ference to that main end, will discover in the orations first named, the perfection and the distinguishing features of his genius.

CHAPTER II.

MODERN ORATORY.

Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, makes an observation which has been sometimes treated as an extravagant paradox. He says that courts of law are the great field for the display of impassioned eloquence; and that, on the other hand, deliberative assemblies, being convened for the purpose of determining on their own affairs, will always force a speaker to keep to the point, and are of all audiences the most intolerant of declamation. Now, with regard to the judicial tribunals of Greece in the philosopher's own time, the first part of his assertion was unfortunately quite true; and as to the latter part, if the proceedings in the Ecclesiæ of Athens did not justify it, which they probably did, those in our own British houses of parliament, which may still be considered as the only great modern schools of political eloquence, have most signally demonstrated its truth. The eloquence of our statesmen is remarkable for its tone of practical sense, the closeness of its adherence to the business immediately in hand, and its general avoidance of oratorical excitement and display, even on occasions when these are justly called for. The character of our great

speakers as statesmen likewise has been inextricably mixed up with the consideration of their strictly oratorical merits; and hence more than one of them hold in universal estimation a rank as orators, which they owe in no mean degree to their talent and success as political leaders. Altogether, while there has generally prevailed among us, and more especially till the beginning of the present century, a tendency to depreciate unduly the eloquence of our statesmen, there are yet very few of them indeed whose works could be recommended, unless with much qualification and explanation, as models for the rhetorical student. The speeches of the younger Pitt, eminently characteristic both in grasp of intellect and haughty stubbornness of will, often admirable and masterly as details of facts or expositions of principles, and frequently most highly successful in the speaker's favourite tone of contemptuous recriminative sarcasm, are but indifferently adapted for the end which we at present have in view. Those of Fox are entitled to rank far higher as specimens of oratory; and indeed, for those who have purity of taste enough to relish the severer graces of a manly eloquence, always drawing its materials from a vigorous and richly stored understanding, always animated by at least a calm and lofty feeling of truth and freedom, and sometimes inspired by a genuine enthusiasm, but never stooping to be graceful, nor pausing to gather ornaments on its way,-for minds which can appreciate eloquence like this, the speeches of Fox will form a treasure of models, in which they will not only find successful exemplifications of most of the principles of eloquence, but much that will remind them of the calmer moods of Demosthenes. But several others of our British statesmen, especially among those who flourished in the end

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of last century and the earliest years of this, deserve from the student of eloquence more industrious study than those two great men. Among these, we can do no more than name Grattan, Erskine, and Sheridan ; and we pause at the threshold of the present age, alluding to no man who is still alive.

But of the political orators who have preceded the present time, both in the last century and this, by far the most remarkable, in a merely rhetorical point of view, were these three; Chatham, Burke, and Canning.

Very many of Chatham's speeches are unreported; many of the earlier ones have reached us with much distortion; and there are but a very few in which we can believe ourselves to be listening throughout to the exact words of the speaker. But enough remains to convince us that Chatham was the most powerful and striking political orator whom our country has ever produced. His celebrated youthful retort to the elder Horace Walpole bears unequivocal marks of being, in the shape in which we possess it, the manufacture of Samuel Johnson; and we have scarcely any speech completely and genuinely reported, which was delivered before his fiftieth year. In the orations succeeding that time, our recollection of the speaker's age and lofty position in the state prepares our minds to harmonize with the tone of address, and to consider that as noble boldness, which in a younger and meaner man might have received another name. The tone is never varied; it is always uncompromising, stern, and admonitory: the speaker is not an advocate devising means to conciliate and persuade, but a preacher of truth and right, denouncing judgments on political trans

gression. Chatham's intellect never grew old; to the last hour of his public life the feelings glowed as passionately, and prompted images as vivid, and alternately checked, and impelled, and transformed the language, in figures as abrupt and varied, as in the morning of his youth and dawning ambition; the sickness and decay of the body were overcome by the resistless energy of the fiery soul; and the British House of Lords trembled before the cripple who stood up feebly in the midst of them, to grow strong as he spoke by the impulse of his own fervent imagination. The idol of Chatham's mind was the baronial constitution of England as confirmed in Magna Charta, which, indeed, with the Petition and Bill of Rights, he himself called the Englishman's political bible: all the strong and diversified powers of his intellect, in observation, judgment, and rapidly convincing argument, and all the array of his chivalrously generous feelings, did continual homage at the one sacred shrine: attempts from below to widen the area of the political edifice, that the mass of the people might come in, the aristocratic Whig would have laughed to scorn: insidious endeavours from above and within to shake the pillars of the temple, roused him repeatedly to overwhelming indignation. His eloquence found its most favourable field of display in two questions of his time: the famous elections of Wilkes for Middlesex, which were made the occasion of fierce debates as to the constitutional rights of the subject; and the more important discussions on the American war. The former of these themes, in which Chatham stood forth as the champion of the people against the supposed usurpation of the House of Commons, drew from him some of his most electric flashes of passion and imagery. One is the speech in

1770, on the Marquis of Rockingham's motion for an inquiry into the state of the nation; in which occurs the splendid passage beginning with the bold prayer for the prevalence of discord, if freedom could not otherwise be preserved, thence passing to the parallel between the scriptural records and the charters of the English constitution, and ending with the stern allusion to the value which the Revolution of 1688 possessed as a warning for succeeding British monarchs. But it is to the American question that we owe his finest speeches; and on this subject we have a series of harangues, exhibiting in admirable union the argumentative, the imaginative, and the passionate elements of oratory, and invaluable to the student, both for their high rank in these points of excellence, for the pointed nervousness of the style, and for the singular force and nature of the rhetorical figures, indignant interrogation, sudden self-correction, and anxious and solemn repetition. The finest of all is undoubtedly the speech on the address to the throne in November 1777. But no parliamentary speech whatever is more interesting, or more honourable to the speaker, than the extemporaneous address elicited from the old man in the same year, by the ministerial defence of the employment of the Indians in America. In the imperfectly reported speech which he delivered on that memorable evening, his last in public life, when he fell down in convulsions, on rising to reply to the attacks of the Duke of Richmond, he related the whole history of the war with America; he repeated the predictions which he had himself day after day pronounced as warnings to the state; and, like a dying prophet reproaching an unbelieving generation, he followed his recital of every prediction by the words, " And so it proved!"