His noble English style was formed by a constant and affectionate study of the He English Bible and the English poets. once told me that for many years he almost always spent his Sunday evenings alone during the session of Parliament, and that every Sunday evening he read through Milton's "Paradise Regained." I said that I should have thought that the earlier books of "Paradise Lost," containing the debates in Hell, would have had more attraction for him; but he answered that he valued the moral wisdom of the "Paradise Regained." His taste was catholic. He expressed great admiration for Pope; and when asked whether he did not prefer the sinewy strength of the verse of Dryden, he acknowledged Dryden's force, but still seemed to assert a preference for Pope. He also admired Cowper, Scott, Byron, and Whittier; and he had a curiously familiar acquaintance with the minor poets of the last century. Nor did he care only for poets who had made their reputation. Very shortly after Mr. Lewis Morris's "Epic of Hades" was published, he quoted it in a speech and expressed his high estimate of its poetic qualities.

reserve, which was akin to the austerity | ness of England, He said enough for his of his personal character, gave elevation purpose, and then he passed on. Even in to his speeches. He always retained his the use of his splendid intellectual powers, self-command. It was not his habit to the austerity of his moral life prevented "let himself go." He had a rich humor, him from yielding to luxurious self-indulbut he never became riotously humorous; gence. a sentence or two, sometimes a phrase, sometimes a word, satisfied him, and he became serious again. His scorn what one of his critics called his "superb scorn was also held under firm restraint; it sometimes made its presence felt in long passages of his speeches; it penetrated the very substance of the thought and colored its expression; but it was rarely permitted to break out except in a single epithet; it was still more rarely suffered to have free and open course through a whole sentence. Nor did he ever throw the reins on the neck of his imagination; it was his servant, or, at best, his friendly ally, not his master. In one of his speeches there was a passage in which he wanted to impress his audience with the enormous magnitude of our national expenditure, which, according to his calculation, was equal annually to the whole of the wages paid during the year to the agricultural laborers of this country. I cannot lay my hand upon the passage just now, but I remember that he introduced his statement by a sentence in which there was a charming but only a momentary glimpse of the loveliness and fertility of England - its pastures, its wheat-fields, its orchards. - fenced and cared for like a garden, every acre showing the results of careful labor; and then he said that the men whose toil had brought the country to this perfection received no more wages in the course of the year than we were raising in taxes and spending for purposes of government. Nothing could have been more beautiful, nothing more vivid, than the picture; but if the vision of England which he saw had come to almost any other speaker, the account of it would have extended through sentence after sentence of picturesque description; and if Mr. Bright's own intellectual habits had been less severe, he would have been betrayed into the creation of a passage of imaginative and poetic prose which would have been quoted through many generations for its music and its beauty. But he was intent upon his end. It was no part of his business at that moment to fill the minds of those who were listening to him with the loveli

On one occcasion when we were discussing the merits of great English authors, he said that it was his habit to select one poet for reading during every session; that when he went home to his lodgings at night after leaving the House of Commons, he was unable to sleep at once, and that he sat up reading his se lected poet. I asked him whether, when he delivered his first speech to his Birmingham constituents, he was reading Byron. Some years had passed and he could not remember. "But why do you want to know?" I replied that one of the sentences of his peroration recalled a line in the fourth canto of "Childe Harold;" and I quoted his words: "I speak with a diminished fire; I act with a lessened force. But such as I am, my countrymen - my constituents I will, if you will let me, be found in your ranks in the impending struggle."* He was silent for a few moments, and then said, "This is

* I find that the sentences which I quoted to him were preceded by the pathetic words which I ought to sibly and painfully that I am not what I was."

added, "I thought that I had better not put it so," and have remembered but had forgotten: "I feel now senI agreed with him.

That

the passage you are thinking of," and he
quoted the whole of stanza 137, begin-
ning: --

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain;
My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire.
And my frame perish even in conquering pain;

But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire.

