exceptions, it is because they are not lawyers.

I do not recollect any other speaker of importance but Mr. Canning; and he requires a chapter by himself. Thus then I would try to estimate him. The orator and the writer do not always belong to the same class of intellectual character; nor is it, I think, in general, fair to judge of the merit of popular harangues by reducing them to the standard of literary compositions. Something,-a great deal, is to be given to the suddenness of the emergency, the want of preparation, the instantaneous and effectual, but passing appeal to individual characters, feelings, and events. The speaker has less time allowed him to enforce his purpose, and to produce the impression he aims at than the writer; and he is therefore entitled to produce it by less scrupulous, by more obvious and fugitive means. He must strike the iron while it is hot. The blow must be prompt and decisive. He must mould the convictions and purposes of his hearers while they are under the influence of passion and circumstances,-as the glass-blower moulds the vitreous fluid with his breath. If he can take the popular mind by surprise, and stamp on it, while warm, the impression desired, it is not to be demanded whether the same means would have been equally successful on cool reflection or after the most mature deliberation. That is not the question at issue. At a moment's notice, the expert debater is able to start some topic, some view of a subject, which answers the purpose of the moment. He can suggest a dextrous evasion of his adversaries' objections, he knows when to seize and take advantage of the impulse of popular feeling, he is master of the dazzling fence of argument, "the punto, the stoccado, the reverso," the shifts, and quirks, and palpable topics of debate; he can wield these at pleasure, and employ them to advantage on the spur of the occasion-this is all that can be required of him; for it is all that is necessary, and all that he undertakes to do. That another could bring forward more weighty reasons, offer more wholesome advice, convey more sound and extensive information in an inde

finite period, is nothing to the purVOL. II.

pose; for all this wisdom and knowledge would be of no avail in the supposed circumstances; the critical opportunity for action would be lost, before any use could be made of it. The one thing needful in public speaking is not to say what is best, but the best that can be said in a given time, place, and circumstance. The great qualification therefore of a leader in debate (as of a leader in fight) is presence of mind: he who has not this, wants every thing, and he who has it, may be forgiven almost all other deficiencies. The current coin of his discourses may be light and worthless in itself; but if it is always kept bright and ready for immediate use, it will pass unquestioned; and the public voice will affix to his name the praise of a sharpwitted, able, fluent, and eloquent speaker. We "no further seek his merits to disclose, or scan his frailties in their brief abode," the popular ear and echo of popular applause. What he says may be trite, pert, shallow, contradictory, false, unfounded, and sophistical; but it was what was wanted for the occasion, and it told with those who heard it. Let it stop there, and all is well. The rest is forgotten; nor is it worth remembering.

But Mr. Canning has an ill habit of printing his speeches: and I doubt whether the same oratorical privileges can be extended to printed speeches; or to this gentleman's speeches in general, even though they should not be printed. Whether afterwards committed to the press or not, they have evidently, I think, been first committed, with great care, to paper or to memory. They have all the marks, and are chargeable with all the malice prepense of written compositions. They are not occasional effusions, but set harangues. They are elaborate impromptus; deeply concerted and highly polished pieces of extempore ingenuity. The repartee has been conceived many months before the luckless observation which gives ostensible birth to it; and an argument woven into a debate is sure to be the counterpart or fag-end of some worn-out sophism of several years' standing. Mr. Canning is not so properly an orator, as an author reciting his own compositions. He fore2 G

sees (without much of the spirit of prophecy) what will, may, or can be said on some well-conned subject; and gets up, by anticipation, a tissue of excellent good conceits, indifferent bad arguments, classical quotations, and showy similes, which he contrives, by a sort of rhetorical join-hand, to tack on to some straggling observation dropped by some Honourable Member; and so goes on, with folded arms and sonorous voice, neither quickened nor retarded, neither elevated nor depressed by "the hear him's that now rise on the one side, or are now echoed from the other; never diverted into laughing gaiety, never hurried into uncontrolable passion-till he is regularly delivered in the course of the same number of hours of the labour of weeks or months. To those who are in the secret of the arts of debating, who are versed in the complicated tactics of parliamentary common-place, there is nothing very mysterious in the process, though it startles the uninitiated. The fluency, the monotony, the unimpressible, imposing style of his elocution," swinging slow with sullen roar," like the alternate oscillation of a pendulum-afraid of being thrown off his balance-never trusting himself with the smallest inflection of tone, or manner from the impulse of the moment,-all shew that the speaker relies on the tenaciousness of his memory, not on the quickness and fertility of his invention. Mr. Canning, I apprehend, never answered a speech: he answers, or affects to answer some observation in a speech, and then manufactures a long tirade out of his own "mother-wit and arts well-known before." He caps an oration, as school-boys cap verses; and gets up his oracular responses, as Sidrophel and Whackum did theirs, by having met with his customers of old. From that time he has the debate entirely in his own hands, and exercises over it "sole sovereign sway and masterdom." One of these spontaneous mechanical sallies of his resembles a voluntary played on a barrel-organ: it is a kind of Panharmonic display of wit and wisdom-such as Mr. Canning possesses! The amplest stores of his mind are unfolded to their inmost source-the classic lore, the historic page, the philosophic

doubt, the sage reply, the sprightly allusion, the delicate irony, the happy turning of a period or insinuation of a paragraph with senatorial dignity and Ovidian grace-are all here concocted, studied, revised, varnished over, till the sense aches at their glossy beauty and sickens at hopeless perfection. Our modern orator's thoughts have been declared by some to have all the elegance of the antique; I should say, they have only the fragility and smoothness of plaster-cast copies!

