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carried the mind away from points on which it was fixed with eager interest to topics on which it felt no interest at all. His manner of expressing himself partook of the philosophic turn of his thoughts. However eloquent or imaginative, he never laid aside his didactic air; and not only tired his audience by his elaborate lessons in politics, but often seemed to them as if he was arrogating the authority of a master over his pupils. To such a degree was his method of expounding his ideas unsuited to the feelings which prevailed in the House of Commons, that Erskine crept under the benches to escape a speech which, when published, he thumbed to rags; and Pitt and Lord Grenville once consulted whether it was worth while to answer another of his famous harangues, and decided in the negative, though Lord Grenville read it afterwards with extreme admiration and delight, and held it to be one of his noblest efforts. The very circumstance which diminished the interest of his oratory when it was delivered adds to it now. The less it was confined to temporary topics, and the more it dealt in permanent principles, the greater its value to posterity. Those whose own horizon was bounded by party prejudices could not even perceive how vast was the reach of his vision in comparison with their own. The profligate Wilkes, who, in his popular time, was at best an ape mimicking the fierceness of the tiger, said, in the days when the pretended patriot had subsided into the sleek and docile placeman, that Burke had drawn his own character in that of Rousseau-" much splendid, brilliant eloquence, little solid wisdom." In our age the wisdom and the eloquence would be pronounced to be upon a par. They are both transcendent, and the world has never afforded a second example of their union in any thing like the same degree. His language was nervous, his sentences polished, his abundant metaphors grand and original. Though his style is never stilted, it has a rare majesty both in thought and expression. Öccasionally he descends to phrases and images which are too homely for the general strain of his discourse; but these blots are not frequent. His commonest fault is rather a monotony of dignity, which wants the relief of passages dressed in a more familiar garb. He has the further defect of moving too slowly over

his ground. There is no repetition in his language, nor much tautology in his sentences. But he dwells long upon one idea, and reïterates it as a whole or in its parts under manifold forms. That speeches so finished and elaborate, and abounding in eloquence of unrivaled magnificence, should have been the product of infinite pains, requires no other proof than is supplied by the speeches themselves. But the immense labor which he bestowed upon all he did was his constant boast. He disclaimed superior talent, and always appealed to his superior industry. Gibbon testifies that he published his great orations as he delivered them, which is only another mode of saying that he prepared his addresses to the House of Commons with no less care than he prepared his pamphlets for the printer. By this incessant labor he could at last soar at any moment to his highest elevation, as though it had been his natural level. "His very answers," says Horace Walpole, "that had sprung from what had fallen from others, were so pointed and artfully arranged that they wore the appearance of study." His innate genius was undoubtedly wonderful, but he improved it to the uttermost. By reading and observation he fed his rich imagination; to books he owed his vast and varied knowledge; from his extensive acquaintance with literature he derived his inexhaustible command of words; through his habits of severe thought he was enabled to draw the inferences which have won for him the renown of being the most sagacious of politicians; and by the incessant practice of composition he learnt to embody his conclusions in a style more grandly beautiful than has ever been reached by any other Englishman with either the tongue or the pen.

Conversation Sharpe relates to Mr. Fox that he sometimes put the arguments of his adversaries in such an advantageous light that his friends were alarmed lest he should fail to answer them. To state one by one the arguments of the opposition, and one by one to reply to them, was the characteristic of his speaking, and without the aid of this text upon which to hang his comments he could make little progress. His opening speeches were almost always bad. Until he got warmed with his subject he hesitated and stammered, and he often continued for long together in a tame and common-place strain. Even

