Mr. Cross is stumping South-West Lancashire in serious alarm, if
not for his own seat, at least for the seat of his Tory colleague, Colonel Blackburne, which is much endangered by the candidature of Mr. William Rathboue for the same divi- sion. Mr. Cross makes a sensible Home Secretary,—that is, when he does not take to the water, where he is clearly not at home ; but as an agitator, we must say he is a failure. His style is " conspicuous by its absence," or if he has a style, it is a decidedly knobby one. He jerks out a slow succession of bald, short sentences, which affect the reader, and still more, we should think, the hearer, rather like raps than words. He pelts the Liberals with small pellets of defiance and accusa- tion. His favourite charge is the charge that Mr. Gladstone and Lord Hartington are not the same person, which is un- deniable; to which be adds that Mr. Chamberlain once called Lord Hartington " the late leader of the Liberal party," which is also true. Then he declares that he does " from his soul " believe that there is not " a more dangerous man " than Mr. Gladstone, which no one will deny ; but which, except as an approximate measure of the dimensions of Mr. Cross's political soul, is hardly relevant to the subject of the Elections,—and even so, only by way of giving Mr. Cross's possible constitu- ents a glimpse of the blankness of the scenery within him. But in this manner are discharged, pellet after pellet, Mr. Cross's stores of small-shot, till the attention of his audiences must be rather stunned by so many little jars, than strained by any continuous effort. We cannot imagine a more fatiguing speaker. His oratory is like the tap of the woodpecker, only without its pleasant associations of forest-life.
