assurance that he should be able to recollect anything that he learned by heart, and that he was not afraid of his courage failing, Henry composed for him the speech which Duncombe delivered. But knowing the slender capacity of his man, he was not satisfied with placing the speech in his hands, but adopted every precaution which his ingenuity suggested to avert the danger of his breaking down.

'He made him learn the speech by heart, and then made him think it over again and put it into language of his own, justly fearing that, if he should forget any of the more polished periods of the original, it would appear sadly botched by his own interpolations. He then instructed him largely as to how and when he was to bring it in, supplying him with various commonplace phrases to be used as connecting links, and by the help of which he might be enabled to fasten upon some of the preceding speeches. I saw Henry de Ros the day before the debate, when he told me what he was doing, and asked me to suggest anything that occurred upon the subject, and at the same time repeated to me the speech with which he had armed his hero. I hinted my apprehensions that he would fail in the delivery, but though he was not without some alarm, he expressed (as it afterwards appeared a well-grounded) confidence in Duncombe's extraordinary nerve and intrepidity.'

The editor states in a note, that 'the incident related in the text appears to have been his (Duncombe's) début in political life." Fresh from a contested election,-no bad school,-Duncombe had spoken in the same tone and manner on the second night of the Session (January 31), and appears to have already acquired that style of speaking which always ensured him a hearing whatever the disposition of the House.* Lord de Ros, with all his cleverness, was unknown as a speaker. We are not aware that he ever opened his mouth in public. Yet, assuming him to have been a practised rhetorician, the grand difficulty remains. To introduce a prepared speech or prepared passages effectively by the adroit use of commonplaces, is an advanced step in oratory, and to succeed twice in rapid succession would indicate a master of the art. To make the pupil first learn by heart the speech he was not to deliver, was one of the oddest expedients ever hit upon to prevent him from being embarrassed by the so-called polished

He (Duncombe) was courteous and pleasant in manner, and members liked to sit by him in the House for the sake of his remarks on men and things. His voice was originally very fine-rich and full-though he mouthed his words like a dandy of the Regency, a character that cropped up in all he said or did. His careless effective style was evidently the result of great care and pains; and he managed to hit exactly the amount of impudent sang-froid which his powers justified and the House would bear. He was just the man for saying at the right moment what everybody wished to be said and nobody had the courage to say; and he was clearly a favourite, being generally called for if anyone else rose at the same time.'-The Times, Jan. 7, 1868.

periods

periods of the original. And when, the day before the debate, Lord de Ros repeated to Greville the speech with which he had armed his hero,' which speech did he repeat?

The effect of the speech is grossly exaggerated; it is not mentioned by the 'Times,' and its tendency is misunderstood. The telling shots were not fired at Herries. They were fired at higher game; at sundry influences behind the Throne, the existence of which Duncombe declared to be matter of notoriety

เ

:

They are known' (he continued) to have been too busy in the underplot of the recent revolution. "I believe their object to be as impure as the means by which their power has been acquired, and I denounce them and their agents as unknown to the British Constitution and derogatory to the honour of the Crown." He trusted that the Duke of Wellington and the Right Hon. Secretary for the Home Department would not allow the finances of this great country to be controlled any longer by a Jew (Rothschild), or the distribution of the patronage of the Crown to be operated upon by the prescriptions of a physician (Knighton). (Loud laughter.)'

Greville's recklessness of statement, or gobemoucherie, is still more remarkable in his account of the (so called) second speech. 'Duncombe's speech on the second night was got up precisely in the same manner, and although it appeared to arise out of the debate and of those which preceded it, the matter had been all crammed into him by his invisible mentor. The amusement to him and to me (especially at the honours that have been thickly poured upon him and the noise which he has made in the world) is indescribably pungent.'

