too, of which Mr. Bright has now a monopoly, were never long neglected. Burke quoted Horace, Lucan, and Juvenal; gems from Virgil sparkle in almost all of his speeches; and to brilliants borrowed from Milton some of his finest passages owe half of their effect. Fox, though a fine classic, quoted rarely, and then from Virgil; but some of Pitt's most happy effects were produced by apt quotation. His mind was so thoroughly steeped in classical literature, that it colors his speeches "like the shifting, varying, yet constantly prevalent hue in shot silk." His allusion to the departure of fortune, Laudo manentem, etc.; his reply to Conway on the East India bill, in which he appropriated Scipio's answer, "Si nullá aliâ re, modestia certè et temperando linguam adolescens senem vicero"; his application of the beams of the rising sun that shot through the windows of the House, while prophesying a better day for Africa,— he was "Nos ubi primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis his application to Fox of the lines, "Stetimus tela aspera contra Contulimusque manus: experto crede quantus In clipeum assurgat, quo turbine torqueat hastam " were some of the things that made his fame. In later times Canning, who was a fine classical scholar, sprinkled *Lord Lytton, in his admirable essays on "Life, Literature, and Manners," observes that in the Fox of St. Stephen's, the nervous reasoner from premises the broadest and most popular, there is no trace of the Fox of St. Anne's, the refining verbal critic, with an almost feminine delight in the filigree and trinkets of literature. At rural leisure, under his apple-blossoms, his predilection in scholarship is for its daintiest subtleties; his happiest remarks are on writers very little read. But place the great critic on the floor of the House of Commons, and not a vestige of the fine verbal critic is visible. His classical allusions are then taken from passages the most popularly known. And, indeed, it was a saying of Fox's, that no young member should hazard in Parliament a Latin quotation not found in the Eton Grammar.'"-Caxtoniana, Vol. I, p. 353. his speeches with felicitous quotations from the Latin poets. In one of his most luminous and eloquent speeches, delivered in 1826 in defense of his Portuguese policy, he likens England to the ruler of the winds, as described by Virgil: "Celsa sedet Eolus arce -Sceptra tenens; mollitque animos, temperat iras; In the courts of justice also, both of England and our own country, striking effects used to be produced by well-chosen bits from Virgil, Martial, and Horace. What could be happier than the reply of Law (afterward Lord Ellenborough), to an angry explosion of Erskine, to whom. Chief Justice Kenyon, before whom they were pleading, was unduly partial? Fixing his eye first on Erskine, and then on Kenyon, Law replied in the words of the prostrate Turnus to Eneas: "Non me tua fervida terrent Dicta, ferox! Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis." Not less felicitous was the skill with which William Wirt, in the celebrated "steamboat case" which came before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1824, retorted on his eminent antagonist, Mr. Emmet, a quotation of the latter from Virgil. The cause was one of deep interest and importance, not only on account of the individual rights involved, but on account of the collisions of those of the State of New York with those of Connecticut and New Jersey, which gave rise to it. The chief question was whether the laws of the first-named State, which conferred upon Messrs. Fulton and Livingston the exclusive right to navigate its waters with steamboats, were or were not in violation of the Constitution of the United States. Mr. Emmet, who was counsel for New York, had eloquently personified her as casting her eyes over the ocean, witnessing everywhere the triumphs of her genius, and exclaiming, in the language of Eneas: Quae regio in terris, nostri non plenae laboris?" Mr. Wirt saw at once the error his opponent had committed, and giving the true sense of the word "laboris," turned the tables upon him as follows: "Sir, it was not in the moment of triumph, nor with the feelings of triumph, that Æneas uttered that exclamation. It was when, with his faithful Achates by his side, he was surveying the works of art with which the palace of Carthage was adorned, and his attention had been caught by a representation of the battles of Troy. There he saw the sons of Atreus and Priam, and the fierce Achilles. The whole extent of his fortunes; the loss and desolation of his friends; the fall of his beloved country; rushed upon his recollection: 'Constitit et lachrymans, quis jam locus, inquit, Achate, "Sir, the passage may hereafter have a closer application to the cause than my eloquent and classical friend intended. For if the state of things which has already commenced, is to go on; if the spirit of hostility which already exists in three of our states, is to catch by contagion, and spread among the rest, as, from the progress of the human passions, and the unavoidable conflict