in his highest flights he indulged in inces-saries in his front, and hence much of the sant repetitions, was negligent in his lan- interest which attended them then, and guage, and was neither polished nor exact the faint impression they produce by comin his style. Notwithstanding these de- parison at present. fects he exercised a prodigious influence The late Lord Stanhope asked Pitt by over his hearers. "He forgot himself," what method he acquired his readiness of says Sir James Mackintosh," and every speech, and Pitt replied that it was very thing around him. He darted fire into much due to a practice, enjoined on him his audience. Torrents of impetuous and by his father, of reading a book in some irresistible eloquence swept along their foreign language, turning it into English feelings and convictions." There is no- as he went along, and pausing when he thing in his finest passages which would was at a loss for a fitting word until the seem to answer to this description, for to right expression came. He had often to the calm eye of the reader they are mar- stop at first, but grew fluent by degrees, red by the want of condensation and and in consequence had never to stop finish, and their faults are perhaps more when he afterwards entered into public conspicuous than their beauties. But if life. This is the example adduced by his speeches are considered with reference Lord Stanhope to show the students of to the influence they might exert when the Aberdeen University the necessity of delivered with vehemence to partisans who were excited upon the topics of which they treat, and who would only slightly remark during the rapidity of utterance the negligence which reigns throughout his best declamation, it is easy to understand the impression they made. There is a rough vigor and animation in his phraseology, a force or plausibility in his reasoning, and a fertility in his counter arguments which would be highly effective whilst the contest raged. Of all the celebrated orators of his generation he was the one who composed the least, and it is precisely on this account that he is the one whose speeches betray the greatest carelessness. His arguments, on the contrary, must have been carefully meditated, and as in reflecting on them the manner in which they could be rendered most telling must have constituted part of the process, even the expressions themselves must have been in some respects prepared. Far from being an instance to encourage indolence, his example confirms the proposition that no powers can enable men to dispense with industry, since the particular in which he took less pains than his compeers was also the point in which he was most defective. He had not the teeming knowledge, the enlarged views, the prophetic vision, the exuberant imagination, or the lofty eloquence of Burke; but he surpassed him as a party leader, or at least as a party debater, chiefly because he kept to the topics of the hour. His were not the grand strategic movements of which few had the patience to await the issue. They were close band-to-hand fights with the adver

VOL. XLIV.-NO. III.

training, and the means by which success is obtained. Lord Chatham brought up his son to be an orator, and the reason he came forth a consummate speaker in his youth was that he had been learning the lesson from boyhood. None of the negligence of Fox was apparent in him. His sentences, which fell from him as easily as if he had been talking, were as finished as if they had been penned. They were stately, flowing, and harmonious, kept up throughout to the same level, and set off by a fine voice and a dignified bearing. But it must be confessed that there is a large measure of truth in the criticism that he spoke "a state-paper style." Though the language is sonorous, pure, and perspicuous, and though it perfectly defines the ideas he intended to convey, it is wanting in fire, and those peculiar felicities which arrest attention, and call forth admiration. In our opinion he was greater as a minister than as an orator, if his speeches are to be judged as literary compositions, and not solely for their adaptation to a temporary purpose, which they most effectually served. His father was less equal, and his manner indeed entirely different from that of his son, but in the energy and picturesqueness of his brightest flashes Lord Chatham was as superior to Mr. Pitt as Mr. Pitt was su perior to Lord Chatham in argument and the knowledge of politics and finance.

Sheridan as an orator was very inferior to the persons with whom his name is usually associated. His taste was radically vicious. His favorite sentiments were claptrap, his favorite phraseology tinsel. The florid rhetoric, the apostro

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lor, as he proceeded, insisted that the minutes should be read. A general cry of inquiry was raised for Mr. Sheridan's bag. Fox, alarmed lest the want of it should be the ruin of the speech, eagerly demanded of Mr. Taylor the cause of the mistake, and Taylor whispered to him: "The man has no bag." The whole scene according to Moore was a contrivance of Sheridan to raise surprise at the readiness of his resources, notwithstanding that he had shut himself up at Wanstead to elaborate this very oration, and wrote and read so hard that he complained at evenings that he had motes before his eyes. The fate which attended the attempt was just what might have been foreseen. The man who could feel it necessary upon such a point to contrive an elaborate piece of dramatic deception could never personate his part with sufficient perfection to deceive.

