'One of our eminent speakers,' he continued, 'Lord Grey, is perhaps best when he has not had time to prepare himself. He is so full of knowledge and of inferences, that he has always enough ready to make an excellent speech. When he prepares himself, there is too much; he gives the House more facts and more deductions than it can digest.'
'Do you agree with me,' I asked, 'in thinking that Lord Melbourne was best when he improvised?'
'I agree with you,' answered Lord Granville, 'that his set speeches were cold and affected. He was natural only when he was quite careless, or when he was much excited, and then he was admirable.'
'Did not Thiers improvise?' I asked.
'Never,' answered Tocqueville. 'He prepared himself most carefully. So did Guizot. We see from the "Revue rétrospective" that he even prepared his replies. His long experience enabled him to foresee what he should have to answer. Pasquier used to bring his speech ready written. It lay on the desk before him, but he never looked at it.'
'That seems to me,' I said, 'very difficult. It is like swimming with corks. One would be always tempted to look down on the paper.'
'It is almost equally difficult,' said Tocqueville, 'to make a speech of which the words are prepared. There is a struggle between the invention and the memory. You trust thoroughly to neither, and therefore are not served thoroughly by either.'
'Yet that,' said Marcet, 'is what our Swiss pastors are required to do. They are forbidden to read, and forbidden to extemporise, and by practice they speak from memory—some well, all tolerably.'
'Brougham,' said Lord Granville, 'used to introduce his most elaborately prepared passages by a slight hesitation. When he seemed to pause in search of thoughts, or of words, we knew that he had a sentence ready cut and dried.'
'Who,' I asked Sumner, 'are your best speakers in America?'