the ear and the taste assign to the lawful dominion of prose. But his excellence is that of the writer, not of the orator. In reading his speeches, the beauty of their composition will be felt in proportion as we forget that they were composed to be spoken. They are not framed according to the fundamental and necessary principles of effective oratory, but on the rules which, as I have elsewhere said, are not only differing, but antagonistic that regulate the method of elaborate essay. The genius of oratory is more irregular and abrupt; it is akin to that of the drama, inasmuch as it does not address men one by one, each in his quiet study, but a miscellaneous audience, which requires to be kept always verging towards that point at which attention relieves its pressure by the vent of involuntary applause. To move numbers simultaneously collected, the passions appealed to must be those which all men have most in common; the arguments addressed to reason must be those which, however new or however embellished, can be as quickly apprehended by men of plain sense as by refining casuists or meditative scholars. Elaborate though Cicero's orations are, they are markedly distinct in style from his philosophical prelections. The essayist quietly affirms a proposition; the orator vehemently asks a question. "You say so and so," observes the essayist about to refute an opponent; "Do you mean to tell us so and so?" demands the impassioned orator. The writer asserts that "the excesses of Catiline became at last insupportable even to the patience of the Senate;" "How long will you abuse our patience, Catiline?" exclaims the orator. And an orator who could venture to commence an exordium with a burst so audaciously abrupt, needs no other proof to convince a practised public speaker how absolute must have been his command over his audience. What sympathy in them, and what discipline of voice, manner, counte

VOL. XCI.-NO. DLX.

nance in himself, were essential for the successful licence of so fiery a burst into the solemnity of formal impeachment !

Oratory, like the Drama, abhors lengthiness; like the Drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes. Burke, from the very depth of his understanding, demands too great a tension of faculties little exercised by men of the world in general, not to create fatigue in an assembly which men of the world compose. And his ornaments, which do not seem redundant when read, would appear in speech too artificial for that spontaneous utterance which oratory, even when prepared, must condescend to simulate. Again, Burke wants that easy knowledge of everyday life which is more or less essential to a popular public speaker. For each day upon each question there is a something which the party he represents wishes to have saida something, which it would have been a rashness to say yesterday, will be a platitude said to-morrow

but said to-day, has a pertinent wisdom that may turn the scales of debate. Now, the true orator, however aiming at immortality, must not neglect the moment; for he who speaks what the moment needs, is eloquent without effort. But Burke knew little of what was said at the clubs, and what it was all-important should be said in Parliament at the right time. And what he might know of such popular common-sense matters, and deign to repeat in his own way, he would so transform in the re-creating process of his glowing intellect, that not one man in a hundred would have muttered, "That's my thought -how clearly he puts it!"

We see in this the contrast between Burke and Fox. Fox studies far more diligently than is generally supposed-in the quiet of his bedroom, which he does not leave till

3 B

noon. But he, then, has his levee of gossiping partisans: he hears all that the town says-all that his party thinks it would be useful to say; and the facts or reflections his mind has already stored are at prompt service for the immediate want. Burke comes to join him just in time for the debate, weary, as he himself complains, of the forenoon's mental labour, and so little in sympathy with the humours and passions of the time and place, that, when he rises to speak, a matter-of-fact partisan plucks him by the coat-tail, with an imploring entreaty to hold his tongue.

That Burke was no popular speaker in Parliament, except upon those rare occasions when all considerations of mere taste give way to the desire to hear what a first-rate intellect has to say upon matters that vitally affect the State, must be ascribed far more to the matter of his speeches than his personal defects as a speaker. It may be very true that he had an untunable voice-a strong brogue-an ungainly gesture; but I think I can cite proof sufficient to show that Burke's delivery, in spite of its defects, was that of an orator-that is to say, it was a delivery which increased, not diminished, the effect of his matter. Mr Fox, in the last motion he ever made in the House of Commons, thus, in words which have escaped the notice of those who have discussed the question of Burke's merits as an orator, refers to a speech of Burke's upon the abolition of negro slavery: It was perhaps the most brilliant and convincing speech ever delivered in this or any other place by a consummate master of eloquence; and of which, I believe, there remains in some publications a report that will convey an inadequate idea of the substance, though it would be impossible to represent the manner;-the voice, the gesture, the manner, was not to be de

66

scribed—O, si illum audisse, si illum vidisse!"*'