phes, and the invocations which imposed | long orations, make the court laugh, upon his listeners, appear now to be only please the women, and get triumphantly fit to be addressed to the galleries by through the whole." The Lord Chancelsome hero of a melo-drama. Burke said of his speech on the Begums in Westminster Hall, at the impeachment of Warren Hastings: "That is the true style; something neither prose nor poetry, but better than either." Moore had the short-hand writer's report, and though his own taste at that time was sufficiently Oriental, he pronounced it to "be trashy bombast." There is occasionally in Sheridan a fine image or a splendid sentence, but his most highly-wrought passages belong in general to the class of the false sublime. Such as he was, however, he became entirely by unremitting exertion. He never, Moore says, made a speech of any moment of which a sketch was not found in his papers, with the showy parts written two or three times over. The minutest points had been carefully considered, and he marked the precise place in which what he meant to seem the involuntary exclamation, "Good God, Mr. Speaker," was to be introduced. This preparation he continued to the last. He never, in truth, acquired readiness by practice. Both Sir Samuel Romilly and Dugald Stewart said that his transitions from his learnt declamation to his extempore statements were perceptible to every body. From his inability to keep for an instant on the wing there was no gradation, and he suddenly dropped from tropes and rhetoric into a style that was singularly bald and lax. His wit, which was his chief excellence, was equally known to have been studied in the closet even before Moore printed from his papers the several forms through which many of his sarcastic pleasantries had passed from their first germ to the last edition which he produced in public. Pitt in replying to him spoke of his "hoarded repartees and matured jests." Every person who has been upon the stage remains more or less an actor when he is off it. Sheridan, the son of a player, and himself a dramatist and the manager of a theater, had contracted this habit, and carried to charlatantry his vain attempts to conceal his labored preparation. In one of his speeches on the trial of Warren Hastings, when Mr. M. A. Taylor, who was to read the minutes referred to in the argument, asked him for the papers, he said he had omitted to bring them. "But he would abuse Ned Law, ridicule Plumer's

Sir James Mackintosh remarked, "that the true light in which to consider speaking in the House of Commons was as an animated conversation on public business, and that it was rare for any speech to succeed which was raised on any other basis.” Canning joined in this opinion. He said that the House was a business assembly, and that the debates must conform to its predominant character; that it was particularly jealous of ornament and declamation, and that if they were employed at all, must seem to spring naturally out of the subject. This preponderance of the business element had been of gradual growth. In the time of Lord Chatham the discussions turned much upon personalities and abstract sentiments, and were compared by Burke to the loose discussions of a vestry meeting or a debating-club. A more extensive knowledge of the minutia of a question was required during the reign of Pitt and Fox, but far less than was demanded in the time of Canning and Brougham. Canning is an evidence that wit and eloquence may find a full exercise in the exposition of facts, and in reasoning upon details, as well as in vague and superficial generalities. His style was lighter than that of Pitt, and his language more elegant, disclosing in its greater felicity his more intimate acquaintance with the masterpieces of literature. His graceful composition would have enlivened any

topic even if his satirical pleasantry had been less bright and abundant. The point in which he fell below the highest orators was in his declamatory passages, which are somewhat deficient in that robustness and power, that grandeur and magnificence, which thrill through the mind. The effect of his speaking was even diminished by the excess to which he carried his painstaking, by the evident elaboration of every word he uttered, by the over-fastidiousness which prevented his forgetting in his subject his care for the garb in which he clothed it. He needed a little more of that last art by which art is concealed; but what intense application did not enable him to reach would certainly not have been gained through indolence, except by the sacrifice of all the merits which have rendered him famous.

Lord Brougham, who comes next in this line of illustrious orators, whom we have named in a chronological series, has, like Cicero, discoursed largely upon his art; and not Cicero himself has insisted more strenuously upon the absolute necessity of incessant study of the best models, and the diligent use of the pen. His speeches, a selection from which, in two volumes, has been recently published, are an evidence that he has done both in his own person. His familiarity with Demosthenes is attested by his imitation of some of his noblest passages; and he is generally understood to have written several of his celebrated perorations again and again. No man has spoken more frequently offhand, or has had a more inexhaustible supply of language, knowledge, and sarcasm at command. He, if any one, might have been supposed capable of dispensing with the preparation he has practiced and enforced; and we could desire no stronger illustration of the eternal truth, that excellence and labor are never disjoined. In the speeches of Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, and Canning, we seek in vain for specimens of oratory which, when separated from the context, would give an adequate idea of their powers, and do justice to their renown. Their most perfect pages would disappoint those whose opinion of their genius is chiefly derived from traditionary fame. In the case of Lord Brougham, the best panegyric of his highest eloquence is to transcribe it. It is thus that he winds up his speech on Law Reform in 1828:

"You saw the greatest warrior of the ageconqueror of Italy-humbler of Germany-termatchless victories poor compared with the triror of the North-saw him account all his umph you are now in a condition to win-saw him contemn the fickleness of Fortune, while in despite of her he could pronounce his memorable boast: 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my hand!' You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawThe lustre giver whom in arms you overcame! solid and enduring splendor of the Reign. It of the Regency will be eclipsed by the more was the boast of Augustus-it formed part of the glare in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost-that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. But how much nobler will be the Sovereign's boast, when he shall have it to say, that he found law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book, left it a living it the inheritance of the poor; found it the letter; found it the patrimony of the rich, left two-edged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!"

