porter.
special exception to the report published in 'Hansard ' of a speech he had delivered on the Dissenters' Chapel bill, and put
dealing with speeches, the accuracy ofwhich for twenty or thirty years had passed unchallenged , by the following ingenious piece of special pleading:
' I do not pretend to give with accuracy the diction of these speeches which I did not myself correct within a week after they were delivered . Many expressions, and a few paragraphs linger in my memory. But the rest, including much that had been carefully premeditated , is irrevocably lost . . . . My delivery is, I believe, too rapid . Able shorthand writers have complained that they could not follow me, and . . . as I am unable to recall the
precise words which I used , I have done my best to put my memory into words which I might have used .”
Vizetelly can not
refrain from adding the comment, “ I am unaware whether Mr. Macaulay spoke as rapidly in privatewhere , as is well-known ,
he commonly monopolised all the conversation - as he here repre sents himself as doing in Parliament, but I remember that Lord
Brougham , who was sufficiently loquacious himself, spitefully compared Macaulay 's incessant flow of talk to the chatter of ten parrots and a chime of bells.” 45
If " many members of Parliament had cause to be amazed at their own eloquence whilst Dr. Johnson was reporter for the
Gentleman's Magazine, between 1740 and 1743," other speakers both in and out of Parliament may have been somewhat similarly amazed . G . J. Holyoake, in a chapter called “ Reporting Speeches
which never were Made,” gives an account of the speeches made 44 A parallel column arrangement of Macaulay's speech on the Dissenters' Chapel Bill, June 6 , 1844, as given in Hansard and in his collected works published in 1866 , shows not only much elaboration of phraseology, but
genuine emendations. Louise Fargo Brown's intimate knowledge of the Anabaptists has led her to detect the evident irritation of the various divi sions of the Baptists over Macaulay' s statement as reported in Hansard “ If . . . it were a Bill in favor of Catholics , or the Wesleyan Methodists, or the Baptists . . . ” In the collected works the passage reads, “ . . . or Wesleyan Methodists , or General Baptists, or Particular Baptists ."
The two versions of the speech may be found in Hansard , Third Series, 75: 338 –351, and Collected Speeches , “ Dissenters' Chapels Bill,” pp . 385 - 403.
45 7 . Vizetelly, Glances Back Through Seventy Years, I, 386 . — The version of Macaulay is given in his Collected Speeches, Preface, pp . 12– 18.