of interests, it will too surely do; what are we to expect? Civil wars, arising from far inferior causes, have desolated some of the fairest provinces of the earth. . . . It is the high province of this court to interpose its benign and mediatorial influence. If, sir, you do not interpose your friendly hand, and extirpate the seeds of anarchy which New York has sown, you will have civil war. The war of legislation, which has already commenced, will, according to its usual course, become a war of blows. Your country will be shaken with civil strife. Your republican institutions will perish in the conflict. Your constitution will fall. The last hope of nations will be gone. And what will be the effect upon the rest of the world? Look abroad at the scenes now passing upon our globe, and judge of that effect. The friends of free government throughout the earth, who have been heretofore animated by our example, and have cheerfully cast their glance to it, as to their polar star, to guide them through the stormy seas of revolution, will witness our fall with dismay and despair. The arm that is every where lifted in the cause of liberty, will drop unnerved by the warrior's side. Despotism will have its day of triumph, and will accomplish the pur pose at which it too certainly aims. It will cover the earth with the mantle of mourning. Then, sir, when New York shall look upon this scene of ruin, if she have the generous feelings which I believe her to have, it will not be with her head aloft, in the pride of conscious triumph, her rapt soul sitting in her eyes. No, sir, no! Dejected with shame and confusion, drooping under the weight of her sorrow, with a voice suffocated with despair, well may she then exclaim, Quis jam locus, Quae regio in terris, nostri non plenae laboris?"" At the present day, with the exception of Gladstone, who introduces a new bit of Virgil into every fresh speech, no English or American orator adorns his speeches with jewels from the ancient classics. The late Lord Palmerston startled the public a few years ago with a morceau from Seneca; but the practice has nearly passed away. The explanation of the change is, that the age is intensely practical. In the early stages of civilization oratory and literature are apt to be confounded; but, as society advances, the distinction between them becomes more and more broadly marked. Oratory ceases to talk; writing ceases to be speech-like. The world, in these prosaic, utilitarian times, is becoming every day more impatient of pedantry, of rhetorical display, of everything that favors or savors of long-windedness; and parliamentary and forensic orators, knowing this fact, try to speak tersely and to the point, avoiding everything that is merely ornamental. is said by a traveler that the wild Indian hunter will sometimes address a bear in a strain of eloquence, and make a visible impression on him; but whatever may be the taste of Indians and bears, it is certain that civilized men, in proportion as they increase in culture, will avoid whatever is high-flown in oratory, study brevity and plainness, and keep to the subject before them. It * Mr. Wirt was a constant student of the Latin classics, and often quoted them, with great felicity, in the court-room. In the company of men of letters," he used to say, "there is no higher accomplishment than that of readily making an apt quotation from the classics; and before such a body as the Supreme Court these quotations are not only appropriate, but constitute a beautiful aid to argument. They mark the scholar,- which is always agreeable to a bench that is composed of scholars." OF CHAPTER III. QUALIFICATIONS OF THE ORATOR. F all the efforts of the human mind, there is no one which demands for its success so rare a union of mental gifts as eloquence. For its ordinary displays the prerequisites are clear perception, memory, power of statement, logic, imagination, force of will, and passion; but, for its loftiest flights, it demands a combination of the most exalted powers,- - a union of the rarest faculties. Unite in one man the most varied and dissimilar gifts,--a strong and masculine understanding with a brilliant imagination; a nimble wit with a solid judgment; a prompt and tenacious memory with a lively and fertile fancy; an eye for the beauties of nature with a knowledge of the realities of life; a brain stored with the hived wisdom of the ages, and a heart swelling with emotion, and you have the moral elements of a great orator. But even these qualifications, so seldom harmonized in one man, are not all. Eloquence is a physical as well as an intellectual product; it has to do with the body as well as with the mind. It is not a cold and voiceless enunciation of abstract truth; it is truth warm and palpitating,-reason "permeated and made red-hot with passion." It demands, therefore, a trained, penetrating, and sympathetic voice, ranging through all the keys in the scale, by which all the motions and agitations, all the shudderings and throbbings of the heart, no less than the subtlest acts, the nimblest operations of the |