We can judge of Canning's speeches more exactly than of those of his predecessors, for by the time that he had become famous the art of parliamentary reporting had attained almost to its present perfection; and there are none which more amply repay critical study. Second only to Burke in the grandeur and richness of his imagery, he greatly excelled him in readiness, in tact, and in those adventitious advantages which go so far to make an orator. Mr. Gladstone remembered the "light and music" of the eloquence with which he had fascinated Liverpool seventy years before. Scarcely any one contributed so many beautiful thoughts and happy phrases to the common stock of public speech. All contemporary observers testify to the effect produced by the proud strength of his declaration on foreign policy: "I called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old." And the language does not contain a more magnificent or perfect image than that in which he likens a strong nation at peace to a great man-of-war lying calm and motionless till the moment for action comes, when "it puts forth all its beauty and its bravely collects its scattered elements of strength, and awakens its dormant thunder."
Lord John Russell entered the House of Commons in 1813, and left it in 1861. He used to say that in his early days there were a dozen men there who could make a finer speech than any one now living; "but," he used to add, "there were not another dozen who could understand what they were talking about." I asked him who was, on the whole, the best speaker he ever heard. He answered, "Lord Plunket," and subsequently gave as his reason this--that while Plunket had his national Irish gifts of fluency, brilliant imagination, and ready wit very highly developed, they were all adjuncts to his strong, cool, inflexible argument. This, it will be readily observed, is a very rare and a very striking combination, and goes far to account for the transcendent success which Plunket attained at the Bar and in the House, and alike in the Irish and the English Parliament. Lord Brougham said of him that his eloquence was a continuous flow of "clear statement, close reasoning, felicitous illustration, all confined strictly to the subject in hand; every portion, without any exception, furthering the process of conviction;" and I do not know a more impressive passage of sombre passion than the peroration of his first speech against the Act of Union: "For my own part, I will resist it to the last gasp of my existence, and with the last drop of my blood; and when I feel the hour of my dissolution approaching, I will, like the father of Hannibal, take my children to the altar and swear them to eternal hostility against the invaders of their country's freedom."