DANIEL O'CONNELL AND RICHARD LALOR SHELL.

Otago Witness, Issue 1890, 10 February 1888, Page 32

DANIEL O'CONNELL AND RICHARD LALOR SHELL.

The immediate triumph that falls to the lot of popular eloquence was enjoyed by both of these remarkable Irishmen. That O'Connell was a public speaker of a high order every listener whose judgment was worth anything fully admitted. Ilis oratory was "often scurrilous and coarse, and marred by a bearing in which cringing flattery and rude bullying were strangely blended," bub it produced great and even startling effects. "As the orator of a popular assembly," says Mr Justin McCarthy, in his " History of Our Own Times,'' "as the orator of a monster meeting, O'Connell probably never had an equal in these countries. He had many of the physical endowments that are especially favourable to success in such a sphere. He had [a Herculean frame, a stately presence, a face capable of expressing easily and effectively the most rapid alternations of mood, and a voice which all heaiers admit to have been almost unrivalled for strength and sweetness. Its power, its pathos, its passion, its music have been described in words of positive rapture by men who detested O'Connell, and who would rather, if they could, have denied to him any claim on public attention even in the matter of voice. He spoke without studied preparation, and, of course, had all the defects of such a style. He fell into repetition, and into carelessness of construction ; he was hurried away into exaggeration, and sometimes into mere bombast. But he had all the peculiar success, too, which rewards the orator who can speak without preparation. He always spoke right to the hearts of his hearers."

When Dickens was reporting a speech of O'Connell's in the House of Commons on one of the tithe riots in Ireland, he had to lay down his pencil, so moved was he by the pathos with which the speaker described the wrongs and sufferings of his fellow countrymen.

The different intellectual mould in which Sheil was cast produced a marked effect on the impetuous oratory which he poured out on his hearers. His gifts as a poet and dramatist may be seen in the literary culture and taste of his speeches, but it has been remarked that their matter " never rose to a level with the brilliancy of illustration and flow of impassioned declamation with which they were adorned." Mr Gladstone has selected Sheil as an example of a speaker achieving great success in spite of serious defects of voice and delivery. Sheil's voice he describes as resembling nothing so much as the sound of a tin kettle battered about from place to place, " knocking first against one side and then against another." "In anybody else," Mr Gladstone adds, " I would not, if it had been in my choice, have liked to listen to that voice ; but in him I would not have changed it, for it was part of a most remarkable whole, and nobody ever felt it painful while listening to.

it. He was a great orator, and an orator of much preparation, I believe, carried even to word^, with a very vivid imagination, and an - enormous power of language and of strong feeling. There was a peculiar character, a sort of half wildness, in his aspect and delivery ; his whole figure, and his delivery, and his voice, and his matter were all in such perfect keeping with one another that they formed a great Parliamentary picture." Sheil entered at last the calm waters of official life, dying at Florence as Minister at the Court of Tuscany.