does listen; and it listens to any one who has information to communicate on a subject interesting to it, and will do so with anything approaching to brevity. It listens always to gentlemen who have established a reputation for speaking only to inform others, and to illustrate the question before the House. And so it is, we repeat, and so it has been, and so it ever will be with every assembly, rude or cultivated; in every country, barbarous or civilized, convened for such purposes as war and peace, legislation and judicature. It is only under very peculiar circumstances, in moments, for example, of intense revolutionary excitement, when all argument is out of the question, that a mere declaimer can aspire to any decided influence. Here, as in the sister art,

or, as Milton quaintly but forcibly expresses it: "Whose mind soever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things, and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others; when such a man would speak, his words, (by what I can express,) like so many nimble and airy servitors trip about him at command, and in wellordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their places."* And not only does he command language, but he infallibly commands attention.

The idea that all this, though perfectly true in modern times, is inapplicable to antiquity, is preposterous. If Lord Brougham really thinks so, he is the first person of any note we have ever heard of, who would profit by that learned dissertation mentioned in Gil Blas, to prove that at Athens, little boys cried when they were flogged by their schoolmasters, just as they do at Oviedo or Salamanca. Let any one read the life of Demosthenes, and consider under what circumstances, and in the face of what an opposition it was that he maintained for a generation together, such a decided ascendant in that fierce democracy, and he will see at once the absurdity of ascribing his wonderful success to the art

* An Apology for Smectymnus.

of tickling the ears or the fancy of his hearers in set speeches or to any other means than those which, in all ages and in all countries, have moved and controlled the minds and the hearts of men-strength of understanding, strength of will, sagacity in council, decision in conduct, zeal in the pursuit of his objects, and passionate eloquence to recommend them.

But not only is all that we have said, as applicable to the public assemblies of Athens, (other things being equal, that is to say,) as to those of any modern nation; it was, if possi ble, more so. What does the epithet " Attic" mean? Lord Brougham has read Cicero's rhetorical works; at least, he quotes them profusely upon occasion. He knows, of course, that some of his most distinguished contemporaries objected to the Roman oraror that he was not Attic, and that his constant effort, in many elaborate essays, is to show, that however austere the taste of the Athenians might be, it did sometimes admit of a copious and ornate style. The idea, then, was not that substance was to be a mere secondary thing, but that it should be everything, and for that purpose should be presented in a diction as pure and simple as light itself. Lysias was the model they most affected. The epithets by which Cicero characterizes this style, are all expressive of the severest taste and reason. Compare with this account of it, what Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a devoted admirer of Lysias, says of the prominent beauties of his eloquence. What are they? Purity of diction, simple, popular, idiomatic language, with a studious avoidance of everything tropical, poetical or hyperbolical; great clearness, both in words and matter; the art, in which no one but Demosthenes ever surpassed him, of condensing what he had to say, and rolling it up and compressing it as it were into solid masses, to carry every thought with the utmost force to the minds of his hearerst that he was unrivalled in narrative

He calls the Attics of this stamp "dry and sound," as a gourmet would speak of fine old wines― sani et sicci. De Opt. gen. Orat. 3. Sincerum judicium Allicorum, that incorruptible judgment that would bear nothing in the least extravagant, affected or forced-nullum verbum insolens, nullum odiosum. In another place it is the "salubrity and as it were healthiness of Attic dietion," illam salubritatem Attica dictionis et quasi sanitatem, which he contrasts with the gross and fat diction of the Asiatics, (adipata.)

+ Judic. de Lysia Orat.

† The phrase is worth citing in the original: ή συςρέφουσα τὰ νοήματα και προγ Júdas ikpĺpovoa desis-needed in judicial speeches and every true dyr, c. 6. Cicero, speaking of the harmonious periods of Demosthenes, says, cujus non tam vibrarent fulmina nisi numeris contorta ferrentur, Orat. c. 70.

and exposition, placing every topic just where it ought to be, and not only distinct but vivid and graphic in description, painting all objects to the very life, bringing them, as it were, in reality before the hearer; observing in all things fitness, decorum and character; aiming in all things at truth and nature, and recommending every part of the argument to the favor of his audience, by a certain native grace and sweetness diffused over the whole. Surely, if speeches thus severely chastened, thus rigidly stripped of everything savoring of theatrical pretension or foreign ornament, were successful, (as they are admitted to have been,) with the Attic tribunals, it could only be by dint of thought and sentiment. The merit of such a style, as that of every pure and transparent medium, consists in bringing out the objects themselves in their proper colors, shapes and dimensions. The perfection of form, then, of which Lord Brougham speaks, was to be without any apparent form-their art studiously concealed itself— their only affectation was that most delicate of all impostures, the affectation of simplicity. And this is so true, that we venture to say, it is the experience of every scholar without exception who has studied the Attic orators, that he was at first excessively struck with a certain (we wish to say statuesque) nakedness of style. Lysias especially, like La Fontaine in French, is never appreciated by any one who has not made himself very familiar with the Greek idioms; and the unceremonious, business-like way in which Demosthenes opens and treats the subjects of his Philippics and other deliberative speeches, attracts the attention of a reader fresh from Cicero, a great deal more than his sublimity and force and passionate earnestness.