If I were compelled to characterize Mr. Canning's style by a single trait, I should say that he is a mere parodist in verse or prose, in reasoning or in wit. He transposes arguments as he does images, and makes sophistry of the one, and burlesque of the other. "What's serious, he turns to farce." This is perhaps, not art in him, so much as nature. The specific levity of his mind causes it to subsist best in the rarified atmosphere of indifference and scorn: it attaches most interest and importance to the slight and worthless. There is a striking want of solidity and keeping in this person's character. The frivolous, the equivocal, is his delight

the element in which he speaks, and writes, and has his being, as an orator and poet. By applying to low and contemptible objects the language or ideas which have been appropriated to high and swelling contemplations, he reduces the latter to the same paltry level, or renders the former doubly ridiculous. On the same principle, or from not feeling the due force and weight of different things, as they affect either the imagination or the understanding, he brings the slenderest and most evanescent analogies to bear out the most important conclusions; establishes some fact in history by giving it the form of an idle interrogation, like a school boy declaiming on he knows not what; and thinks to overturn the fixed sentiment of a whole people by an interjection of surprize at what he knows to be unavoidable and unanswerable. There is none of the gravity of the statesman, of the enthusiasm of the patriot, the impatient zeal of the partizan, in Mr. Canning. We distinguish through the disguise of pompous declamation, or the affec

tation of personal consequence, only the elegant trifler, the thoughtless epigrammatist, spreading " a windy fan of painted plumes," to catch the breath of popular applause, or to flutter in the tainted breeze of court-favour. "As those same plumes, so seems he vain and light," -never applying his hand to useful action, or his mind to sober truth. A thing's being evident, is to him a reason for attempting to falsify it: its being right is a reason for straining every nerve to evade or defeat it at all events. It might appear, that with him inversion is the order of nature. "Trifles light as air, are" to his understanding, "confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ:" and he winks and shuts his apprehension up to the most solemn and momentous truths as gross and vulgar errors. His political creed is of an entirely fanciful and fictitious texture-a kind of moral, religious, political, and sentimental filligre-work: or it is made up of monstrous pretexts, and idle shadows, and spurious theories, and mock-alarms. Hence his gravest reasonings have very much an air of concealed irony; and it might sometimes almost be suspected that, by his partial, loose, and unguarded sophisms, he meant to abandon the very cause he professes to magnify and extol.* It is indeed, his boast, his pride, his pleasure," to make the worse appear the better reason;" which he does with the pertness of a school-boy, and the effrontery of a prostitute: he assumes indecent postures in the debate, confounds the sense of right and wrong by his licentious disregard of both, puts honesty out of countenance by the familiarity of his proposals, makes a jest of principle,-"takes the rose from the fair forehead of a virtuous cause, and plants a blister there."

The House of Lords does not at present display much of the aristocracy of talent. The scene is by no means so amusing or dramatic here as in the House of Commons. Every speaker seems to claim his privilege of peerage in the awful attention of his

auditors, which is granted while there is any reasonable hope of a return: but it is not easy to hear Lord Grenville repeat the same thing regularly four times over, in different wordsto listen to the Marquis of Wellesley who never lowers his voice for four hours from the time he begins, nor utters the commonest syllable in a tone below that in which Pierre curses the Senate.-Lord Holland might have other pretensions to alacrity of mind than an impediment of speech, and Lord Liverpool might introduce less of the vis inertia of office into his official harangues than he does. Lord Ellenborough was great "in the extremity of an oath." Lord Eldon, "his face 'twixt tears and smiles contending," never loses his place or his temper. It is a pity to see Lord Erskine sit silent, who was once a popular and powerful speaker; and when he does get up to speak, you wish he had said nothing. This nobleman, the other day, on his return to Scotland after an absence of fifty years, made a striking speech on the instinctive and indissoluble attachment of all persons to the country where they are born,-which he considered as an innate and unerring principle of the human mind; and, in expatiating on the advantages of patriotism, argued, by way of illustration, that if it were not for this original dispensation of Providence, attaching, and, as it were, rooting every one to the spot where he was bred and born,-civil society could never have existed, nor mankind have been reclaimed from the barbarous and wandering way of life, to which they were in the first instance addicted! How these persons should become attached by habit to places where it appears, from their vagabond dispositions, they never stayed at all, is an over-sight of the speaker which remains unexplained. On the same occasion, the learned Lord, in order to produce an effect, observed that when, advancing farther north, he should come to the old play ground near his father's mansion, where he used to play at ball when a child, his

I read with much pleasure, in THE LONDON MAGAZINE, a delightful paper entitled, Recollections of the South Sea House. There was a fine antique air about it which became the subject: the characters were sketched with delicacy, and their foibles and good qualities drawn out in the truest spirit of humanity. I was carried back at once into the days when Steele, and Addison, and Garth, were flesh and blood like ourselves. Now they are mere names:--and names, indeed, of little power or interest, except with elderly gentlemen like myself, who still entertain a respect for what was venerable in childhood; and who do not readily consent to float up and down, backwards and forwards, on the varying tide of literary opinion.

