Within living memory a member has dared to suggest that certain of his opponents had come into the House not wholly sober. Who does not remember the epigrams which were based on Pitt’s addiction, real or supposed, to intoxicating liquors? Porson is said to have composed one hundred such ‘paper pellets’ in one night, as, for example:
‘“Who’s up?” inquired Burke of a friend at the door;
“Oh, no one,” said Paddy, “tho’ Pitt’s on the floor.”’
After this, most other insinuations become almost harmless; and the accusation of mere twaddling, such as that which was brought against Mr. Urquhart in the following lines, seems, by comparison, trivial:
‘When Palmerston begins to speak,
He moves the House—as facts can prove.
Let Urquhart rise, with accents weak,
The House itself begins to move.’
By the side of twaddling, again, mere rambling grows venial. One of H. J. Byron’s burlesque heroes says of Cerberus:
‘My dog, who picks up everything one teaches,
Has got “three heads,” like Mr. Gladstone’s speeches.
But, as might naturally be expected,
His are considerably more connected.’
But it is against Parliamentary long-windedness, in particular, that most sarcasm, whether in verse or in prose, has been directed. Everybody remembers Moore’s comparison of the Lord Castlereagh of his time to a pump, which up and down its awkward arm doth sway,
‘And coolly spout, and spout, and spout away,
In one weak, washy, everlasting flood.’
This has always been a stock quotation to use against oratory of the ‘dreary’ and ‘dilatory’ order. Then, Brougham had the good sense to recognise his own sins in respect to ‘much speaking.’ Punch made someone ask himself ‘if Brougham thinks as much as he talks;’ but the Lord Chancellor removed the pungency from gibes of that sort by writing his own epitaph, in which he declares that
‘My fate a moral teaches,
The ark in which my body lies
Would not contain one-half my speeches.’