pendence, the majestic eloquence of Chatham, the profound reasoning of Burke, the burning satire and irony of Barré, had influence on our fortunes in America? They tended to diminish the confidence of the British ministry in their hopes to subject us. There was not a reading man who did not struggle more boldly for his rights when those exhilarating sounds, uttered in the two houses of Parliament, reached him across the seas." To the effects wrought by "the fulminating eloquence" of the first of these great orators, history has borne abundant testimony. The arbiter of the destinies of his own country, he was also the foremost man in all the world. "His august mind overawed majesty. . . . Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England."

We are told that when Mirabeau arose in the National Assembly, and delivered one of those fiery speeches which, in their union of reason and passion, so remind us of Demosthenes, he trod the tribune with the supreme authority of a master, and the imperial air of a king. As he proceeded with his harangue, his frame dilated; his face was wrinkled and contorted; he roared, he stamped; his hair whitened with foam; his whole system was seized with an electric irritability, and writhed as under an almost preternatural agitation. The effect of his eloquence, which was of the grandest and most impressive kind, abounding in bold images, striking metaphors, and sudden natural bursts, the creation of the moment, was greatly increased by his "hideously magnificent aspect," - the massive frame, the features full of pock-holes and

blotches, the eagle eye that dismayed with a look, the voice of thunder that dared a reply, the hair that waved like a lion's mane. The ruling spirit of the French Revolution, he did, while he lived, more than any other man, "to guide the whirlwind and direct the storm" of that political and social crisis. When the clergy and the nobles obeyed the royal mandate that the National Assembly should disperse, and the commons remained hesitating, uncertain, almost in consternation, it was his voice. that hurled defiance at the King, and inspired the TiersÉtat with courage. When he cried out to the astonished emissary of Lewis: "Slave, go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people, and that we will depart only at the point of the bayonet!" the words sounded like a thunder-clap to all Europe, and from that moment the bondage of the nation was broken, and the fate of despotism sealed.* Startling the critics of the Academy by his bold, straight-forward style of oratory, so opposed to the stiff, conventional manner of the day, he showed them that there was a power of life" in his rude and startling language,- that the most commonplace ideas could be endowed with electric power; and, had he not died prematurely, he might, perhaps, have dissuaded France from plunging into the gulf of anarchy, and shown a genius for reconstruction only inferior to that which he had displayed as a destroyer.

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Among the most memorable displays of oratory, few are more familiar to the ordinary reader than those which took place during the trial of Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall. It is said that when Burke, with an im

*It is pretty certain that the language actually used by Mirabeau was less terse and audacious than this: we give the current version.

agination almost as oriental as the scenes he depicted, described, in words that will live as long as the English language, the cruelties inflicted upon the natives of India by Debi Sing, one of Hastings's agents, a convulsive shudder ran through the whole assembly. Indignation and rage filled the breasts of his hearers; some of the ladies "swooned away"; and Hastings himself, though he had protested his innocence, was utterly overwhelmed. "For half an hour," he said afterward in describing the scene, "I looked up at the orator in a revery of wonder, and actually felt myself to be the most culpable man on earth." When Canning, in 1826, closed his famous speech on the King's Message respecting Portugal with the memorable passage: "I looked to Spain in the Indies; I called a New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old," the effect, we are told, was terrific. The whole House was moved as if an electric shock had passed through them: they all rose for a moment to look at him!

A memorable example of the power of eloquence is furnished by the speech of Lord Stanley (afterward the Earl of Derby) on the Irish Coercion Bill, brought into the House of Commons in 1833. O'Connell had made a powerful speech in opposition, and seemed, says Lord Russell (to whom we are indebted for an account of the scene), about to achieve a triumph in favor of sedition and anarchy. Lord Derby, in his reply, recalled to the recollection of the House of Commons that, at a recent public meeting, O'Connell had spoken of the House of Commons as 658 scoundrels. "In a tempest of scorn and indignation," says Lord Russell, "he excited the anger of the men thus designated against the author of

the calumny. The House which for two hours before seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was now almost ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst of the storm which his eloquence had raised, he (Lord Stanley) sat down, having achieved one of the greatest triumphs of eloquence ever won in a popular assembly by the powers of oratory."

In our own country the triumphs of eloquence have been hardly less marked than those of the Old World. In the night of tyranny the eloquence of the country first blazed up, like the lighted signal-fires of a distracted border, to startle and enlighten the community. Everywhere, as the news of some fresh invasion of liberty and right was borne on the wings of the wind, men ran together and called upon some earnest citizen to address them. The eloquence of that period was not the mere ebullition of feeling; it was the enthusiasm of reason; it was judgment raised into transport, and breathing the irresistible ardors of sympathy.

When in 1761 James Otis, in a Boston popular assembly, denounced the British Writs of Assistance, his hearers were hurried away resistlessly on the torrent of his impetuous speech. When he had concluded, every man, we are told, of the vast audience went away resolved to take up arms against the illegality. When Patrick Henry pleaded the tobacco case "against the parsons" in 1758, it is said that the people might have been seen in every part of the, house, on the benches, in the aisles, and in the windows, hushed in death-like stillness, and bending eagerly forward to catch the magic tones of the speaker. The jury were so bewildered as to lose sight of the legislative enactments on which the plaintiffs relied; the court lost the

equipoise of its judgment, and refused a new trial; and the people, who could scarcely keep their hands off their champion after he had closed his harangue, no sooner saw that he was victorious, than they seized him at the bar, and, in spite of his own efforts, and the continued cry of "Order!" from the sheriff and the court, bore him out of the court-house, and, raising him on their shoulders, carried him about the yard in a kind of electioneering triumph. When the same great orator concluded his wellknown speech in March, 1775, in behalf of American independence, "no murmur of applause followed," says his biographer; "the effect was too deep. After the trance of a moment, several members of the Assembly started from their seats. The cry, To arms! seemed to quiver on every lip and glance from every eye."- Mr. Jefferson, who drew up the Declaration of Independence, declares that John Adams, its ablest advocate on the floor of Congress, poured forth his passionate appeals in language which moved his hearers from their seats."

There are few school-boys who are not familiar with the famous passage in the great speech of Fisher Ames on the British Treaty, in which he depicts the horrors of the border war with the Indians, which would result from its rejection. Even when we read these glowing periods to-day in cold blood, without the tremulous and thrilling accents of the dying statesman, that made them so impressive, we feel the "fine frenzy" of the speaker in every line. An old man, a judge in Maine, who heard the burning words of Ames, declared that as he closed with the climax, "The darkness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of your dwellings. You are a father, the blood of your sons shall fatten your corn-field: you are a mother,