under existing or under any circumstances, was justifiable. On this point the party in power and the opposition divided; and on this ground the two champions of things as they were, and things as they ought to be, the rivals in ability and desire of power, took their position, and fought foot to foot for more than twenty years. Pitt chose to consider the revolution in France as an accident; that it had not been produced by a long course of oppression; and that its seeds had not been for a long time taking root in the minds of men; but that it was the result of mere temporary excitement, and instigated by a band of visionary philosophers, while its chief actors were a body of ferocious assassins. He saw nothing in it but the subversion of all government-the downfall of law and order-the obliteration of the prerogatives of time and every vestige of the past; and ridiculed the idea that it was the opening of a new era in the history of man. Fox took a directly opposite view. He regarded it as the greatest event that had ever occurred-a revolution in man's civil and intellectual life-a complete change in his destinies and his hopes. However the manner in which it was conducted was open to abhorrence-however fierce and bloody its scenes—he looked beyond these, and did not hesitate to approve, with his whole soul, the event itself. His opponent saw, under the false pretence of justice, the innocent, the virtuous, all whose wealth made them objects of envy, whose qualities dignified human nature, perish on the scaffold. He drew back from the contemplation of the future in the view of the present, and permitted the disgust and horror roused by the scenes before him, to turn him from the perception of the developments of time. The other lamented the wide ruin and reckless havoc that accompanied the event; but considered them as the natural and necessary consequences of a long oppressed people suddenly and by violence acquiring their rights, without understanding or knowing how to make use of them. The blame of these excesses was not with the people of France, but with those who had kept them under the basest of all servitude-the vassalage of ignorance; and who now deemed that from a condition of such degradation they were at once to become a mild and enlightened nation. Was it to be supposed that they would not act up to the character thus impressed upon them, and seek retribution, without regard to any thing but the gratification of their revenge? To hope the contrary, was to expect too much from men; and it was on this ground that Fox looked from the manner in which France conducted the revolution, to the principles it involved; and in these he saw freedom to men, equal rights, and all by which human character can be elevated, all by which men and nations can be advanced in moral excellence and intellectual greatness. This was a natural view with a mind so enlarged and liberal as that of Mr. Fox, and which ever took the favourable side of human character. But Pitt thought this romantic or untrue; or, from his situation of first minister, he had formed very different conclusions concerning men from those of his opponent, or he might have been really alarmed for England, or, what is as probable, his mind was not expanded and warmed by his heart, but narrowed by the extreme caution his position required, and its tremendous responsibility. There was this difference in the character of the two men; the one ever advocated the most generous principles, and carried all his ideas of government to an extreme: he wished an entirely new era, in which men and minds should be able to exist by themselves and for themselves, without the control of self-constituted power; in fact, he upheld the sovereignty of the people. Pitt clung to old habits of thinking, and conceived that men could only be governed by their interests or corruption. From the sketch here given of the characters and principles of these two individuals, it is not difficult to declare which of the two was the better orator-the one who opened the heart, who warmed its benevolence, who excited its best and purest feelings, who elevated men's views of himself and his fellow men, who struggled to awaken his hope of attaining excellence, and to improve his capacity for it, and who, to sum his virtues as a man, in the words of Burke, was born to be loved; or he who called forth men's patriotism by stimulating their cupidity and pandering to their ambition, who relied upon corruptness of motive and selfish design as the basis of human action, and the conceding to these as the surest if not only means of making men subserve his purposes. It would be unjust to create an impression that Pitt acted on these principles with any personal object; he is universally acquitted of this, though he is charged with political corruption in all its extremes. This might be, and probably was, essential for the preservation of his power; but whether power so preserved is for the moral or political advantage of a nation, is another question. He may have regarded himself (and it is best if not safest in judging men to concede to them honourable motives) as the defender of his country and its constitution; and with this feeling and for such ends, that any mode of supporting himself in authority was lawful and necessary. But, however we may view Pitt, it is impossible to conceive him to be as great an orator as his rival. His dignified manner, his well modulated voice, his beautiful language and polished periods, heightened as they were by his father's fame, his own talents and moral character, must have made him effective in any body; though, through the idea one forms of the cold concentration of his manners and disposition, the heart and imagination do not warm to him as they do to Fox. We cannot conceive him to have been a popular orator, or as more than a debater the term Burke applies to Fox, though he qualifies its meagreness, and the minor rank it seems to assign him, by the words, "the most brilliant and accomplished the world has seen." But perhaps the best example of what an orator should be, is Burke. He cannot be cut down to the narrow sphere of a debater, but moves in the full orbit of a great orator. His fine philosophical spirit, his capacity, more