singular tact and felicity with which their dramatic (or rather melo-dramatic) turns and touches were brought in.

It is in vain to say that people could never have been such fools as to be awed by what reads very like buffoonery or impertinence; or to cite the failure of Burke, who, when he flung the dagger on the floor of the House, produced nothing but a smothered laugh, and a joke from Sheridan :-'The gentleman has brought us the knife-but where is the fork?' The scene would have gone off differently, had the actor been equal to the part. Lord Chatham often succeeded in worse. On one occasion, for example, he rose and walked out of the House, at his usual slow pace, immediately after he had finished his speech. A silence ensued till the door opened to let him into the lobby. A member then started up, saying, I rise to reply to the right honourable member.' Lord Chatham turned back, and fixed his eye on the orator, who instantly sat down dumb; then his lordship returned to his seat, repeating, as he hobbled along, the verses of Virgil:

At Danaûm proceres, Agamemnoniæque phalanges,
Ut vidêre virum fulgentiaque arma per umbras,
Ingenti trepidare metu: pars vertere terga,
Ceu quondam petiere rates: pars tollere vocem
Exiguam inceptus clamor frustratur hiantes."

Then placing himself in his seat, he exclaimed, Now let me hear what the honourable member has to say to me.' When the late Mr. Charles Butler, from whom we borrow this anecdote, asked his informant, an eye-witness, if the House did not laugh at the ridiculous figure of the poor member, he replied, No, sir, we were all too awed to laugh."

Another extraordinary instance of his command of the House is the manner in which he fixed indelibly on Mr. Grenville the appellation of the gentle shepherd.' At the time in question, a song of Dr. Howard, which began with the words, Gentle shepherd, tell me where,' each stanza ending with that line, was in every mouth. In the course of the debate, Mr. Grenville exclaimed, Where is our money? where are our means? I say again, where are our means? where is our money?' He then sat down, and Lord Chatham paced slowly out of the House, humming the line, Gentle shepherd, tell me where.'

Mr. Butler states that a gentleman mentioned the two last circumstances to the late Mr. Pitt; the minister observed that they were proofs of his father's ascendancy in the House; but that no specimens remained of the eloquence by which that ascendancy was procured. The gentleman recommended him to read slowly his father's speeches for the repeal of the stamp-act; and while

he

he repeated them to bring to his mind, as well as he could, the figure, the look, and the voice, with which his father might be supposed to have pronounced them. Mr. Pitt did so, and admitted the probable effect of the speeches thus delivered.

In the case of his Transatlantic rival we must go still further: we must infer both language and action from the wonders recorded of him; but when we find Americans of all classes, parties, and shades of opinion, bearing concurrent testimony to these, there is obviously no alternative but to assume the direct falsehood of their statements, or admit that Patrick Henry possessed the genuine vis vivida, the inborn genius of oratory, as much perhaps as any other modern, dead or living, with the exception of Chatham and Mirabeau.

Botta, the Italian, who, in his History of the American Revolution,' has thrown the arguments for and against the Declaration of Independence into the form of harangues after the manner of the historians of antiquity, makes Lee and Dickinson the champions of their respective parties. Lee certainly moved the resolutions, but Jefferson says, the colossus of that Congress, the great pillar of support to the Declaration, and its ablest advocate on the floor of the House, was John Adams,' who poured forth his passionate appeals in language which moved his hearers from their seats.' It was a bold measure to attempt an imitation, but this has been done by Mr. Webster, artistically interweaving the few original expressions which have been retained. We will quote a few sentences:

'Let us, then, bring before us the assembly which was about to decide a question thus big with the fate of empire. Let us open their doors, and look in upon their deliberations. Let us survey the anxious and care-worn countenances, let us hear the firm-toned voices of this band of patriots.

'Hancock presides over the solemn sitting; and one of those not yet prepared to pronounce for absolute independence is on the floor, and is urging his reasons for dissenting from the declaration.

It was for Mr. Adams to reply to arguments like these. We know his opinions, and we know his character. He would commence with his accustomed directness and earnestness

"Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed not at independence; but there's a Divinity which shapes our ends. The injustice of England has driven us to arms; and, blinded to her own interest for our good, she has obstinately persisted, till independence is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is ours. Why then should we defer the declaration? For myself, having twelve months ago, in this place, moved you, that George Washington be appointed commander

commander of the forces, raised or to be raised, for defence of American liberty, may my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him! The war, then, must go on. We must fight it through. And if the war must go on, why put off longer the Declaration of Independence? . . . .

"Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs; but I see, I see clearly, through this day's business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to the time when this declaration shall be made good. We may die! die colonists! die slaves! die, it may be, ignominiously, and on the scaffold! Be it so-be it so. If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But while I do live, let me have a country, or at least the hope of a country, and that a free country.

"But whatever may be our fate, be assured, be assured, that this declaration will stand. It may cost treasure, and it may cost blood; but it will stand, and it will richly compensate for both. Through the thick gloom of the present I see the brightness of the future, as the sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves, our children will honour it. They will celebrate it, with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires, and illuminations. On its annual return they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears, not of subjection and slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation, of gratitude, and of joy. Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it; and I leave off as I began, that, live or die, survive or perish, I am for the declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment; independence now-and INDEPENDENCE FOR EVER!"""