The subject had been dropped till what Greville calls the second night (Feb. 21st), when there was no debate, and no question before the House. Herries having risen to answer a question about the Malt Tax, said that 'while he was on his legs, he might as well take the opportunity of removing one or two erroneous impressions that had gone abroad as to part of a statement he had made on a preceding evening.' This brought up Duncombe, who briefly pointed out the disagreement between the explanation just given by Herries and the preceding one. The two or three sentences spoken by the hero of the night' would be incorrectly described as a speech: the ministerial explanations were considered at an end; and no one could have guessed that Herries would reopen them on that or any other night to stultify himself. Now for the philosophical deduction and the moral:

'Thus Duncombe and his speech have made what is called a great sensation, and he has the reputation (no matter whether justly or not) of having thrown the enemy's camp into greater confusion by the boldness of his language than anybody has ever done, because nobody has ever before dared to mention those whom he dragged forward.

To

To the ignorant majority of the world he appears a man of great promise, of boldness, quickness, and decision, and the uproar that is made about him cannot fail to impress others as well as himself with a high notion of his consequence.

'Knighton is gone abroad, I have very little doubt, in consequence of what passed, and as nobody inquires very minutely into the real causes of things where they get apparent ones with ease, it is said and believed at once that Duncombe is the man who has driven him out, and that he has given the first blow to that secret influence which has only been obscurely hinted at before and never openly attacked. These are great and important matters, far exceeding any consequences which the authors of the speech anticipated from its delivery at the time. And what are the agents who have produced such an effect? A man of ruined fortune and doubtful character, whose life has been spent on the race-course, at the gaming-table, and in the green-room; of limited capacity, exceedingly ignorant, and without any stock but his impudence to trade on, only speaking to serve an electioneering purpose, and crammed by another man with every thought and every word that he uttered.'

The ignorant majority of the world were right. Duncombe was a man of capacity, boldness, quickness, and decision. If his private life was to be held up to reprobation, we have yet to learn that his habits and pursuits differed materially from those of Greville and Lord de Ros. Nor is there anything extraordinary in the production of important effects through the instrumentality of men of ruined fortune. What were Mirabeau and Wilkes? But the Journal teems with proofs that no such effects were produced on this occasion; that Knighton was not driven out; and that the secret influence continued unimpaired.*

An unsafe guide through the mazes of political intrigue and supplying no trustworthy materials for history, Greville cannot

*See vol. ii., pp. 144 and 154, quoted ante, p. 10. Knighton had started on one of his numerous foreign missions the day before Duncombe's speech. He returned shortly afterwards, and the attack is mentioned in his Memoirs as 'having proved the means of establishing him still more firmly in the estimation of his sovereign and his friends.' The letters to him from George IV. and the rest of the Royal Family printed in the Memoirs materially vary the impression which Greville's entries convey. For example, during Knighton's illness:

'Dear Friend,

For God's sake, for all our sakes, pray, pray take care of yourself, and do not think, upon any account, of stirring until to-morrow morning. It is true, I am jaded and quite worn, and writing from my bed, where I have lain down for a little; but to-morrow will be quite time enough. Little or no advance, I regret to say, has as yet been made amidst, almost perhaps, unravelable perplexities. 'St. James's Palace, Yours affectionately,

Friday, April, 1827.'

·

G. R.

There is no alteration of tone at any time, and the letters of William IV. to Knighton do credit to both.-Memoirs of Sir William Knighton. By Lady Knighton.

be

be accepted as an authority for those episodes in our social annals to which he recalls attention; at all events, the judgments he passes on the actors in them should be carefully collated with the facts.

'May 17th, 1835.-These elections and the affair between Alvanley and O'Connell have been the chief objects of attention; all the newspapers are full of details, which I need not put down here. Alvanley seems to have behaved with great spirit and resolution. There was a meeting at De Ros's house of De Ros, Damer, Lord Worcester, and Duncombe to consider what was to be done on the receipt of Morgan O'Connell's letter, and whether Alvanley should fight him or not. Worcester and Duncombe were against fighting, the other two for it. Alvanley at once said that the boldest course was the best, and he would go out.'

