“But these laws of nature, these divine laws, are capable of being discovered and understood, and of being taught and made our own. This is the task of science: and whilst science discovers and teaches these laws, art teaches their application. No pursuit is therefore too insignificant not to be capable of becoming the subject both of science and art.”
|Condense-ness of the Prince’s speeches.| Contrary to our feeling in reading most speeches, we are always sorry when the Prince has ended, and we want more to have been said by him; and yet, if we look attentively at any of the speeches, we cannot but see that so much has been said that we must acknowledge ourselves somewhat unreasonable in wishing to have had any more. His speech on laying the foundation stone of the National Gallery at Edinburgh affords a notable instance of this. It is so short that you feel inclined to clamour for more; and yet, when you read it attentively, you find that enough has been said to make up what would have been a long and telling speech in Parliament. Happily the Prince’s absence from the parliamentary arena freed him from that tendency to needless amplification which is the besetting sin even of the best speakers in the present day.
The sympathetic nature of the Prince, which enabled him to feel so largely and deeply for all classes of men, visible throughout his speeches, is nowhere better seen than in his speech at the Bicentenary Festival of the Sons of the Clergy. How rarely, by any one, has a just tenderness for the Clergy been shown in ampler and in nobler terms than in the following extract:—
|Speech at the Bicentenary Festival of the Sons of the Clergy.| “Gentlemen, the appellation of a ‘money-making parson’ is not only a reproach but a condemnation for a clergyman, depriving him at once of all influence over his congregation; yet this man, who has to shun opportunities for acquiring wealth open to most of us, and who has himself only an often scanty life income allotted to him for his services, has a wife and children like ourselves; and we wish him to have the same solicitude for their welfare which we feel for our own.”
In estimating the Prince Consort’s speeches, it is to be recollected that for the most part they treat of topics of an abstract character, and seldom take up what is merely personal as their subject, which, however, is always the most interesting to mankind.
This could not be avoided from the position of the Prince; but it is much to be regretted, for whenever he did speak of something personal, he was particularly successful.
For instance, if we were called upon to furnish for history the main characteristics of Sir Robert Peel’s mind, we could not refer to any description of that eminent statesman which would at all compete with that given by the Prince Consort in the speech that he made at the dinner to which he was invited by the Lord Mayor of York.