His English was accurate as well as vigorous and beautiful. Twenty years ago three well-known Parliamentary reporters told me that Mr. Bright, Mr. Gladstone, and Mr. Disraeli were the only men in the House of Commons at that time whose speeches they could report verbatim. There were no formless sentences to complete or to reconstruct. The only kindly service which his speeches required from them was the elimination of an unnecessary "Now," or "Well now," with which he occasionally began a sen

tence.

His voice in his later years was often husky; in the years of his great activity it was clear and strong, and could be heard without effort in every part of the largest buildings. It was musical in its quality, and he used it as naturally when addressing six or seven thousand people as when talking to a friend at the fireside. It was his habit to speak slowly, but in his more vehement and impassioned passages there was what might be called a restrained eagerness, a subdued intensity, which had all the effect of rapidity, and which often created great excitement; then there sometimes came a sentence declaimed in tones which thrilled his au

The late Mr. Henry Fawcett told me of a delightful day that he once spent with Mr. Bright in Scotland. They were there to fish, but the weather was unfavorable. To pass the time Mr. Bright recited to him, for several hours, single verses and long passages from poets of every rank, famous and obscure, interspersing the quotations with comments. It must have been his habit for many years to commit to memory the lines which inpressed him. In his English style, thus formed, there was a consummate union of simplicity and dignity. Its resources were equal to every demand that he made upon it. It was perfect for all purposes for plain narrative, for homely humor, for picturesque description, for fierce invective, for pathos, for stateliness, for the expression of lofty moral sentiment, for imaginative splendor. To attribute its unique excellence—as is the habit of critics to Mr. Bright's anx-dience like the notes of a clarion; or iety to adhere to an almost exclusive use of the Saxon elements of our language is an error; and it is an error from which the critics should have been saved by Mr. Bright's delight in Milton, who, of all When Mr. Bright had to make a great our great poets, did most to enrich our speech he brooded over it day after day. plainer speech with the spoils of Greece But he did not care to do all his preparaand Rome. He knew exactly the mo- tion at his desk or in solitude. As argument when the Saxon element of our ments and illustrations occurred to him tongue would not serve him. Mr. Hutton he liked to try their effect by talking them pointed out many years ago the illustra- over with his friends; and when he was tion of his wonderful felicity which is at home, if nobody else was within reach, afforded by the famous sentence in which he talked them over with his gardener. he looked forward to the time when it will The speech took shape in conversation. be possible to say that " England, the Then he made the "notes" which he august mother of free nations, herself is intended to use when the speech was defree." It is the word "august," with its livered. He gave an account of these train of splendid imperial associations, "notes " in a letter written to the Rev. G. that gives to the sentence its spell for the E. Cheesman, who had asked his advice imagination and its impressive dignity. as to various methods of preparation for It was the distinction of his style that the public speaking- namely: "(1) writing most cultivated men and women admired speeches and reading them; (2) writing, it, and that the most uncultivated under and committing to memory; and (3) sketchstood him and felt his power-thoughing the heads of the topic, and trusting to many of these, I suspect, were of opinion that they had heard much "finer" speak

sometimes a phrase, or even a single word - not shouted - but suddenly projected, with enormous force, like a ball from the mouth of a cannon.

the inspiration of the moment for the words in which to clothe the thought." Mr. Bright said in reply:

As to modes of preparation for speaking, it seems to me that every man would readily discover what suits him best. To write speeches and then to commit them to memory is, as

was a just one. It was his honest endeavor to apply the highest moral laws the laws of God-to the solution of all political difficulties. It was the depth and energy of his moral and religious earnest. ness which gave him his immense power while he lived; and this, beyond his genius, beyond his eloquence, beyond the great material advantages which he has conferred on the country, constitutes his chief title to the enduring gratitude and reverence of the English people.

you term it, a double slavery, which I could | preacher you would have made;" and he not bear. To speak without preparation, answered, "I hope I have always been a especially on great and solemn topics, is rash- preacher of righteousness." The claim ness, and cannot be recommended. When I intend to speak on anything that seems to me important, I consider what it is that I wish to impress upon my audience. I do not write my facts or my arguments, but make notes on two or three or four slips of note-paper, giving the line of argument and the facts as they occur to my mind, and I leave the words to come at call while I am speaking. There are occasionally short passages which for accuracy I may write down, as sometimes also -almost invariably the concluding words or sentences may be written. This is very nearly all I can say on this question. The advantage of this plan is that while it leaves a certain and sufficient freedom to the speaker, it keeps him within the main lines of the original plan upon which the speech was framed, and what he says, therefore, is more likely to be compact, and not wandering and diffuse.

