though a more marked contrast to Gough could hardly be named.*

One of the greatest of modern orators, Lord Brougham, lays down as a test of a great mind in the senate, the power of making a vigorous reply to a powerful attack. The observation appears a just one, for as "iron sharpeneth iron," the clash of intellect, like the collision of flint and steel, throws out a sparkling stream. Among the distinguished orators of the United States, there have been many striking examples of this power, the most notable, perhaps, being Webster's reply to Hayne. Naturally, Mr. Webster was of a heavy, sluggish temperament, and required to be assaulted by a formidable antagonist,- to be lashed, and goaded, and driven to the wall, by another giant like himself, to set his massive energies in motion. For the ordinary parliamentary duello,- that species of intellectual gladiatorship which requires that a man should have a little of the savage in him, to be very successful in it,— he had little taste. But give him a great occasion, and an adversary worth grappling with, a foeman worthy of his steel, and he rises with the exigences of the occasion, and displays the giant strength of his intellect, the fiery vehemence of his sensibility, his brilliant imagination, and his resistless might of will, to terrible advantage. When thus roused and stimulated, his pent-up stores of passion burst forth with volcanic force; he presses into his service all the weapons of oratory; the toughest sophistries of his adversaries are rent asunder like cobwebs; denunciation and sarcasm are met with sarcasm and denunciation still more crushing and incurably wounding;

* Not having the volume of "Harper" before us, we give the comparison as nearly as we can recollect it, with, of course, some changes in the language.

and his style has, at times, a Miltonic grandeur and roll which are rarely surpassed for majestic eloquence.

Among the orators of Great Britain Lord Brougham himself was one of the most remarkable illustrations of his own remark. When his faculties were stimulated by assault, no man rose more readily with the greatness of the occasion, or poured out a more fearful torrent of scathing invective, with all the peculiarities of look, tone, and gesture, which drive a pointed observation home. His enunciation was naturally harsh, yet it was so modulated, we are told, that the hearer was carried through a series of involved sentences without perplexity, until, at the close, the orator literally pierced the intellect by the concluding phrase, which was the keynote to the whole. In days gone by, Brougham and Canning "used to watch each other across the table, eagerly waiting for the advantage of reply; the graceful and accomplished orator being aware that his rival, by a single intonation, or even a pointing of a finger, could overwhelm with ridicule the substance of a well-prepared speech." One of the most effective British speakers in reply at a later day, was Sir Robert Peel. His tenacious memory preserved every point of his adversary's argument, and his practical intellect enabled him to hit an objection "between wind and water." Lord Macaulay, on the other hand, though he always chained the attention of the house by his set efforts, could not speak in reply.

That climate and race have not a little to do with eloquence, is an obvious fact. The style called Asiatic, for example, is marked, like all oriental compositions, by an excess of imagination; the wings are disproportioned to Cicero, in speaking of it, says: "No sooner

the body.

had eloquence ventured to sail from the Piræus, than she traversed all the isles and visited every part of Asia, till at last, infected with their manners, she lost all the purity and healthy complexion of the Attic style, and, indeed, almost forgot her native language." It is a curious fact noted by a late writer, that the climatic conditions of extreme heat and cold have a similar effect on the imaginative faculty, causing it to overshadow all the others, as may be seen in the poetry of Arabia and Hindostan and the Edda of Scandinavia. The Irish and the French are born orators; and our own Southern people have a great advantage over the New-Englanders, who, as Emerson says, live in a climate so cold that they scarcely dare to open their mouths wide. Yet the rule has many exceptions, and Nature is perpetually startling us with her freaks and anomalies. Who that ever listened to Rufus Choate, so oriental both in his looks and style of speech, would have fancied, before being told, that he was a product of the same rocky soil as Jeremiah Mason and Daniel Webster? Or who would have dreamed of finding in a child of Maine a genius as fiery and fervid, an imagination as tropical in its fruitfulness and splendor, as any that blooms in oriental climes? Yet such were the qualities of Sargent S. Prentiss, whom, reasoning a priori, one would have expected to possess an understanding as solid as the granite of her hills, and a temperament as cold as her climate. So, it has been happily said, "the" flora of the South is more gorgeous and variegated than that of less favored climes; but occasionally there springs up in the cold North a flower of as delicate a perfume as any within the tropics. The heavens in the equatorial regions are bright with golden radiance, and the meteors

shoot with greater effulgence through the air; but even the snow-clad hills of the North flash, from time to time, with the glories of the Aurora Borealis. Under the line are found more numerous volcanoes, constantly throwing up their ashes and their flames; but none of them excel in grandeur the Northern Hecla, from whose deep caverns rolls the melted lava down its ice-bound sides."

If the gifts of the impassioned son of Maine belied his birth-place, not less, in an opposite manner, did those of Carolina's child, John C. Calhoun. Born in a tropical region, where a southern sun is apt to ripen human passion into the rank luxuriance of tropical vegetation, he was as severely logical, as rigidly intellectual, as if he had been reared in Nova Zembla, or any other region above the line of perpetual snow. Dwelling amid the luxuriant life, the magnificence and pomp, the deep-toned harmonies, of the Southern zones, he was as blind to their beauties, as deaf to their melodies, as if he had really been "the cast-iron man that he was called, and had sprung from the bowels of a granite New Hampshire mountain.

CHAPTER V.

THE ORATOR'S TRIALS.

F the orator has his triumphs, which are as dazzling

IF

as any that are the reward of genius and toil, he has also, by that inexorable law of compensation which so largely equalizes human conditions, trials which are proportional to his successes. The hearer who "hangs both his greedy ears upon his lips," little dreams of the toils and mortifications the speaker has undergone. The aspirants to oratorical distinction, who envy him his fame and influence, have but a faint conception of the laborious days and sleepless nights which his successes have cost him,—of the distracting cares and interruptions, the nervous fears of failure, or of falling below himself and below public expectation, the treacheries of memory, the exhaustion and collapse of feeling, the self-dissatisfaction and selfdisgust, with which the practice of his art has been attended. Armies are not always cheering on the heights which they have won. "The statue does not come to its white limbs at once. It is the bronze wrestler, not the flesh and blood one, that stands for ever over a fallen adversary with the pride of victory on his face." It is a rare intellectual gratification to listen to a finished orator; and so it is delightful to gaze upon tapestry, and we are dazzled by the splendor of the colors, and the cunning intertexture of its purple and gold; but how many of those who