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ORATORY AND ORATORS.

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CHAPTER I.

THE POWER AND INFLUENCE OF THE ORATOR.

10 estimate the degree in which the orator has influenced the world's history, would be a difficult task. It would be hardly too much to say that, since the dawn of civilization, the triumphs of the tongue have rivalled, if not surpassed, those of the sword. There is hardly any man, illiterate or educated, so destitute of sensibility that he is not charmed by the music of eloquent speech, even though it affect his senses rather than his mind and heart, and rouse his blood only as it is roused by the drums and trumpets of military bands. But when eloquence is something more than a trick of art, or a juggle with words; when it has a higher aim than to tickle the ear, or to charm the imagination as the sparkling eye and dazzling scales of the serpent enchant the hovering bird; when it has a higher inspiration than that which produces the "sounding brass and tinkling cymbal" of merely fascinating speech; when it is armed with the thunderbolt of powerful thought, and winged with lofty feeling; when the electric current of sympathy is established, and the orator sends upon it thrill after thrill of sentiment and emotion, vibrating and pulsating to the sensibilities of his hearers, as if their very heart-strings

were held in the grasp of his trembling fingers; when it strips those to whom it is addressed of their independ ence, invests them with its own life, and makes them obedient to a strange nature, as the mighty ocean tides follow the path of the moon; when it divests men of their peculiar qualities and affections, and turns a vast multitude into one man, giving to them but one heart, one pulse, and one voice, and that an echo of the speaker's, then, indeed, it becomes not only a delight, but a power, and a power greater than kings or military chieftains can command.

The French philosopher, D'Alembert, goes, so far as to say of eloquence, that "the prodigies which it often works, in the hands of a single man, upon an entire nation, are perhaps the most shining testimony of the superiority of one man over another"; and Emerson expresses a similar opinion when he says that eloquence is "the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy." As there is no effort of the human mind which demands a rarer combination of faculties than does oratory in its loftiest flights, so there is no human effort which is rewarded with more immediate or more dazzling triumphs. The philosopher in his closet, the statesman in his cabinet, the general in the tented field, may produce more lasting effects upon human affairs, but their influence is both more slowly felt, and less intoxicating from the ascendancy it confers. The orator is not compelled to wait through long and weary years to reap the reward of his labors. His triumphs are instantaneous; they follow his efforts as the thunder-peal follows the lightning's flash. While he is in the very act of forming his sentences, his triumph is reflected from the countenances of his hearers,

and is sounded from their lips. To stand up before a vast assembly composed of men of the most various callings, views, passions, and prejudices, and mould them at will; to play upon their hearts and minds as a master upon the keys of a piano; to convince their understandings by the logic, and to thrill their feelings by the art, of the orator; to see every eye watching his face, and every ear intent on the words that drop from his lips; to see indifference changed to breathless interest, and aversion to rapturous enthusiasm; to hear thunders of applause at the close of every period; to see the whole. assembly animated by the feelings which in him are burning and struggling for utterance; and to think that all this is the creation of the moment, and has sprung instantaneously from his fiery brain and the inspiration imparted to it by the circumstances of the hour;-this, perhaps, is the greatest triumph of which the human mind is capable, and that in which its divinity is most signally revealed.

The history of every country and of every age teems with the miracles wrought by this necromantic power. Eloquence, as every school-boy knows, was the masterspirit of both the great nations of antiquity.- Greece and Rome. It was not the fleets of Attica, though mighty, nor the valor of her troops, though unconquerable, that directed her destinies, but the words and gestures of the men who had the genius and the skill to move, to concentrate, and to direct the energies and passions of a whole people, as though they were but one person. When the Commons of Rome were bowed down to the dust beneath the load of debts which they owed their patrician creditors, it was the agonizing appeals of an old man in rags, pale

and famishing, with haggard beard and hair, who told the citizens that he had fought in eight and twenty battles, and yet had been imprisoned for a debt with usurious interest which he was compelled to contract, but could not pay, that caused a change of the laws, and a restoration to liberty of those who had been enslaved by their creditors. It was not, as it has been well said, the fate of Lucretia, but the gesture of Brutus waving abroad her bloody knife, and his long hidden soul bursting forth in terrible denunciation, that drove out the Tarquin from Rome, overthrew the throne, and established the Republic. "It was a father's cries and prayers for vengeance, as he rushed from the dead body of Virginia, appealing to his countrymen, that roused the legions of the Tusculan camp to seize upon the Sacred Mount, and achieve another freedom. And when the Roman Empire was the world, and trophies from every people hung in her capitol, the orator, whether in the senate or in the comitia, shook oracles of the fate of nations from the folds of his mantle." Plutarch tells us that Thucydides, when Archidamus, King of Sparta. asked him which was the best wrestler, Pericles or he,replied: "When I throw him, he says he was never down, and persuades the very spectators to believe him." The Athenian populace, roused by the burning words of Demosthenes, started up with one accord and one cry to march upon Philip; and the Macedonian monarch said of the orator who had baffled him,-on hearing a report of one of his orations,-"Had I been there, he would have persuaded me to take up arms against myself." We are told that such was the force of Cicero's oratory, that it not only confounded the audacious Cataline, and silenced the eloquent Hortensius,-not only deprived Curio of all

power of recollection, when he rose to oppose that great master of enchanting rhetoric,- but made even Cæsar tremble, and, changing his determined purpose, acquit the man he had resolved to condemn. It was not till the two champions of ancient liberty, Demosthenes and Cicero, were silenced, that the triumph of Despotism in Greece and Rome was complete. The fatal blow to Athenian greatness was the defeat by Antipater which drove Demosthenes to exile and to death; the deadly stroke at Roman freedom was that which smote off the head of Tully at Caieta.

In the Dark Ages the earnest tones of a simple private man, who has left to posterity only his baptismal name, with the modest surname of Hermit, roused the nations to engage in the Crusades, drove back the victorious crescent, overthrew feudalism, emancipated the serfs, delivered the towns from the oppression of the barons, and changed the moral face of Europe. Two centuries later the voice of a solitary monk shook the Vatican, and emancipated half of Europe from the dominion of Papal Rome. In later ages the achievements of oratory have been hardly less potent. What reader of English history is not familiar with the story of that "lord of the silver bow," the accomplished Bolingbroke, whom the Ministry, when they permitted him to return from exile, dared not permit to reënter Parliament, lest they should be pierced by his deadly shafts? Who can say what the cause of European, or even the world's history would have been, had the British Senate never shaken with the thunders of Fox's, Camden's, or Grattan's eloquence, or had Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Louvet, Barbaroux, and Danton never hurled their fiery bolts from the French tribune? "Who can doubt," says Daniel Webster, "that in our own struggle for inde

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