There could not be a richer
opportunity for reconciling and making friends betwixt the old system of
society and the new; but Lord ------ did not seem to make anything of it.
I remember nothing that he said excepting his statement that the family
had been five hundred years connected with the town of Liverpool. I wish
I could have responded to "The House of Stanley," and his Lordship could
have spoken in my behalf. None of the speeches were remarkably good; the
Bishop of Chester's perhaps the best, though he is but a little man in
aspect, not at all filling up one's idea of a bishop, and the rest were
on an indistinguishable level, though, being all practised speakers, they
were less hum-y and ha-y than English orators ordinarily are.
I was really tired to death before my own turn came, sitting all that
time, as it were, on the scaffold, with the rope round my neck. At last
Monckton Milnes was called up and made a speech, of which, to my dismay,
I could hardly hear a single word, owing to his being at a considerable
distance, on the other side of the chairman, and flinging his voice,
which is a bass one, across the hall, instead of adown it, in my
direction.
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