The prevailing character of his delivery was majesty and force. "The crutch in his hand became a weapon of oratory."-" You talk, my Lords, of conquering America; of your numerous friends there to annihilate the Congress; of your powerful forces to disperse her armies; I might as well talk of driving them before me with this crutch."

Much, however, as he owed to these personal advantages, it was his character as a man which gave him his surprising ascendency over the minds of his countrymen. There was a fascination for all hearts in his lofty bearing; his generous sentiments; his comprehensive policy; his grand conceptions of the height to which England might be raised as arbiter of Europe; his preference of her honor over all inferior material interests. There was a fascination, too, for the hearts of all who love freedom, in that intense spirit of liberty which was the animating principle of his life. His political integrity, no less than his eloquence, formed “an era in the senate ;" and it was his glory as a statesman, that, in an age of shameless profligacy, "when every one," in the words of Walpole, "had his price," he stood forth to “stem the torrent of a downward age." Even his enemies were forced to pay homage to his noble assertion of his principles-his courage, his frankness, his perfect sincerity. Eloquent as he was, he impressed every hearer with the conviction, that there was in him something higher than all eloquence. "Every one felt," says a contemporary, that the man was infinitely greater than the orator." Even Franklin lost his coolness when speaking of Lord Chatham. "I have sometimes," said he, "seen eloquence without wisdom, and often wisdom without eloquence; but in him I have seen them united in the highest possible degree."

The range of his powers as a speaker was uncommonly wide. He was equally qualified to conciliate and subdue. When he saw fit, no man could be more plausible and ingratiating; no one had ever a more winning address, or was more adroit in obviating objections and allaying prejudice. When he changed his tone, and chose rather to subdue, he had the sharpest and most massy weapons at command-wit, humor, irony, overwhelming ridicule and contempt. His forte was the terrible; and he employed with equal ease the indirect mode of attack with which he so often tortured Lord Mansfield, and the open, withering invective with which he trampled down Lord Suffolk. His burst of astonishment and horror at the proposal of the latter to let loose the Indians on the settlers of America, is without a parallel in our language for severity and force. In all such conflicts, the energy of his will and his boundless self-confidence secured him the victory. Never did that "erect countenance" sink before the eye of an antagonist. Never was he known to hesitate or falter. He had a feeling of superiority over every one around him,

which acted on his mind with the force of an inspiration. He knew he was right! He knew he could save England, and that no one else could do it! Such a spirit, in great crises, is the unfailing instrument of command both to the general and the orator. We may call it arrogance; but even arrogance here operates upon most minds with the potency of a charm: and when united to a vigor of genius and a firmness of purpose like his, men of the strongest intellect fall down before it, and admire—perhaps hate-what they cannot resist. The leading characteristic of eloquence is force; and force in the orator depends mainly on the action of strongly excited feeling on a powerful intellect. The intellect of Chatham was of the highest order, and was peculiarly fitted for the broad and rapid combinations of oratory. It was at once comprehensive, acute, and vigorous; enabling him to embrace the largest range of thought; to see at a glance what most men labor out by slow degrees; and to grasp his subject with a vigor, and to hold on to it with a firmness, which have rarely, if ever, been equaled. But his intellect never acted alone. It was impossible for him to speak on any subject in a dry or abstract manner; all the operations of his mind were pervaded and governed by intense feeling.

He did not, like many in modern times, divide a speech into distinct compartments, one designed to convince the understanding, and another to move the passions and the will. They were too closely united in his own mind to allow of such a separation. All went together, conviction and persuasion, intellect and feeling, like chainshot.

The rapidity and abruptness with which he often flashed his thoughts upon the mind arose from the same source. Deep emotion strikes directly at its object. It struggles to get free from all secondary ideas-all mere accessories. Hence the simplicity, and even bareness of thought, which we usually find in the great passages of Chatham and Demosthenes. The whole turns often on a single phrase, a word, an allusion. They put forward a few great objects, sharply defined, and standing boldly out in the glowing atmosphere of emotion. They pour their burning thoughts instantaneously upon the mind, as a person might catch the rays of the sun in a concave mirror, and turn them on their object with a sudden and consuming power.

His mode of reasoning, or, rather, of dispensing with the forms of argument, resulted from the same cause. When the mind is all a-glow with a subject, and sees its conclusions with the vividness and certainty of intuitive truths, it is impatient of the slow process of logical deduction. It seeks rather to reach the point by a bold and rapid progress, throwing away the intermediate steps, and putting the subject at once under such aspects and relations, as to carry its

own evidence along with it. Demosthenes was remarkable for thus crushing together proof and statement in a single mass.-It was so with Lord Chatham. The strength of his feelings bore him directly forward to the results of argument. He affirmed them earnestly, positively; not as mere assertions, but on the ground of their intrinsic evidence and certainty. John Foster has finely remarked, that "Lord Chatham struck on the results of reasoning as a cannonshot strikes the mark, without your seeing its course through the air." Perhaps a bomb-shell would have furnished even a better illustration. It explodes when it strikes, and thus becomes the most powerful of arguments.

As he advanced in years, his tone of admonition, especially on American affairs, became more and more lofty and oracular. He spoke as no other man ever spoke in a great deliberative assembly-as one who felt that the time of his departure was at hand; who, withdrawn from the ordinary concerns of life, in the words of his great eulogist, " came occasionally into our system to counsel and

decide."

His great preponderance of feeling made him, in the strictest sense of the term, an extemporaneous speaker. His mind was, indeed, richly furnished with thought upon every subject which came up for debate, and the matter he brought forward was always thoroughly matured and strikingly appropriate; but he seems never to have studied its arrangement, much less to have bestowed any care on language, imagery, or illustrations.

It is worthy of remark, that nearly all those great passages, which came with such startling power upon the House, arose out of some unexpected turn of the debate, some incident or expression. In his attack on Lord Suffolk, he caught a single glance at "the tapestry which adorned the walls" around him, and one flash of his genius gave us the most magnificent passage in our eloquence. His highest power lay in these sudden bursts of passion.

To this intense emotion, thus actuating all his powers, Lord Chatham united a vigorous and lofty imagination, which formed his crowning excellence as an orator. It is this faculty which exalts force into the truest and most sublime eloquence. In this respect he approached more nearly than any speaker of modern times, to the great master of Athenian art. It was here, chiefly, that he surpassed Mr. Fox, who was not at all his inferior in ardor of feeling or robust vigor of intellect. Mr. Burke had even more imagination, but it was wild and irregular. It was too often on the wing, circling around the subject, as if to display the grace of its movements or the beauty of its plumage. The imagination of Lord Chatham struck directly at its object. It "flew an eagle flight, forth and right on." It never became his master. Nor do we ever find it degenerating into fancy,

in the limited sense of that term: it was never fanciful. It was, in fact, so perfectly blended with the other powers of his mind-so simple, so true to nature even in its loftiest flights-that we rarely think of it as imagination at all. "Upon the whole," in the words of Mr. Grattan, "there was in this man something that could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm an empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound through its history."

PROF. C. A. GOODRICH.

EXPLANATORY INDEX.