Lord Brougham evidently supposes, and this notion is at the bottom of all his errors upon the subject, that every Greek oration was a mere theatrical exhibition. Indeed he says so in so many words. There is barely truth enough in this supposition to'give color for the lay gents,' as special pleaders express it; but the conclusions which he draws from it, are altogether extravagant, and entirely at variance with facts familiar to scholars. It is, indeed, undeniable, that throngs of curious spectators flocked from all parts of Greece to listen to some debate of great expectation, just as people of leisure now repair to Washington for a similar purpose;

* Esch. c. Timarch. § 25.

and it is quite natural that this circumstance, by imparting more solemnity and splendor to the occasion, should induce the orator to make what he had to say as perfect as possible in its kind. But how it should affect the character of his speech in any other way, how it should induce him to sacrifice its real excellences, and turn it into mere declamation, we own, we do not exactly perceive. It is also true that a high degree of precision and correctness in diction, a harmony of cadence, a fullness and finish in periods, not difficult to attain in a language of such infinite compass and euphony as the Greek, were required to please ears susceptible to the most refined delicacies of accent and quantity. Yet a wise man-Phocion, for instance- would command their attention without any one of these graces (except perhaps the first) to recommend his oratory. It must be admitted, too, that Attic taste, so severe, so exquisite, in every department of art, might not be as indulgent as that of an English or American audience, to a slovenly, or feeble, or inappropriate style of speaking that the most gifted orators, Pericles, for example, and Demosthenes, were unwilling to encounter the Demus without full preparation, though Demades and others did so continually and that the master-pieces produced by the efforts made to come up to the demands of such a public, were in fact the perfection, the ideal, of the noblest of all arts. Then it must, also, be taken into the account, that many of these speeches were delivered in vast assemblages, where it was extremely difficult, as everything proves, to command attention, and where a little more emphasis and effort in delivery and in style might not be altogether unnecessary, and not in a St. Stephen's chapel, too small to accommodate even a British House of Commons, and reducing the contests of orators to mere piquant conversation at close quarters, over a table. For that the shape, size, and character of the Hall-if it deserves the name-has had something, and even a good deal to do with fixing the style of English parliamentary debating, we have, after some attendance there, no doubt whatever; and we venture to predict, that if they turn the House of Commons, as they now think of doing, into a National Assembly, sitting in a Beau Locale, they will presently become less colloquial-"more Irish and less nice." But after making every possible allowance for the

*Plut. in. Demosth.

+ This idea of the effect of the place, etc., on the style of oratory, is broached

effect of a real difference in some external circumstances, we insist upon it that the Greeks drew the line between the panegyrical oration and the business speech-between Gorgias and Isocrates on the one hand, and Lysias and Demosthenes on the other, as rigidly, and more rigidly, than any other people, modern or ancient. It would be mere waste of time and space to load our pages with the evidence of a proposition so incontestable.*

It would indeed be the most surprising of all things, that they who carried art to such perfection in all things, that every piece of marble that has been so much as touched by a Greek chisel becomes a precious stone, and their very geometry is a model of elegance, (without ceasing to be geometry on that account, as Lord Brougham well knows,) should not have perfected that art, of all others the most indispensable in every democracy, and in which theirs, in fact, lived, and moved, and had its being. That true eloquence should not flourish in a close oligarchy, or even such a mitigated one as governed England from the Revolution to the Reform Bill, (we say nothing of the bar,) is not at all to be wondered at.t But among the Athenians! The most litigious and disputatious of all men-continually judging and arguing causes, as exercising jurisdiction over half Greece-with a popular assembly, uniting in its own hands supreme executive and judicial, with legislative functions, and for ever in session, they lived in the agora and the ecclesia. Power, wealth, distinction, everything that can excite the ambition and cupidity of mankind, and of the most ambitious, rapacious, and unprincipled of mankind, especially, was commanded in the days of Demosthenes by eloquence alone. Without office, place, or dignity, of any kind, without an election, or a commission from any constituency, mere volunteers on the Bema, to which the crier summoned indiscriminately all who might choose to say what they thought of public affairs, the orators ruled the state, were practically its ministry, had the functionaries of the commonwealth, its generals, its treasurers, at their mercy. They themselves, held responsible for their

by Lucian, de Domo, § 14, 15, 16, and by the author of the dialogue De Causis Corrupte Eloquentiæ, c. 39.

*Cic. Orat. 12, sq. Dionys. Halicarn. IIɛpi Iookparovs, passim, especially § 12 (exactly in point.) Id. Περὶ της λεκτικης Δημοσθενους δεινότητος, from beginning to end.

+Magna illa et notabilis eloquentia alumna licentiæ, comes seditionum, etc. See the Dialogue just quoted, De Caus. Corr. Eloquent.