"John Morley...should be mentioned here, not as an orator, for he would make no such claim, but as the last or almost the last exponent of the classical literary style. Just as his great Biography of Mr. Gladstone teems with splendid phrases, original without being extravagant, imaginative without being ornate, so in some of his platform speeches, delivered in the days when he addressed great popular audiences, the principles of his political creed were expounded in a garb that reminds one of the school of literary orators that ended with Canning and Macaulay. It was not rhetoric, because the sense was never sacrificed to the form, but it was an inspired form of spoken prose."
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Academics from EnglandMembers of the Parliament of the United KingdomEditors from EnglandChief Secretaries for IrelandSecretaries of State for India (United Kingdom)
Original Language: English
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Lord Curzon, Modern Parliamentary Eloquence: The Rede Lecture, delivered before the University of Cambridge, November 6, 1913 (1914), p. 40
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Morley%2C_1st_Viscount_Morley_of_Blackburn
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John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
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