He tells us that not only did the members who attached supreme importance to the passing of the Bill clasp each other by the hand with tears, but that, with unprecedented disregard of the decorous traditions of Parliament, they leapt upon the benches, and stood there waving their hats, and cheering themselves hoarse.
Take again the scene which the House witnessed during a memorably eloquent speech of Mr. Bright. He was addressing a House which in those days all but unanimously rejected his opinions, though time has since then shown how well deserving they were of consideration; and yet he moved many to tears who were little accustomed to give open signs of their emotion. He always spoke in a style of nervous Saxon English, and his words on that occasion were a singular mixture of unconventional homeliness and profound pathos.
JOHN BRIGHT SPEAKING IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
He mentioned that he had met Colonel Boyle, a well-known member of the House—"at Mr. Westerton's, the bookseller's I think it was, at the corner of Hyde Park"—and had asked him whether he was going out to the Crimea. He answered that he was afraid he was. "It was not fear for himself; he knew not that. 'But,' he said, 'to go out to the war is a serious thing for a man who has a wife and five children.' The stormy Euxine is his grave; his wife is a widow; his children are fatherless." And then, after alluding to other well-known members who had perished in the Crimean War, he added, "The Angel of Death has been among us; we may almost hear the beating of his wings."
BRIGHT RECITING HIS SPEECH TO HIS FRIENDS.
As he spoke many of the assembled gentlemen of England were seen indignantly dashing away, or furtively wiping from their eyes, the tears of which no one need have been for one moment ashamed. When Lord Palmerston arose to answer the oration, and to repeat to the House its own predominant convictions, the bursts of cheering with which his entirely unoratorical speech was welcomed were heard even in the House of Lords. But what the members cheered was not Lord Palmerston's eloquence, for to eloquence he had scarcely the smallest pretence, but the British pluck which would not succumb to the intense feeling which the great orator had aroused by appeals that had held his audience "hushed as an infant at the mother's breast."
