Is it the growing modesty of the young, or the
growing coldness of the old, which seems to discourage so much the rise of new oratorical ability amongst us? Here is Lord Dufferin, whom none of us knew to be a finished orator till the Government sent him to govern the Canadian Dominion, but since that time he has sentns home proof after proof of capacity for that refined and picturesque, but yet easy and humorous oratory, which not only creates real enthusiasm amongst those to whom it is addressed, but delights the ear and captivates the taste of those who only read to themselves the reported speech. Last Saturday's Times contained in its outer sheet such a speech of Lord Dufferin's, delivered at a dinner at Quebec, on the subject of the efforts which were being made to restore and complete the old system of fortifications of that beautiful capital,—fortifications which are associated with all the most brilliant epochs and all the most dttafferetus crises of our colonial history there. We cannot give any tolerable. illustration even, of the charm of such a speech here, but how, could the great revolution in the fortunes of Quebec be better described than in the following sentence ?—
" From the rock on which your city stands, once isolated by an interminable ocean of pritneaval forest and a waste of barbarism, there now stretches out on every aide to the horizon a perfectly ideal prospect of agricultural wealth and beauty, while your political dominion, at one time reaching no farther than the range of your primitive artillery, now requires two oceans to con- fine it." Surely it looks as if a position of authority and in- fluence were developing a faculty which could never have ripened in the rigorous climate of the House of Lords. Are there any other men of suppressed genius in that House whom we could transplant with the like result?
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