paniments, and with the temper of those to whom it was addressed. We need the “fiery life of the moment," the contagion of the great audience, the infectious enthusiasm leaping from heart to heart, the shouting thousands in the echoing minster or senate. We need to see and to hear the magician with his wand in his hand, and on the theatre of his spells. The country preacher, therefore, was right, who, when he had electrified his people by an extempore discourse preached during a thunderstorm, and was asked to let them print it, replied that he would do so if they would print the thunder-storm along with it.

CHAPTER II.

IN

IS ORATORY A LOST ART?

N the last chapter we expressed the opinion that the triumphs of eloquence in our own day, though of a different kind from those of yore, are not less signal than in the ages past. We are aware that many persons in England and America,- especially the croakers, laudatores temporis acti, and believers in the fabled "golden ages" of excellence, will deny this statement. Talk to them of the eloquent tongues of the present day,- tell them how you have been thrilled by the music of Gladstone's or Everett's periods, or startled by the thunderbolts of Webster, Brougham, or Bright,—and they will tell you, with a sigh, that the oratory of their predecessors was grander and more impressive. The golden age of oratory, they say, has gone, and the age of iron has succeeded. It is an era of tare and tret, of buying and selling, of quick returns and small profits, and we have no time or taste for fine phrases. If we have perfected the steam-engine, and invented the electric telegraph and the phonograph, we have also enthroned a sordid, crouching, mammon-worshipping spirit in high places; we have deified dullness, and idolized cotton-spinning and knife-grinding, till oratory, which always mirrors the age, has become timid and formal, dull and decorous, never daring or caring to soar in eagle flights, but content to creep on the ground, and “dwell in decencies forever." Hence we have no masterpieces of

eloquence to-day like those with which Demosthenes, or Chatham, or Mirabeau, awed and overwhelmed their hearers. We have no speeches of marrow and pith, abounding in great truths felicitously expressed, terse, epigrammatic sentences, that stick like barbed arrows in the memory, and magnificent metaphors which only genius can coin. We have plenty of able debaters, but no real orators,― no men "on whose tongue the fiery touch of eloquence has been laid, whose lips the Attic bees have stung with intensity and power." Go to the home of oratory, France, and you will hear the same melancholy plaint. A late French writer, mourning over the decay of eloquence in his native land, declares that the present Chambers are but so many little chapels, where each one places his own image upon the altar, chants magnificats, and pays adoration to himself. The deputies, devoured with the leprosy of political materialism, are but manikins, not men. Deputies of a parish or a fraternity; deputies of a harbor, of a railroad, of at canal, of a vineyard; deputies of sugar-cane or beet-root; deputies of oil or of bitumen; deputies of charcoal, of salt, of iron, of flax; deputies of bovine, equine, asinine interests,—in short, of everything except of France, they represent but obsolete opinions, and are never heard of beyond the range of their own voice.*

In every age we hear these doleful Jeremiads; evermore the cry of the present is, "there were giants in those days." We are all more or less the victims of that illusion which leads men to idealize and idolize the past. It seems almost impossible for a man who has reached fifty to escape that senile querulousness which leads one to magnify the merits of dead actors and singers, sculptors and painters, and

The Orators of France."

other artists of lang syne. "Memory's geese are always swans." We all fancy with the old Count in Gil Blas, that the peaches were much larger when we were boys. Burke, who, we think, lived in an age of giants, spoke of it as an age of comparative dwarfs. There are persons who go even farther than the victims of this hereditary illusion; who not only claim for the orators of past centuries, and especially for those of Greece and Rome, an immeasurable superiority over those of the present age, but do not hesitate even to assert that oratory is now almost a lost art. The age of great orators, they say, has gone by, and such have. been the changes in society, and in the modes of influencing public opinion, that the Cicero or Demosthenes of antiquity is no more likely to return than the rhapsodist of early Greece or the Troubadour of romance. the improved artillery, the revolver, and the repeating rifle, have rendered swords, sabres, and bayonets cumbrous and useless, so the old-fashioned formal harangues of the British and American senates have given way to the brief, business-like speeches of modern times.

Just as

That many plausible reasons may be urged for this belief, we are ready to admit. Oratory, like satire, is fed by the vices and misfortunes of society. Long periods of peace and prosperity, which quicken the growth of other arts, are in some respects fatal to it. Its element is the whirlwind and the storm; and when society is upheaved to its foundations, when the moral and political darkness is thickest, it shines forth with the greatest splendor. As the science of medicine would be useless among a people free from disease, so if there were a Utopia in the world free from crimes and disputes, from commotions and disturbances, there would be no demand for oratory. As

Tacitus, (or whoever else was the author of the dialogue on the "Corruptions of Oratory.") has observed, peace, no doubt, is preferable to war, but it is the latter only that forms the soldier. "It is just the same with eloquence; the oftener she enters, if I may so say, the field of battle; the more wounds she gives and receives; the more powerful the adversary with which she contends,so much the more ennobled she appears in the eye of mankind."

It is a significant coincidence that the period when Athenian oratory was at its height was the period when the Athenian character and the Athenian empire were sunk to the lowest point of degradation. Before the Persian wars, and while she was achieving those victories which have made the world ring with her name, the eloquence of Athens was in its infancy. At length the crisis. came. Disunion crept into her councils; her provinces revolted; her tributaries insulted her; her fleets, which had won such dazzling triumphs over the barbarians, fled before the enemy; her armies, which had so long been invincible, pined in the quarries of Syracuse, or fed the vultures of Egospotami; the sceptre passed from her hand, and the sons of the heroes who fought at Marathon were forced to bow to the yoke of a Macedonian king. It was now, when the sun of her material prosperity was setting, when her moral, political, and military character was most degraded,— when the viceroy of a foreign despot was giving law to her people, and she was draining the cup of suffering to its very dregs, that was seen the splendid dawn of an eloquence such as the world never since has known.

The history of Roman eloquence differs in no essential