It was his habit, when he spoke on the platform, to place his notes on the brim of his hat, which stood on the table before him; they were written on half-sheets of note-paper. Extracts of more than three or four lines in length which he intended to quote in support of his statements were usually written on similar half-sheets, separately numbered, and were carefully placed on the table by the side of the hat. His annual speeches to his constituents rarely extended over less than an honr; and they as rarely exceeded an hour and and five minutes. But the sheets of notes varied greatly in number; sometimes he had only four or five; sometimes he had eight or nine; and I think that occasion ally he had still more.

To those who listened to Mr. Bright with admiration these details may be interesting. But the secret of his eloquence is not to be discovered in his methods or preparation, or in the mechanical aids which he used to assist him while speaking, but in himself. He had great gifts of many kinds the genius of the orator, masculine sagacity, and a certain largeness of intellectual manner in handling every subject that he discussed. These gifts he used, not for the ends of personal ambition, but in the service of his country. He loved the people well enough to face their anger and their insults. He never flattered them. His public life was laborious and honorable; his private life stainless. He feared God, and had no other fear. Many years ago, when he sat down at the close of one of his speeches, which had deeply moved me, I said to him, "I have been thinking what a

Birmingham.

R. W. DALE.

From The Nineteenth Century. WITH FATHER DAMIEN AND THE LEPERS.

THE little steamer Mokolii leaves Honolulu, the capital of the Sandwich Islands, on Mondays at five o'clock for Molokai, and I took my passage on the 17th of last December and went on board.

The sunset was orange, with a great purple cloud fringed with gold. It faded quickly, and by the time we reached a small pier-head outside the town it was dark, and the moon was casting a long greenish light across the sea. From the pier came a continuous tremolo wail, rather mechanical, but broken by real sobs. I could see a little crowd of lepers and lepers' friends waiting there. "Omy husband!" cried a poor woman again and again. Thirteen lepers got into the boat and were rowed to the steamer. Then we sailed away, and gradually the wailing grew fainter and fainter till we could hear it no longer.

These partings for life between the lepers and their families are most tragic, but they are inevitable; for whether the disease be propagated by heredity or by contagion, the necessity for absolute segregation is equally evident, and the Hawaiian government has risen to the emergency

would that our Indian government with its hundred and thirty thousand lepers would do likewise! - and, sparing neither labor nor expense, has sought out the cases one by one, and provided a home so suitable to their needs, so well ordered, and so well supplied, that, strange to say, the difficulty often arises of preventing healthy people from taking up their abode there. I know many sadder places than

The Sandwich Islands are a collection of volcanoes of which the fires appear to have died out in southward order. In the largest and most southerly island they still rage. Out of its great lake of liquid boiling lava the fire-fountains toss themselves high into the air, red as blood in daylight, orange at twilight, and yellow as a primrose by night-a fearful sight, and ap I think he had not much faith in the proached by three miles of scarcely less gurjun oil, but at my request he began terrible lava, black and glittering, and using it, and after a fortnight's trial the hardened into shapes like gigantic croco- good effects became evident to all. His diles and serpents. Sometimes the trav-face looked greatly better, his sleep beeller sees that it is red-hot only eight inches below the sole of his foot.

attacked the lungs or some other vital | Caroline Charteris, which would play organ, and that the remedy comes too about forty tunes by simply having its late. handle turned. Before we had been at the settlement half an hour, Father Damien was showing his boys how to use it, and I rarely went through Kalawao afterwards without hearing the ariston active.