The battle for Catholic Emancipation was being carried on, and it became clearer from year to year on which side Lord Palmerston was to be counted, in spite of his colleagues, whom he thus names: “I can forgive old women like the Chancellor, spoonies like Liverpool, ignoramuses like Westmoreland, old stumped-up Tories like Bathurst; but how such a man as Peel, liberal, enlightened, and fresh-minded, should find himself running in such a pack is hardly intelligible. I think he must in his heart regret those early pledges and youthful prejudices which have committed him to opinions so different from the comprehensive and statesmanlike views which he takes of foreign affairs.” But even for Catholic Emancipation he had very little to say in Parliament. It cannot be too often declared,--either as against his character as a statesman or on his behalf, as the reader may think it,--that he was not in any part of his career a man prone to speech. He was brought up in that school of politicians in which a man uses his power of speech, or used to use it, not as a woman uses her teeth, for ornament, but as a dog does, for attack and defence. To have to make a speech was from the first to the last of his career an evil thing, though the evil became mitigated by practice, till as a personal annoyance it wore away. Nevertheless there was the time lost, and the trouble necessary to be taken, and the hours given up to the listening to other people, which might have been so satisfactorily employed either in reading or writing, or in early years in playing Cupid, or even in shooting pheasants, if his keeper would preserve them for him! As for his taking delight in the speeches of others, it cannot be believed of him. Once--but he was then very young--did he burst out into praise of Canning’s eloquence. “Canning’s speech was one of the most brilliant I ever heard. He carried the House with him throughout.” But at that time he was not yet twenty-four.