the most part, be analyzed, digested, and copied, though sometimes they may be too subtle to be reduced to a written art! They prove conclusively, we think, that the great orators, of ancient and modern times, have trusted, not to native endowments, but to careful culture; that it was to the infinitus labor et quotidiana meditatio, of which Tacitus speaks, that they owed their triumphs; that, marvellous as were their gifts, they were less than the ignorant rated them; and that even the mightiest, the elect natures, that are supposed to be above all rules, condescended to methods by which the humblest may profit.

In answer to all this, some one may cite the "natural oratory" of Abraham Lincoln, who owed as little to books and teachers as perhaps any man of equal eminence. But even he did not win his successes without toil. His finest effort, the immortal Gettysburg speech,-which, brief as it is, will be read and remembered long after Edward Everett's ambitious oration, which occupied hours in the delivery, shall have been forgotten, was prepared with extraordinary care. According to the statement of Mr. Noah Brooks, his friend, it was written and re-written many times. The same conscientious painstaking, even in the veriest trifles, distinguishes all the great actors and public readers who have won the ear of the public. It is said that a person once heard a man crying "murder," in the room under his own, in a hotel, for two hours in succession. Upon inquiry, he found that it was Macready, the tragedian, practicing on a word, to get the right agonized tone. A gentleman in Chicago,* who has had occasion to learn some of the secrets of Charlotte Cushman's mastery of her art, tells us that she never, in her public readings, read

Mr. George B. Carpenter.

the pettiest anecdote, or even a few verses, without the most careful and laborious preparation. On one occasion, in Chicago, she prepared herself for an encore by selecting a comic negro anecdote that met her eye, which filled about twenty lines in a newspaper. For three or four days she read and re-read this story in her private room, trying the effect of different styles of recitation, now emphasizing this word, now that, now pitching her voice to one key and now to another, till she had discovered what seemed to be the best way to bring out its ludicrous features into the boldest relief. When Rachel was about to play in Paris a scene from "Louise de Lignerolle," she spent three hours in studying it, though it comprised but thirty lines. Every word was rehearsed in all possible ways, to discover its "truest and most penetrating utterance." So true is it that the greatest geniuses in every art invariably labor at that art far more than all others, because their very genius shows them the necessity and value of such labor, and thus helps them to persist in it! So true is it that whether in oratory, poetry, music, painting, or sculpture, no artist attains to that excellence in which effort concealed steals the charm of intuition, unless he is totus in illo,- unless, as Bulwer says, "all which is observed in ordinary life, as well as all which is observed in severer moments, contributes to the special faculties which the art itself has called into an energy so habitually pervading the whole intellectual constitution, that the mind is scarcely conscious of the work which it undergoes"! The prodigies of genius, so far from being favored by nature and allowed to dispense with toil, would. probably, as Professor Channing, of Harvard, says, show to us, their short-sighted worshipers, were they able to

reveal to us the mystery of their growth, a far more thorough course of education, a more strict, though perhaps unconscious obedience to principles, than even the most dependent of their brethren have been subjected to.

We say, then, to the reader,-Would you wield the mighty power, the thunderbolt,- of oratory? Listen to the words of Salvini, the great actor, to the pupils in his art: "Above all, study,-study,-STUDY. All the genius in the world will not help you along with any art, unless you become a hard student. It has taken me years to master a single part." The same performer is now occupied with the role of King Lear, which he says it will take him two years to study thoroughly. To speak as Nature prompts, to give utterance to one's thoughts and feelings in appropriate tones and with appropriate gestures,— seems too easy to require much labor. But, as it has been well observed, simple as truth is, it is almost always as difficult to attain as it is triumphant when acquired. It is said that one day a youth walked into the studio of Michael Angelo in his absence, and with a bit of chalk dashed a slight line on the wall. When the great master returned, he did not need to ask who had visited him; the little line, as true as a ray from heaven, was the unmistakable autograph of Raphael. Doubtless in every profession there are men who leap to the heights without much training; but we know not how much higher they might have risen, had they added all possible acquired ability to the gifts of nature. "Where natural logic prevails not," says Sir Thomas Browne, "artificial too often faileth; but when industry builds upon nature, we may expect Pyramids."

INDEX.