There was no such meeting. There was neither occasion nor time for it. The old laws of honour were then in full force, and Morgan O'Connell's letter left no alternative. Besides denouncing Lord Alvanley's conduct as 'braggadocio and ungentlemanlike,' he spoke of him as a man whom I sincerely believe to have been appropriately designated by my father,' i.e. as a bloated buffoon.

According to Colonel Hodges' printed statement, this letter was delivered to Lord Alvanley at half-past three in the afternoon of May 4th. According to Colonel Damer's, he had just returned from a review at Woolwich at that hour when the letter was placed in his hands by Lord Alvanley. He went at once to the Junior United Service Club to make the requisite arrangements with Colonel Hodges, who proposed the next morning, to which Damer replied that there would be light enough that same evening; and the meeting took place soon after six in. a field off the Barnet Road, near the Regent's Park. The ground was measured, the combatants were placed, and the pistols delivered:

'I was proceeding' (writes Damer) 'to instruct the gentlemen concerned, as to the signals that were to be their guide, and I had said, Gentlemen, I shall use the following words, "Make ready! Fire!"; when Mr. O'Connell, thinking that I had given the signal, through mistake, discharged his pistol. I then had a short discussion with Colonel Hodges as to the light in which that shot was to be considered, when Lord Alvanley desired me to waive the right I conceived he had to return the fire.'

An exchange of shots then took place without effect. O'Connell did not fire in the air, as he should have done, and Damer then said that the affair should stop; but Hodges insisted on an apology or another exchange of shots, to which

Damer

Damer consented, to avoid (he said) all possibility of misapprehension. Having once agreed to regard the first shot as a nullity, he was obviously precluded from reverting to it; and the whole question turns on whether he should have withdrawn his man after the first shot.

'Damer' (writes Greville) 'seems to have been a very bad second, and probably lost his head: he ought not to have consented to the third shot upon any account. Alvanley says he execrated him in his heart when he found he had consented to it. Hodges acted like a ruffian, and had anything happened, he would have been hanged.'

The late Sir Robert Peel defined a good second to be one who would bring you off with flying colours or make you fight. Would Lord Alvanley have been brought off with flying colours had he been withdrawn? On the contrary, he would have been exposed to every sort of taunt and misrepresentation. This was a party duel, a class duel, a duel of defiance, and both he and his second judged rightly that, if it was to be fought at all, the boldest and most uncompromising mode of conducting it was the best.

In the autumn of 1843, Lord Alvanley, Colonel Damer, and an English friend, were breakfasting in the public room of the Hôtel de Flandre, at Brussels, when Lord Alvanley quizzed a Belgian officer so unmercifully, that the brave Belge' left the table in a huff. That fellow,' said the friend, will call you out.' 'And if he does,' was the reply, 'I'll have you for my second; for Damer-and be d-d to him-let Morgan O'Connell have three shots to two.' This possibly is the sort of execration which was uttered to Greville. In the course of the ensuing conversation Lord Alvanley expressed his high satisfaction at the manner in which the affair had been carried through.

The value of every story depends on its being true. A story is a picture of an individual, or of human nature in general: if it be false, it is a picture of nothing.' This was a favourite axiom of Johnson's, which seems to have had no weight with Greville or Mr. Reeve: Greville seldom, if ever, taking the trouble to verify a story or anecdote, whilst the editorial notes afford little aid in the correction or elucidation of the text.

'Lord Holland told stories of Lord Thurlow, whom he mimicks, they say, exactly. When Lord Mansfield died, Thurlow said, “I hesitated a long time between Kenyon and Buller. Kenyon was very intemperate, but Buller was so damned corrupt, and I thought upon the whole that intemperance was a less fault in a judge than corruption, not but what there was a damned deal of corruption in Kenyon's intemperance.'

The vacancy (of the Chief-Justiceship) was created by the

resignation