Personality plays a vital part in a speaker's success. Gladstone
described Cardinal Newman's manner in the pulpit as unsatisfactory if
considered in its separate parts. "There was not much change in the
inflection of his voice; action there was none; his sermons were read,
and his eyes were always on his book; and all that, you will say, is
against efficiency in preaching. Yes; but you take the man as a whole,
and there was a stamp and a seal upon him, there was solemn music and
sweetness in his tone, there was a completeness in the figure, taken
together with the tone and with the manner, which made even his delivery
such as I have described it, and tho exclusively with written sermons,
singularly attractive."