In youth he had the brow
of a Jupiter and a stature of Apollo. Sydney Smith says of Lord John
Russell's five feet, when he went down to Yorkshire after the Reform
Bill had passed, the stalwart hunters of Yorkshire exclaimed, "What,
that little shrimp, he carry the Reform Bill!" "No, no!" said Smith, "he
was a large man, but the labors of the bill shrunk him."
I remember the story Russell Lowell tells of Webster; when a year or two
before his death, the Whig party thought of dissolution, Webster came
home from Washington and went down to Faneuil Hall to protest, and four
thousand of his fellow Whigs came out; drawing himself up to his
loftiest proportion, his brow charged with thunder, before the listening
thousands, he said, "Gentlemen, I am a Whig, a Massachusetts Whig, a
Faneuil Hall Whig, a revolutionary Whig, a constitutional Whig. If you
break up the Whig party, sir, where am I to go?" And says Lowell, "We
all held our breath, thinking where he could go. But if he had been five
feet three, we should have said, 'Who cares where you go?'"
Well, O'Connell had all that; and true nature seemed to be speaking all
over him.
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