Lord Selborne has an episcopal appearance, the manner of an author of hymns, and the unctuous delivery of a High Church speaker.

But like most of the orators of the House of Lords, he considered two hours was the minimum which he was entitled to occupy, and though he spoke with wonderful briskness, for an octogenarian, at the beginning of his observations, his voice soon became so exhausted as to be a mere senile and inaudible whisper.

Deeper and deeper it descended, and the House was in the blackest depths when the Foreign Secretary rose to speak.

Everybody knows how embarrassing and distressing it is to an orator to have to begin by rousing an assembly that has been thus depressed; and the difficulty was increased in the case of Lord Rosebery by the fact that he had to address an audience in which four hundred men were against him and about forty in his favour; and there is no orator whose nerve is so steady, and whose self-confidence is so complete, as not to be depressed and weakened by such a combination of circumstances.

This is partly the reason of the lighter tone of the earlier observations which offended some too sensitive critics.