Nobody needs to be told that this conclusion must have been labored, in advance, because it is not within the compass of human intellect to have sustained the antithesis in language so felicitous and condensed by any extempore effort. An ordinary speaker may approach the greatest in his middle strain. The test of genius is in flights like this, which, as with the fine parts of Milton, soar to a height that lesser masters can not approach. To an example of a prepared peroration we add one which must have been inspired at the moment, since it was in answer to an argument used in the course of the debate, and which was hardly of a nature to have been foreseen. The subject was the Eastern Slave Trade, and the date of the discussion was 1838:

"But I am told to be of good courage, and not to despond. I am bid to look at the influence of public opinion-the watchfulness of the press-the unceasing efforts of all the societies the jealous vigilance of Parliament. Trust, say the friends of this abominable measure, trust to the force which gained the former triumph. Expect some Clarkson to arise, mighty in the powers of persevering philanthropy, with the piety of a saint, and the courage of a martyrhope for some second Wilberforce who shall cast away all ambition but that of doing good, scorn all power but that of relieving his fellowcreatures, and reserving for mankind what others give up to party, know no vocation but that blessed work of furthering justice and free

ing the slave-reckon upon once more seeing a government like that of 1806-alas! how different from any we now witness!-formed of men who deemed no work of humanity below their care or alien to their nature, and resolved to fulfill their high destiny, beard the Court, confront the Peers, contemn the Planters, and in despite of planter and peer and prince, crush the foreign traffic with one hand, while they gave up the staff of power with the other, rather than be patrons of intolerance at home. I make for answer, if it please you-No. I will not suffer the upas-tree to be transplanted on the chance of its not thriving in an ungenial soil, and in the hope that, after it shall be found to blight with death all beneath its shade, my arm may be found strong enough to wield the axe which shall lay it low."

an ordinary number in the present day; and Lord Brougham, who himself is one of them, may thus be said to have flourished in two generations. Of the speakers who belong exclusively to a later period than that of Canning, we shall not touch here; but we venture to express our belief that, when the circumstances which have formed Lord Derby and Mr. Gladstone are known, it will be found that these two orators, confessedly without a rival among the men of their own standing, have attained to excellence by the same methods as their predecessors. If they have not surpassed their forerunners by doing without effort what their precursors could only effect with diligence, Cicero says that, as a boat, when the as little can we admit that they fall berowers rest upon their oars, continues to hind them. Persons who have been move by the previous impulse in the same thrilled and charmed by their oratory, and direction, so in a speech which has been who are loud in its praise, yet share the in part composed, the extemporaneous notion, which is founded upon nothing, portion proceeds in the same strain from that the exhibitions of Pitt and Fox were the influence of the high-wrought decla- finer still. Burke, in conformity with this mation which has gone before. This ex- hereditary delusion, spoke of that very tract from Lord Brougham is both an ex-age as of an age of mediocrity; we speak ample of the truth of Cicero's observation, and of the pitch to which unprepared eloquence may rise. Marvelous under any circumstances, it would be absolutely miraculous if extraordinary industry did not conspire with extraordinary talent to produce the result. Orators are not made by the talk of the nurse, and it would indeed be strange if passages which are surpassed by nothing in the English language could have been conceived without the study and practice of that composition of which they are such noble specimens.

Lord Brougham states, in his "Discourse on Natural Theology," that though the body begins to decline after thirty, the mind improves rapidly from thirty to fifty, and suffers no decay till past seventy in the generality of men, while in some it continues unimpaired till eighty or ninety. Of such persons there have been more than

of it as of an age of giants. Every era is thus unduly depressed while it is passing, and is sometimes unduly elevated when it is past. Nearly all mankind, in this respect, adopt the language of Nestor, or even believe, with the old Count in "Gil Blas," that the peaches were much larger in their youth. But let those who are not imposed on by names read a speech or two of Pitt and Fox, and when fresh from the task, listen to an oration, upon an equal occasion, of Lord Derby in the House of Lords, or of Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons, and they will, we are confident, be ready to confess that elo. quence in England is not yet upon the decline. The real improvement required is, that the men who have entirely neg lected the art should endeavor to repair a deficiency which deprives their knowledge of its utility by destroying its charm.

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