The physical qualifications necessary for the Speakership include a clear, resonant voice and a commanding presence. A little man with a flute-like falsetto might be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and the virtue of Cæsar's wife, and yet fail to claim the respect of the House, even though he contrived to render audible his shrill cries of "Order!" When Sergeant Yelverton was elected to the Chair in 1597, he declared that a Speaker ought to be "a man big and comely, stately and well spoken, his voice great, his carriage majestical, his nature haughty, and his purse plentiful,"[193] and, with the omission of the last qualification, now no longer necessary, the same may truly be said to-day.
The enjoyment of perfect health might also be added to this list, since only the most robust constitution can support the strain of labours which were always arduous, and, with the rapid increase of business and the prolongation of each succeeding session, grow annually more onerous.
Hour after hour does the Speaker sit in the splendid isolation of the Chair, listening to interminable speeches, of which no small proportion are insupportably wearisome.
"Like sad Prometheus, fastened to his rock, In vain he looks for pity to the clock; While, vulture-like, the dire [M.P.] appears, And, far more savage, rends his suff'ring ears."[194]
He may not rest, though the cooing of Ministers on the immemorial front bench, and the murmur of innumerable M.P.'s, must often threaten to reduce the hapless listener to a condition bordering upon coma. He must pay the strictest attention to every pearl that falls from the lips of "honourable gentlemen," many of whom delight to air their vocabulary at an unconscionable length, and, like Dryden's Shadwell, "never deviate into sense." He must be ever ready to check irrelevancy, to avert personalities, to guide some discursive speaker back to the point at issue; nor is he upheld by the stimulus of interest which might possibly be his could he look forward to replying to the member who is addressing the House.
For the last hundred years it has been considered undignified for the Speaker to take any personal part in debate, even when the House is in Committee, though Speaker Denison once broke this rule, and made a long speech upon some agricultural question. Speaker Abbot often spoke in Committee, and once actually moved an amendment to a Bill which had been read a second time, and succeeded in getting it thrown out. At a still earlier date, in 1780, we read of Sir Fletcher Norton inveighing vehemently against the influence of the Crown, and making a violent attack upon Lord North which resulted in what Walpole calls "a strange scene of Billingsgate between the Speaker and the Minister."[195] But though Speaker Norton, who was reputed to be the worst-tempered man in the House, could thus relieve his pent-up feelings in occasional bursts of eloquence, he took no pains to conceal his boredom, and during the course of a particularly tedious debate would often cry aloud, "I am tired! I am weary! I am heartily sick of all this!"[196] Speaker Denison, even, on one occasion, at the end of a protracted session, grew so anxious for release that when a tiresome orator rose to continue the debate he could not refrain from joining in the members' general chorus of "Oh! oh!"
As a rule, however, modern Speakers seem able to exercise complete self-control, and, bored though they must often be, are polite enough to hide the fact. They cannot now have recourse to that flowing bowl of porter which Speaker Cornwall kept by the side of the Chair, from which he drank whenever he felt the need of a mental fillip, subsequently falling into a pleasing torpor which the babble of debate did nothing to dispel. To-day, indeed, the Speaker neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the advice given by the poet Praed to the occupant of the Chair during one of the debates of the first reformed Parliament would fall on deaf ears.
"Sleep, Mr. Speaker; it's surely fair, If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair; Longer and longer still they grow, Tory and Radical, Aye and No; Talking by night, and talking by day; Sleep, Mr. Speaker, sleep, sleep while you may!
"Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sweet to men Is the sleep that comes but now and then; Sweet to the sorrowful, sweet to the ill, Sweet to the children who work in a mill. You have more need of sleep than they; Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may!"