Always the same to your old Glad-stone."
Lord Derby wrote every word of his speeches, and sent them in advance to the press. It was said that once he dropped his manuscript in the street, and that, being picked up, it was found to contain such entries as "Cheers," "Laughter," and "Loud applause," culminating in "'But I am detaining you too long.' (Cries of 'No, no,' and 'Go on.')"
The mention of Lord Derby reminds me of the much-criticized body to which he belonged. When I entered Parliament, the Chief Clerk of the House of Commons was Sir Thomas Erskine May, afterwards Lord Farnborough—an hereditary friend. He gave me many useful hints, and this among the rest—"Always go across to the House of Lords when they are sitting, even if you only stop five minutes. You may often happen on something worth hearing; and on no account ever miss one of their full-dress debates." I acted on the advice, and soon became familiar with the oratory of "the Gilded Chamber," as Pennialinus calls it. I have spoken in a former chapter of the effect produced on me as a boy by the predominance of Disraeli during the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867. He had left the House of Commons before I entered it, but that same mysterious attribute of predominance followed him to the House of Lords, and indeed increased with his increasing years. His strange appearance—un-English features, corpse-like pallor, blackened locks, and piercing eyes—marked him out as someone quite aloof from the common population of the House of Lords. When he sat, silent and immovable, on his crimson bench, everyone kept watching him as though they were fascinated. When he rose to speak, there was strained and awe-stricken attention. His voice was deep, his utterance slow, his pronunciation rather affected. He had said in early life that there were two models of style for the two Houses of Parliament—for the Commons, Don Juan: for the Lords, Paradise Lost. As the youthful Disraeli, he had out-Juaned Juan; when, as the aged Beaconsfield, he talked of "stamping a deleterious doctrine with the reprobation of the Peers of England," he approached the dignity of the Miltonic Satan. It was more obviously true of him than of most speakers that he "listened to himself while he spoke"; and his complete mastery of all the tricks of speech countervailed the decay of his physical powers. He had always known the value of an artificial pause, an effective hesitation, in heralding the apt word or the memorable phrase; and just at the close of his life he used the method with a striking though unrehearsed effect. On the 4th of March, 1881, he was speaking in support of Lord Lytton's motion condemning the evacuation of Kandahar. "My Lords," he said, "the Key of India is not Merv, or Herat, or,"—here came a long pause, and rather painful anxiety in the audience; and then the quiet resumption of the thread—"It is not the place of which I cannot recall the name—the Key of India is London."
At a dinner at Lord Airlie's in the previous month Lord Beaconsfield, talking to Matthew Arnold, had described the great (that is, the fourteenth) Lord Derby as having been "a man full of nerve, dash, fire, and resource, who carried the House irresistibly along with him." Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was reckoned by Mr. Gladstone as one of the three men who, of all his acquaintance, had the greatest natural gift of public speaking.[47] Both the Bishop and the Statesman found, each in the other, a foeman worthy of his steel; but both had passed beyond these voices before I entered Parliament, leaving only tantalizing traditions—"Ah! but you should have heard Derby on the Irish Church," or "It was a treat to hear 'Sam' trouncing Westbury." Failing those impossible enjoyments, I found great pleasure in listening to Lord Salisbury. I should reckon him as about the most interesting speaker I ever heard. His appearance was pre-eminently dignified: he looked, whether he was in or out of office, the ideal Minister of a great Empire—
"With that vast bulk of chest and limb assigned
So oft to men who subjugate their kind;
So sturdy Cromwell pushed broad-shouldered on;
So burly Luther breasted Babylon;
So brawny Cleon bawled his agora down;
And large-limb'd Mahomed clutched a Prophet's crown."