PREFACE.

THE following work, as will be perceived upon a slight examination, is on a different plan from any which has hitherto appeared on the subject of elocution. It is the result of a laborious study begun in early youth and continued for upwards of twenty years, of the physiology of the voice and the accompanying instincts of the body in gesture. The great work of Dr. James Rush, of Philadelphia, and the able treatise of Dr. Porter, of Andover, both of which appeared in 1827, were adopted by the present author immediately on their first appearance, and the truth of their doctrines subjected to the test of practical and independent investigation. The latter of these works was found to be an improvement upon those of Walker, Sheridan, and others; but the former proved to be accurate and practically useful in proportion to the genius, industry and acuteness of its author. Probably a more difficult and subtle investigation was never entered into in any branch of the sciences of observation, and the more it is submitted to the test of comparison with nature, the more surprising will its completeness and accuracy appear. Yet having been for some time laboriously employed as a teacher of reading and speaking before its appearance, and having con

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tinued to be thus occupied for most of the time since, the present writer has uniformly found that such philosophical and strictly scientific modes of describing the functions of the voice as those adopted by Dr. Rush, require too much time and study to be very useful to those who wish merely to acquire practical skill in reading and speaking, and that for the purpose of teaching elocution, it is absolutely necessary to resort to a different method.

The practical student needs to be informed of those uses only of the voice in which he is liable to err, and that these be described in such a way as corresponds with his feelings of embarrassment and difficulty, when in attempting to read or speak, he finds that his delivery is not such as he wishes it to be. Those who feel their own deficiencies in reading or speaking, have a conception more or less perfect of what they ought to exhibit, but find on trial that their delivery is in fact strangely inferior to the ideal standard in their minds. In this state of disappointment, an elocutionist at his elbow, should be able at once to inform such a one-in the first place what tones he is using, and in what they differ from those of nature and cultivated power; and in the next place to explain the reason why his voice proceeds differently from what he wishes. This last is the most important service required of the teacher of elocution. Such reasons will always be found to result from some unfortunate habit of body or mind, with which the teacher is familiar from study and experience. The explanation of all such habits belongs to the science of physiology, taken in its widest acceptation, as is done

by Chalmers, in his Bridgewater treatise, and as it is familiarly understood by medical men and naturalists. Elocution is properly a branch of physiology, and no more connected with Rhetoric, with which it is so commonly associated, than with music, painting and sculpture, with which also it has considerable connection. Every complete work on physiology treats of voice, gesture, and of the alphabetic elements..

It seems to be commonly supposed that the unfortunate habits above alluded to, which interfere with the free expression of thought and sentiment in reading and speaking, must necessarily result chiefly from mistakes, or neglect in early education. This is a serious errorthey proceed rather from that weakness of mental and physical organization, which is shared in a greater or less degree by all. The faults of delivery which a teacher is called upon to correct, are not of very many kinds. They are exhibited with little variation by all who have not cultivated delivery by their own efforts, with no exceptions, except occasionally in the case of one whose organization peculiarly fits and predisposes him for public speaking. To enlarge his sphere of observation, the author at one period welcomed every opportunity of instructing persons of both sexes and of all ages, from six to forty years and upwards, and for a considerable time gave individual instruction to about two hundred persons a day. He soon found however, that the various difficulties among so many were readily reducible to a few general classes, and that time spent in pointing out faults, was in general, lost. All have certain fundamental requisites of delivery to learn; all must ac

quire a voice of greater compass, depth and flexibility, than is developed in common conversation; all must learn to regulate the breath, and keep the chest in that condition which enables the speaker to emit the successive syllables of discourse with the steadiness and slowness required for large rooms; all must acquire the habit of concentrating the mind on the ideas delivered, to such a degree that no external and embarrassing influences shall prevent the natural impulses from which a good delivery results, from acting with intensity and power; Jall must acquire that judgment of the ear by which a speaker distinguishes for himself the actual sound of his voice at a distance, and listens to it after it has issued from him, as if he himself were one of the auditors as well as the speaker; Jall must acquire that discipline of the mind, by which the words of a written or a memorized discourse can be taken from the dead letter before they are uttered, and transferred to the mind in the shape of thoughts not yet completely clothed in language, so that when actually spoken, the utterance shall proceed from the same impulses as if he were extemporizing, and the ideas thus have their living embodiment of words with their inseparably associated tones; and finally, all must acquire those unfettered bodily habits, in consequence of which attitude and gesture become as varied and graceful as the impulses from which they spring. From infancy onwards, the commerce of ordinary life teaches us to talk. We learn to read by expressing aloud the words which silently meet the eye, but in reading merely for our own information, the mind is in the condition of apprehending, not of communica

ting thoughts. Hence the tone of reading is at first abstracted and inexpressive, and if it becomes otherwise, the natural expression is at first similar to that of soliloquizing, or, still more precisely, it resembles that which one uses in repeating over to himself words which have just been addressed to him by another, in order to be certain that he has caught them correctly. We next attempt to utter them in living tones, to satisfy ourselves that we understand them. But the regular succession of written words and their natural rhythm, cause the voice to proceed more or less in a monotonously regular and a mechanically rhythmical manner. The mind likewise is in a musing state. From both these causes, reading is at first naturally characterized by what is called a tone. The tones with which children read are universal, and are equally exhibited by uneducated men. Among the Asiatic nations, indeed, where the people act less from the impulses of the understanding and more from those of the imagination and feelings, all reading is in the style which we call chanting, and in their languages the same word signifies both to read and to sing.

Up to this point, we have nothing which can be called delivery. This term implies the act of addressing ideas to others. When children in school have once acquired the ability to pronounce written words at sight, all instruction in propriety of reading consists in teaching them to make an effort to give the tones by which we communicate written ideas to others. This act requires in general, the modulations of the voice used in conversation. But as the mind is in an entirely different state from that of conversation, it is by a long and slow process that the child