There is something pleasant to me in the circumstance of an essay touching upon, or even being dated from, a particular spot in London. It identifies the writer, as it were, with the

town; and gives him an authority to discuss any thing metropolitan.-It is an advantageous record too of the place itself. For my own part, I never go by Will's, or the Grecian, without thinking of former times, when the wits and the learned were wont to assemble there; and, though the first has assumed a newfangled appearance, and is called an "Hotel," I have, more than once, sat there invoking the spirits of those famous essayists, who have conferred on it immortality. I have even mixed in the bustle at Batson's, and eaten a steak at Dolly's, on the strength of their old reputations. What a history would any one of those places furnish!-What quips, and cranks, and jests;-what learned debates and rich colloquies have been had there!

-What wine has been spilt!-What ink!-Now, the Grecian and Will's are the mere haunts of lawyers. The learned and the witty, have been

driven westward: where swordknots, and smiles, and ruffles were once seen, there is nothing now visible but the sallow visages of barristers and attorneys; and the silence of the spot is broken only by the rustling of papers, or an occasional call for a pint of port!

Among the celebrated places of resort in London, there is one of which no notice has been hitherto taken, THE CIDER CELLAR. A few years ago I was in the habit of frequenting it; and it was, then, I was told, rather on the decline: still, however, it was a pleasant place, pleasantly frequent ed; and it is worthy of some notice, as well on account of its own accommodations, as of the merit of its company.

The Cider Cellar is situate in Maiden-lane, Covent Garden. It runs under ground, and is conspicuous at night for its bright lamp, which blazes before the entrance, and shows you the Cellar, yawning like a brilliant Tartarus, beneath. There is something very inviting, particularly in winter, in the aspect of the place. It has an air of warmth about it. There is a broad flight of stairs with quivering lights at the bottom,-and strong handsome ropes at the sides, to encourage and assist the timid in their descent, and to enable those whose heads are weaker than the ale to reascend in safety. Thus much for the exterior. The inside (or the Cellar) consists of one room only, rather spacious, but very low; entirely unornamented, and having about five tables, and a proper number of easy arm chairs, for the accommodation of the guests. It is open during the whole evening, till midnight, but it is not much frequented till nine or ten o'clock. At twelve the doors are shut against further in-comings, -and the landlord is punctual and inexorable. The delicacies to be met with there, are, a Welch rabbit, eggs poached and boiled, cider, porter, ale, and stronger liquors ;-the eatables are good and very cheap, and the ale, the porter, and the cider excellent. This, at least, was the case a few years ago.

The frequenters of the Cider Cellar formerly consisted principally of Templars-men in the army-an occasional tradesman, who had left his shop and his wife, to enjoy an hour

of luxury with a cigar a parson or two-a middle-aged single man, who seemed to have plenty of leisure on his hands-some beaux, who dropped in from the theatres about half past eleven-and two or three stray members of Parliament. There was even a Lord to be seen there now and then -though I never met him but twice.

The subjects discussed at the Cider Cellar were those which occur usually at Coffee-houses; but they were discussed more generally, and with less ceremony-each person taking his share in the debate, although he might not, perhaps, form one of the company which originally started the question. Politics, law, theatrical criticism, science, the belles lettres,all were handled in a pleasant, and sometimes ingenious way; and catches and glees, and merry songs were sung, after midnight, with a joviality that would have excited the admiration of Mr. Justice Shallow himself.

At the head of the principal table was (and I believe still is) a large arm-chair, which conferred on whosoever sat therein, the dignity of chairman during the evening. It was usually occupied by a short, stout, elderly gentleman, who looked like a clergyman. Whether he was so or not I will not pretend to say; but he wore a black coat and waistcoat, and powder in his hair: he had a broad ruddy face, a smiling bold eye, and never, to my knowledge (or seldom) ventured upon an oath. He was a talkative person; not very profound to be sure, but he had some stock of anecdote, which he dealt out very willingly and deliberately for the benefit of the company. He was even eloquent about trials at the Old Bailey, and discoursed of executions with much edifying nonchalance. I have seen the old man chirp over his third glass of brandy and water, in a way that did one's heart good. He usually limited himself to three glasses, but occasionally, when the cellar was full, and the company agreeable, he would say, "William! I think I must have a lee-tle drop more brandy tonight." He then would look at the clock, and button an additional button of his coat, as though he meant only to stay a short time longer :-if so, he sometimes deceived himself. This gentleman was as good, to the full, as a copy of Burn's Justice. I