Lord Rosebery delivered on Monday in the Debating Hall of
the Oxford Union Society a speech of a kind which, so far as we know, could be uttered only in this country. It was an eloquent, and, as we believe, an accurate, appreciation of Lord Salisbury, to whom the speaker had throughout his life been in opposition. There was not an unkind sentence in it, though Lord Rosebery did not spare the pessimism which made his subject misapprehend so entirely the probable effects of the last Reform Bill. Lord Salisbury held that after it had passed "the monarchical principle was dead, the aristocratic principle was doomed," and democracy was finally triumphant; whereas since that great change the Monarchy has grown stronger, the aristocracy rule us quite serenely, and democracy "has rather a sickly time of it." He acknowledged Lord Salisbury's powers to the full : his high literary skill, shown as often in his despatches as in his essays ; his eloquence, which was, in fact, a power of talking fine literature ; and his capacity for making great coups, as in his celebrated despatch on the Treaty of San Stefano, a despatch which proceeded hot from his own brain. Lord Rosebery spoke of his subject's scorn of self-advertisement, and, indeed, of all baseness ; of his devotion to his country and his family; and he even defended his cynicism as "an acid" which he poured upon inappro- priate or inopportune proposals, and which dried them up. The speech, in truth, was a fine doge, and incidentally a splendid testimony to the absence of malignity in the eternal political strife of the British people.
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