12 MAY 1849, Page 14

WHAT THE REPORTERS DO FOR SPEECHES.—" The House of Lords

com- bines the echoes of a long and vaulted hall with the buzz of a drawingroom; or, when there is a large attendance of Commons at the bar, the ham of a school- room. . . . When it comes to feeble voices and indistinct articulation, nod rather a turbid torrent of ideas, the task of the reporter in the near House of Lords is increased both in magnitude and multitude. First of all, he has to listen through the ascending hum of a dozen inattentive talkers (among whom Lord Brougham is enjoying a second speech quite in an uufermal way); then he has to frame the little pieces that he occasionally catches into some sort of shape; then he has to put them in order, and give them an air of connexion, coherence, and relation. Imagine the vishwash prolixity from which a dexterous reporter saves the eyes and tastes of his morning readers: thestatements which were stated with reference to the question which concerned the hononrable gentleman who stated that he bad not, Sec.'; the ' understanding on which I understood the honourable member rnderstood the question which the honourable gen- tleman said he bad understood, Sm.,' and all the tedium of inane repe- tition and diluted wordiness. We will not venture to say that the reporters make the eloquence of the English Parliament. There is much in a really great speech of which no report will convey an adequate notion. Voice, gesture, in- tonation, emptasis, allusion, are necessarily lost in a report. But there are many things which reporting gives to a middling speech, and there is nothing which it does not gild to a bad one. It gives form, structure, grammar, and something like meauitg, to rambling disquisitions and vapid sounds. It supplies what the nervous nan wished to say, or the unpractised man should have said. It buries the sung; of a first failure by raising a neat little cenotaph to its meaning. It reliever those who spoke and those who are to read alike. It soothes wounded vanity and impatient eyes; and, finally, it does no little towards preventing the cornption of the English language in high places."—Tines, May 12.