enlarged than any other of his time, his acquirements, the richness of his imagination, and brilliancy of his fancy, made him pre-eminent among the great spirits of his time, not as an orator alone, but as a man. No one approached his intellectual dimensions; no one could encounter him without being humbled; and no one could listen to him without being instructed. To this we have the testimony of Fox after their rupture, "that if he were to put all the political information which he had learned from books, all which he had gained from science, and all which any knowledge of the world and its affairs had taught him, into one scale, and the improvement which he had derived from his right honourable friend in the other, he should be at a loss to decide to which to give the preference." Yet, with all these extraordinary qualities, his influence in the house of commons was very trifling; in part, because they could not appreciate him; in part, because he overlooked many of those minor acquisitions, as they really are, though of importance, where common minds are to be addressed and common feelings to be influenced. But much of this want of influence was owing to a want of discretion. He does not appear to have understood the management of himself; and, of course, was unable to acquire a control over others. His exhibitions of ill temper and irritable feeling were, at times, almost disgusting, and they took from him at last the moral weight. which belonged to him from the greatness of his talents and excellence of his character, and which, in itself, forms a powerful instrument in creating authority and attracting attention. To one who is not favoured with a good temper, or who has not a bad one under control, all contradiction or opposition is a source of agitation. To one who, with this defect, possesses, at the same time, commanding abilities, and who, from the nature of his mind, is led to regard little things with contempt, the small opposition of small minds, with their various modes of irritating and thwarting, becomes something more than an inconvenience. Insignificant as they may be, when brought to their true measure, they still can fling their venomed weapons with effect, and it is a mistake, not unfrequently made by these great capacities, to lay themselves open to these petty attacks by the neglect of parts, degrees, and elements of a matter with which they may be occupied, and to presume, because they have perfectly mastered it, that inferior minds will be equally ready and equally able. It was in little things, if in any thing, that Burke exposed himself to the ridicule of the silly and ignorant. In all that constituted true greatness, in all that showed strength and extent of capacity, he was beyond the jealousy or detraction of any one. His eminence could not be denied in these points; and it was from this elevation that he was made to overlook those details in affairs and individual differences in character, that the practical statesman and man of the world observe and employ, and which are with them all or nearly all they know or conceive to be important. His mind was not of He the nature that would have made him a useful minister. took too large a view, and generalized too much, to have that ready adaptation of means to ends, that quick insight into motives, and the rapid glance and keen penetration into times and occasions, which form almost the sole value of one who directs the details of government. He perhaps judged too well of mankind, or despised them too much, to be ever watching conduct, and prying into feeling, or trying to gratify their desires. He could not, which is all important in one who undertakes the government of men, appreciate or make use of those minor exigencies and small opportunities in affairs which constantly occur; nor, perhaps, was it possible for him to turn to his advantage those foibles in character by which men are controlled far more easily than through uncommon virtues or great vices. There is no necessity for drawing a comparison between the three men to whom we have alluded as examples in oratory. Burke was, beyond a doubt, the first mind of his day, and the first orator of his nation at any time. We can thus easily fix his position as respects his intellectual character, but where does he rank as an orator? He was not a popular orator, as that term is generally understood. He could not have addressed a mob from the hustings with effect-certainly not with half the effect of Fox. He could not have commanded their feelings, or carried them with him through a long oration. He could not have met in any way the ignorance and stupidity of the mass; but, like Cæsar, he would have swooned, not from the stinking atmosphere, but with indignation at their dulness or indifference. He was not, in this low meaning of the word, a popular orator, nor was he such if we carry him to the house of commons, where, in the best sense, a man may be considered a popular orator-where the majesty of the people of Great Britain is addressed-where their power is expressed and their will given forth. Yet here, except to very few, who listened to the overflowings of his genius, who sought information, and who knew that they had before them, in one sense, the wisest and greatest man of the times, it does not appear that he commanded the minds or feelings of the house. He did not arouse the dull, stir the lazy, or attract the indifferent; but, on the contrary, he fatigued his audience by not meeting the tone of their minds: all his splendid eloquence was wasted; they could not rise to the height where he soared; there was no sympathy between them-the one moving on a barren level, and interested only in commonplace; the other assuming a wide range, and circling a vast sphere of thought. There could of course be no communion between natures so different. Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, These lines contain the sources of Burke's deficiencies as a public man, and the real cause of his failure in political life. The being too deep for his hearers, the refining, the trying to convince while they thought of dining, were, in a body like the house of commons, insuperable difficulties in the path of success. A popular assembly is not the place such a man |