THE ART OF ORATORY.

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1. THIS is an art-a high, noble art-I know not but I may say the highest, noblest art of which man is capable. For when does man seem more exalted, more godlike than when, by the power of his eloquence, he sways, at will, the judgments and passions of men. Go-witness its displays and its energies. Enter the halls of judicature, and notice there the voice of truth and fervor guiding ignorance and doubt into light and knowledge, subjecting prejudice to reason, and confounding all the arts of sophistry and error, while it yields protection to innocence, extends succor and redress to the injured, and restores to right and to law its authority and respect. Demosthenes into the tumultuous assembly of an alarmed, incensed and factious populace, met to adopt measures that are to decide the destiny of the state. Follow him with your eye, as he ascends, trembling yet decided, the bema. The eye glistens, the lips move, and, as if by the power of him who " spake and it was done," who turns the hearts of men as the rivers of water are turned, the tumult is hushed; the strife is appeased; the alarm is dispelled; perplexity is fled; confidence returns, and Athens rends the air with its united, determined cry, "To arms! to arms!" and rushes to the conflict. Witness this, and can you conceive of a scene where man can appear more exalted, more godlike?

2. I am well aware that the art whose province it is to fit man for this high function has been decried, resisted and despised. But when I question experience, and hear her declare that the noblest fruits of eloquence are the products of rhetorical art;—that in all ages the orators who have risen to the highest eminence at the bar, in the forum or the pulpit, are the men who have subjected themselves most entirely to its forming hand when she tells me of Demosthenes devoting years and thousands of gold upon a single branch, and that almost the least, that of vocal expression; of Cicero, applying himself under the direction of the most eminent masters of the art, year after year, with untiring assiduity; of Chatham, contending, like those ancient orators, with the difficulties of an infirm bodily constitution, and consenting to the most puerile tricks of the art, as they have been sneeringly called; practising, hour after hour, before a mirror, that he might acquire a free, graceful, and forcible action: when she takes me into the church of God, and points me to a Chrysostom-him of the

golden mouth, so styled from the surpassing richness of his eloquence, the devoted pupil of the art; and in modern times to Reinhard, the untiring student of the ancient rhetoric, as well as of the ancient orators; to a Robert Hall, remarkable in early life as much for his attention to the culture of oratory, as for his philosophical investigations, I am content to pass by, unnoticed, the sneers of ignorance and the detractions of envious sloth and weakness.

3. But rhetoric has received her deepest wound from her own votaries. She has been conceived of, even by professed teachers of the art, only as a stern, morose, capricious critic, with chisel and mallet in hand, hewing off this angle, or chipping out that excrescence, but as incapable of adding a beauty as of infusing original life. The rhetorician, it is said, necessarily succeeds the orator. He can, therefore, only analyze, classify, enumerate. He may detect deformities, and smooth an outline, but with that terminates his power.

4. The logic is false; and the conception low and unworthy. Rhetoric, in the true notion of its office, is developing and formative, as well as corrective. It cannot, indeed, give original life; but it can do something more than prune off an unproductive or injurious limb. Its province is to take the plant, living indeed, but undeveloped, unformed, and weak, and by the judicious and assiduous application of water, light and air, by the timely direction of every shoot, and the removal of every needless stem and stalk, develope its infant energies, its generous juices, and its beauteous foliage, and thus make that the noble, majestic tree or vine yielding its rich, and beautiful, and plenteous fruits in their season, which otherwise had been choked with weeds, withered in the drought, or wasting all its life in a rank luxuriance of leaves, alike shapeless, cumbersome, and destitute of fruit.

5. It has here a great, a noble task to perform, worthy of the most gifted and most richly furnished intellect. Receiving the mind, thoroughly disciplined in all its intellectual faculties, and stored with the richest fruits of knowledge, with its sensibilities and capabilities of feeling, also, expanded, trained and pliant; taking, in short, intellect and soul in the highest degrees of their cultivation, it has, first, to set forth a standard of eloquence and fix it firmly in the mind, by the judicious and forcible exhibition of the finest models. It has, next, to inspire a generous enthusiasm for its attainment, which will mock difficulties, and turn toil to pleasure, by opening the eye upon the peculiar charms and delights of the study, and by presenting the rich rewards that attend success. It has, then, to

direct and superintend the severe course of training, which shall elevate the enthusiastic aspirant to the standard and aim he desires; a course of training which shall bring into perfect control all the attainments of learning, and make all subsidiary to the designs of eloquence; which shall also give him command over all the powers of feeling, and enable him to transfuse the life and energy of passion into the coldest, driest, most lifeless forms of thought; which shall make easy a ready arrangement, rendering every process of reasoning clear and convincing; every description and narrative simple, consecutive and symmetrical; and every passionate appeal timely, unerring and effective; which shall, moreover, put at service all the powers of expression, so that thought can be made to appear, not in cold and inanimate forms of language, but in its own living body, in distinct and graceful outlines, plump, fresh and vigorous and which shall, still more, superadd a graceful, appropriate and energetic action, that will seem but the outward covering, the skin, if you please, of the verbal body of the thought, partaking its life, and picturing, in its changing hues, the stirrings of the soul within.