The first sentence of the speech here given to Adams is copied from his declaration to the attorney-general for Massachusetts in 1774:-The die is now cast. I have passed the Rubicon. To sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish with my country, is my unalterable determination.' The passage would be materially improved by leaving out the words survive or perish ;' but a leaning towards pleonasm is one great defect of American style, as we may subsequently have occasion to point out.

Prior to his appearance in congress, Adams had obtained great celebrity at the bar. He defended Captain Preston, prosecuted for firing on the people in 1770; and, throwing all petty considerations and prejudices aside, called on the jury to be deaf, deaf as adders, to the clamours of the populace.' Captain Preston was acquitted; and the circumstance is often mentioned as a proof of the inherent sense of justice among the people of the United States. But is it quite clear that they retain as a nation all the good qualities which distinguished them as a British colony?

Were

Were the ringleaders of the Baltimore mob, who murdered the printer of a newspaper which opposed a war with England in 1812, convicted or acquitted? Or if the slave-owners had tarred and feathered Miss Martineau, and sent her to keep company with wild turkeys, as they threatened, could any southern jury have been persuaded to find them guilty of an assault?

Two other famous speakers of the ante-revolutionary period were John Rutledge and James Otis. The latter argued the great question of writs of assistance (a sort of general warrant) in 1761; and his speech is thus described in one of John Adams's letters: -Otis was a flame of fire! With a promptitude of classical allusion, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eye into futurity, and a rapid torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him. American independence was then and there born. Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.'-Jefferson was struck in precisely the same manner by Henry, and gives him credit for the same description of effect. We may split the difference, by supposing that Otis then laid the embers which Henry afterwards lighted and flung

abroad.

This is all worth repeating that we have been able to collect regarding the ante-revolutionary epoch, and we gladly pass on to a period which offers something more substantial than scattered allusions to argue from. Common Rumour is an indispensable witness in an inquiry like the present. With all her hundredtongued propensity to fibbing, she must be put into the box; and our first care was to learn from the most enlightened Americans of our acquaintance, which, according to the popular estimate, were generally regarded as the best speakers of their time. The following is a carefully-collated list of the chief names that have been forwarded to us with satisfactory testimonials :

Alexander Hamilton, Fisher Ames, John Quincy Adams, Josiah Quincy, Rufus King, Samuel Dexter, Chief Justice Marshall, John Wells, Thomas Emmett (the Irish barrister), Harrison Grey Otis, John Randolph, William Wirt, Joseph Hopkinson, Horace Binney, Luther Martin, William Pinkney, Robert Harper, Robert Hayne, James Madison, James Bayard, William Preston, Joseph Story, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Edward Everett.

It is a remarkable fact that the whole of these are lawyers by profession except the last. The order in which they are here named means nothing; and it may be as well to say that no just conclusion can be drawn from the preference we may accord,

or

or the comparative space we may devote to any of them, in our remarks and quotations.

Lord Brougham, in his Dissertation on the Eloquence of the Ancients, says that public speaking among them bore a more important share in the conduct of affairs, and filled a larger space in the eye of the people, than it does now, or indeed ever can again. He afterwards alludes to their interest in oratorical displays as sources of recreation, but it seems to have escaped his attention that the orators' formed a class distinct from the public men in general, and were more frequently the disturbers than the rulers of the state. Thus Plutarch, in the Life of Phocion, says For as princes divert themselves at their meals with buffoons and jesters, so the Athenians attended to the polite and agreeable address of their orators merely by way of entertainment; but when the question was concerning so important a business as the command of their forces, they returned to sober and serious thinking,' &c. For this reason it was said that Demosthenes was the finer orator, and Phocion the more persuasive speaker-Phocion, who, when his opinion once happened to be received with universal applause, turned to his friends and asked, ' Have I inadvertently let slip something wrong?'

The good sense of mankind has established the same distinction in all countries,-even under a democracy like that of the United States, where, from the undue prevalence of the talking profession, it might be thought that the assembly or the forum afforded the only legitimate means of influence. The name of Jefferson, for example, does not appear upon our list; yet who has played a more important part? The fact is, his voice, weak at best, became guttural and inarticulate in moments of high excitement, and the consciousness of this infirmity prevented him from risking his reputation in debate; though, judging from the productions of his pen, he possessed all except the physical qualifications of an orator. Washington, again, was wont to exercise much the same sort of influence as the Duke of Wellington has long exercised in this country. He delivered his opinion in a few pithy sentences, written or spoken, and the mere declaimers subsided into insignificance. It is remarkable, too, that the patriotic exertions of these great men were generally directed against the same class of politicians-namely, those who sought to gain the favour of the people by relaxing the reins of government and weakening the foundations of authority.*

It is related of Washington, at the conclusion of his campaign against the Indians, that, having to appear before the assembly

Many other points of analogy will be suggested by a perusal of the inestimable and (in some measure) parallel compilations of Colonel Gurwood and Mr. Sparks.