Now, as many must then have been present, by whom Burke's delivery would have been familiarly known, it is clear that a man of Fox's sound taste and sense would never have indulged in a compliment, not only to the matter, but still more emphatically to the manner of the departed statesman, had it not been recognised as truthful. If the matter had been really marred by the defects of delivery, Fox's cordial praise would have seemed a malignant irony. In fact, the House of Commons is an audience that is very soon reconciled to mere personal defects. It is the triumph of an impassioned and earnest speaker to overcome all hostile impressions on eye and ear which at first interpose between his mind and his audience. Fox's gesticulation was extravagant and graceless; his articulation, in spite of lengthened practice, was so indistinct from rapidity, that he himself in one of his latest speeches observes, that no reporter could catch his words with sufficient accuracy for faithful report. Yet I doubt not that, though indistinct in the gallery, he contrived to make himself very intelligible to the House. The late Mr Sheil had almost every defect which tradition ascribes to Burke; an unmistakable brogue-a voice so shrill that its tones were compared to daggers of splintered glass; while in spite of its shrillness, the ear was laboriously strained to distinguish the sense of the sound that shivered as it struck on the tympanum. His action was that which in itself is most distasteful to an audience that abhors the theatrical; it was theatrical, and theatrical to excess. Yet Sheil was surpassed by none of our time in his immediate effect upon the House of Commons. He dazzled and fascinated an attention always eager, sometimes breathless. If his effects were transient-if the quality of the effects was not equal

p. 662.

to the degree-it was not because of his voice and gestures. His deficiencies as an orator, whatever they might be, were intellectual; the physical deficiencies he redeemedthey were forgotten while he spoke. But Mr Sheil's speeches were composed not upon literary but oratorical principles. It was the form in which he cast his thoughts that made him an orator of mark, beyond the standard of his political knowledge and his intellectual capacities as it was the form in which Burke cast his thoughts that forbade him to gain, save on rare occasions, that sovereign ascendancy over his audience, which, by political knowledge and intellectual capacities, was his unquestionable right. Any young man with the ambition to become a public speaker can test for himself the truth of my remarks. Let him take up one of Pitt's or Fox's speeches on the French Revolution. They are very badly reported, but enough of the original remains to show the mode in which those masters of the art of oratory conducted the argument they severally advanced. Let him declaim aloud, to any circle of listeners, some of the more animated passages in those mutilated harangues; and if he can declaim tolerably well, he will perceive at once that he is speaking as parliamentary orators speak-that the effects require no histrionic skill of delivery; they are palpable-popular; the sense is easily uttered and quickly understood, and will even at this day excite a certain sensation in listeners, because it embodies elementary differences of opinion, and places those differences in the light and the warmth of the broadest day. Let him then try to speak aloud one of those grand essays which are called Burke's Speeches, and he will soon find the difficulty of suiting phraseology so uncolloquial, and reasoning so refined, to the tone and gesture of a practical debater. They would require a delivery as skilful as that which the more metaphysically thoughtful, or the more abstracted

ly poetic, passages of Shakespeare require in an actor-in order to conciliate the imagination to an involuntary jar upon the reverence with which, in reflective stillness, we have been accustomed to ponder over oracles so subtle, conveyed from penetralia so remote. It is the same with many famous works in didactic or moralising poetry, which a person of ordinary refinement will peruse, when alone, with pleasure, but which become wearisome when read aloud; whereas other works akin to the drama, and therefore to oratory, may please and impress more when spoken than they do when perused in the closet. The Death of Marmion,' or 'Lord Ullin's Daughter,' almost requires to be recited in order to be fully appreciated. But who would wish to hear recited the 'Excursion,' or the Essay on Man?'

It is more than doubtful whether Burke himself ever spoke his speeches as they are now printed. They were carefully revised for publication, and revised in order to be perfect literary compositionsfiled from the roughness, and elaborated from the haste, of oral utterance; and, therefore, it is as literary compositions that they seem to me to deserve our reverential praise and requite our impassioned study-models, as nobly instructive to the young writer, as they would be fatally injurious to the young orator.

To close these remarks, it is according to the nature of the author's work that we should more or less give the preference to richness of language, or to concinnity of style.

In writings that treat of the ordinary business of life, or seek to explain rather than suggest, symbolise, or depict, some selected truth, we naturally prefer a style compact and lucid, dispensing with a pomp of words which would be an ostentation impertinent to the simplicity of the occasion. On the other hand, in those classes of composition which are more or less generic to poetry, inasmuch as they are chiefly ad

dressed to the imagination, and through the imagination wind their way to the reason, a style of architectural structure, with all its proportions measured by an inch scale, would be destructive to the effects which the writer desires to produce. To enlist the imagination on your side, you must leave it free to imagine for itself.

When we want practically to build a dwelling-house, let the builder show us his plan in plain geometrical outlines. We suspect that there is something wrong in his construction, that there is some defect which he desires to conceal, when he adds to his drawing the hues of a sunset, or dips the unsightly office-wing into the pleasant gloom of an imaginary grove. But when we wish rather to see on the canvass some ancient legendary castle, some il lustration of scenes which heroes have trodden or poets have sung, then we willingly lend ourselves to the beautifying art by which the painter harmonises reality to our own idealising preconceptions; then the thunder-cloud may rest upon the ruined battlements, then the moonlight may stream through the gaping fissures, or, then, the landscapes of Spenser's Fairyland may take a Nature of their own, never seen on earth, yet faithful to our dreams, as they rise from the pallet of Turner in the glory of golden haze.