6. I need not say that here is no slight task to be performed,. both by him who superintends and by him who undergoes the process of training. I need not say that it is by no means. strange, so few have been willing to take the requisite pains, and submit to the necessary toil-that so few, therefore, have attained the enviable power of swaying, by the force of truth, enlivened by feeling, the minds and hearts of men.

7. Indeed, it is a most rare occurrence that we find any one ready to admit that eloquence is an attainment at all; that it is any thing else than a gift conferred. Into such neglect has the art fallen in modern times, that the maxim once so current, orator fit, is now received with almost universal skepticism. Men witness the prodigies of oratory,-they are themselves the victims of its power, and suppose it wholly a boon of heaven. They have no idea of the midnight study and the toil by day; the severe discipline, the long and patient training which the fruits of eloquence have cost in their production; and were they told of a Chatham coming into parliament to awe a virulent faction into silence and speechless dread by the force of a word or a gesture, in which the whole energy of his giant mind went out, from a dressing-room-from practising before a mirror; of a Brougham, to catch a proper power of expression, first locking himself up for three weeks to the study,. night and day, of the single oration" on the crown," and then writing over fifteen different times his peroration before bring

ing it to its final shape, they would stare with wonder and incredulity.

8. We have all seen the man of known intellect and acquirement, of devoted spirit, too, rise and address a waiting congregation, and through the obscurity of his method, the want of command over thought and feeling, the clumsiness of his style, and the dulness of his manner, but still more to stupify and chill his hearers. And we have seen, also, another of inferior parts, of lower piety, perhaps, whose first word or look fixed the eye, whose clear and distinct method carried the attention, whose style and manner, so true, so natural, so easy, impressed every thought and implanted every feeling. The difference is as much the fruit of art as is the superiority of the thoroughly trained musician, or the long experienced artisan over mere genius undrilled, undisciplined. Natural genius will indeed make here, as everywhere else, a difference in the comparative degree of attainment made under the tuition of art; but it will not supply the place of principles and rules, into which observation has rendered the true elements of power in every eminent speaker, nor of systematic practice founded on those principles.

9. No-the ancients were right. They judged from experience. The poet-the eminent in any other line may be the product of nature alone; the orator is formed-is made so by art and training. It is no more absurd to expect that a man may be eloquent in a foreign tongue, in which he cannot speak a sentence without faltering, than that he will be so in his own native dialect, of which he has not acquired a mastery;~no more absurd to expect that a man who has never opened his lips in song will sing with the sweetness of Orpheus, than that he who has never fitly trained his voice will speak with the force of a Chatham or a Whitfield. "There is no native eloquence, more than there is native running races or fighting battles."

10. It has been justly observed by one to whom his own experience probably verified the remark, "the most successful preachers are those who, in their discourses, observe most the laws according to which power in public speaking universally displays itself.” And certainly it is not difficult to decide which of the two has fairest promise of success, he who devotes himself to the practice of an art ignorant of all its laws, or he who has closely and thoroughly studied and comprehended it, so closely and thoroughly that they have become the secret principles and guides of all his efforts.

11. It is not the object of the rhetorician to teach the arts of

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display;-how to round a period, to hang artificial flowers onlifeless statues of thought, to string together epithets of high sound but of scanty sense; how to balance gracefully to this side and that, with all the regularity of a pendulum, and to show how prettily the voice can glide up and down through the whole range of the musical scale; in other words, to teach bombast and rant. Nor does his art seek merely to prune speech of all such false ornaments and disgusting trickery. Its great province is to develope and cultivate that highest, noblest attribute of man-the faculty of discourse in its outward working; to furnish it a suitable body, and feed and educate that body. The connexion is not closer or more vital between body and spirit, than between thought and expression. all experience proves; for who attempts to think but in words, as who conceives a spirit but in body? This intimate connexion, too, the phenomena of language demonstrate; since in different tongues,-in languages originating in different ages and countries we find, from the vital intimacy of the two, both reason or discourse and speech expressed by the self-same word. Hence, too, speech has well been called "the incarnation of thought." This body it is the high duty of him who aims to sway the minds of men at will, diligently and lawfully to train and educate. And, surely, it is no small, no despicable task to make the vital fluid circulate through every limb, diffusing life, vigor and beauty through every part. It is no mean task to acquire the power to present truth in a perfect, a symmetrical, vigorous, healthful body of speech. It is a work, in truth, in the accomplishment of which man comes nearest to Him who gave expression to his own infinite attributes in the perfect forms of creation.

12. The idea of what eloquence is-of what it is in its constituent nature-in its form and outward appearance-in its prerogative and power, is to be awakened and developed. Not only must there be a conception of what it is, but the idea must be reduced to a practical idea in the mind, impressed on all the faculties of the intellect and all the susceptibilities of the soul; made a practical standard or model, guiding insensibly, as does the idea of harmony the fingers of the organist, all the powers of the mind-a standard of attainment to which the aim shall ever be directed till perfection be reached; a standard, too, of criticism that shall indicate at once to the orator, as the smooth concord of sounds to the harmonist, that the end is reached, and persuasion, in perfect figure, sits on his lips. This is to be accomplished, as in the case of the artist, by the