The great political speech, which for that matter is a sort of drama, is not made by passages for elegant extract or anthologies, but by personality, movement, climax, spectacle, and the action of the time.
Morley describes the essence of a great political speech, emphasizing its dynamic and dramatic nature over mere literary elegance.
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Happy the man who from out the floods has fled the storm and found the haven; happy too is he who has surmounted toil and trouble.—Bacchae, 902-5.
Gladstone protested against the bill as “inequitable, unusual, and unwise,” and it was largely modified in committee.
A rendering less apt for this occasion finds favour with some scholars, that true virtue can never be restored to those who have once fallen away from it.
They might learn how the true gentleman speaks of one whom he cannot but admit to have devoted a long life to the search of truth, and allow to have sacrificed every personal prospect to the promulgation of that which appeared to him as…
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