Thus, in the literature of romance, we must admit to creative prose a licence analogous to that which we accord to creative verse. For Romance, though its form be in prose, does in substance belong to poetry, obey the same conditions, and necessitate the same indulgence.

Nor is it in fiction alone (wherein audacity in the resources of poetic diction is obviously proportioned to the degree in which that fiction approaches, or recedes from, the poetic aspects of life) that we are compelled to relax severe canons as to the mechanism of style, if we would leave free play to the higher delight derivable from luxury and glow of language. There are sub

jects which can only be rescued from triteness, by showing those more latent phases of the Material that rest half-hid amid types and parables of the Spiritual. When Jeremy Taylor discourses on Marriage, what new and endearing light the preacher throws upon the sacred mystery of the indissoluble bond, by words and images that exact from our taste the licence it accords to the poet! And there is many a truth, whether found hourly by the side of crowded thoroughfares, or in shadowy dingles and forest-deeps, unpenetrated by the star,-which we may enable science to classify more accurately, and the common reader to comprehend more plainly, if, instead of dry speculation on its botanical attributes, we place in our page the form and the colours of the flower.

Nor, where the imagination of the author has wealth sufficient to render display an appropriate evidence of riches, and not the artifice of the impostor seeking to disguise his poverty, need we fear that the substance of good sense will be slighter for the delicate arabesques, which may give to a thing of use the additional value of a work of art. On the contrary, the elegance of the ornament not unfrequently attests the stoutness of the fabric. Only into their most durable tissues did the Genoese embroiderers weave their delicate threads of gold; only on their hardest steel did the smiths of Milan damaskeen the gracious phantasies which still keep their armour among the heirlooms of royal halls, and guide the eye of the craftsman to numberless fresh applications of former art, though the armour itself be worn no more. The Useful passes away with each generation into new uses. The Beautiful remains a fixed unalterable standard of value, by which the Useful itself is compelled to calculate the worth of its daily labours. This is a truth which, to a superficial thinker, will seem dubious. Every profound thinker will acknowledge it at once.

IF I have a fancy for living in towers, I suppose I may indulge in it so long as no nocturnal raids are proved against me. It was Burns who sang

"As I stood by yon roofless tower,
Where the wa-flower scents the dewy air,
Where the howlet mourns in her ivy bower,
And tells the midnight moon her care;'

Border

and it was such an old grey tower that first attracted my boy hood's fancy. Never could I pass it without laying down my fishingrod and climbing up an old staircase, in order to muse for an hour beneath the old ash-tree which grew out of its roofless second storey, and weave into wild fancies the blue smoke of my secret youthful pipe. As snatches of the weird Border ballads came to recollection, fierce mosstroopers thronged round me with their riant recklessness and defiant gloom. That tower became associated with blazing hamlets, in whose red glare stalwart figures were snatching "the fat horse and feir woman; with passion so intense that the King of Terrors became its feeble vassal; and with those dreams of unearthly love and undy ing sorrow, which passed ever and anon over the hill-side where the hunted marauder lay. I was too young to care much for the interesting fact, that there was a ford beneath, where Scotch lasses,

"A' plump and strapping in their teens,"

stripped off their shoes and stockings to wade over. It was better to remember that it was the stream of Thomas the Rhymer which murmured by, and to fancy him meeting the Queen of Elfland in her grass-green silk :—

"Harp and carp, Thomas,' she said,

'Harp and carp alang wi' me; And if ye daur to kiss my lips, Sure of your bodie I will be.'

'Betide me weal, betide me woe, That weird shall never daunton me.' Syne he has kissed her rosy lips,

All underneath the Eildon tree."

Then there was the five-storeyed wooden tower from which the Jam of Bela looks over the flaming wilds of Beloochistan, and marks the caftilah which he thinks may safely become his prey. When Balooch Khan struck first his shield and then his

breast as he offered to protect me, while I put up a devout internal prayer for protection from him, how curiously the old Border ballads came to mind, and how forcibly the fact was impressed uprealise the charms of the state of on me that I was in a position to society which they depict! several days, however, I slept in safety under the shadow of that Bela tower, and wandered unharmed among tribes as lawless and marauding as ever blessed the Scottish Border.*

For

Perhaps, strictly speaking, it was not so much a tower as a tomb in

which I passed many pleasant days of Ellora; but it had the position, beside the caves and rock-temples with the appearance, of a tower; and the Mohammedan buried beneath never disturbed the white invader. Stretching beneath like an ocean was rich land bearing the traces of former cultivation, but at that time with scarcely a culinary. fire to mingle its smoke with the pillars of rain and cloud which the Indian monsoon whirled over it. Close by were dwellings once occupied by troglodytic monks-vast caves and temples of solid rock, filled and carved over with strange figures, some of half-human, halfbestial shapes, and others of lordly and beautiful forms of races which have now passed away. Above and around these was the Wilde—the more savage powers of nature, en