Appreciation of Mr. Gladstone delivered in the House of Lords on May 20, 1898, by his successor in Office, the Rt. Hon. ARCHIBALD PRIMROSE ,Earlof Rosebery , Prime Minister, 1894-95
THE celebrated William Johnson Cory said of his pupil at Eton, the late Earl of Rosebery : ' He will be an orator, and if not a poet, such a man as poets delight in.' The prophecy was triumphantly fulfilled. None of Lord Rosebery's achievements as a statesman, historian, sportsman, or littérateur, received a greater tribute in his recent obituary notices than the eloquence of his oratory.
As a speaker, it has been said that he had dignity, art, a musical voice with a great range of modulation, wit and a rare power of persuasion. He brought back British Parliamentary eloquence to the great traditions of Fox and Pitt. In spirit and in speech, he was a nineteenth-century representative of the eighteenth-century type of statesman, who was also a scholar and often a man of letters.
The appreciation of JMr. Gladstone is one of the most famous of his addresses. Nobody was better fitted than Lord Rosebery to pay a tribute to the memory of a man whom he not only succeeded in the leadership of the Liberal Party and in the office of Prime Minister, but also esteemed highly as a great personal friend.
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