To Teachers and the Public. Among the numerous testimonials from distinguished sources in favor of the present work, the publishers select the following, as being all-sufficient to satisfy the public of its superior merits and adaptation to the purposes of rhetorical instruction in the United States. Teachers, who may wish to examine this work with a view to its introduction into their schools, will be gratuitously furnished with copies, on applying at the Publication Office of James Mowatt & Co., 174 Broadway, New York. From Charles Anthon, L.L.D., Jay-Professor of the Greek and Latin Languages in Columbia College, New York, &c. &c. ars. New York, Feb. 17th, 1844. I have received your edition of Knowles's Elocutionist, and am of opinion that it will form a very useful work for young scholThe great evil under which publications of this kind labor is a superabundance of rules and directions, only tending to produce confusion. I congratulate you on having so successfully avoided this, and on having produced so excellent a guide in a most important department of education. From the Hon. Wm. C. Preston, of South Carolina. The selections strike me as being more apt and judicious than those which are to be found in any similar work since Scott's Lessons. The study of it cannot fail to inform the mind and cultivate the taste of youth; while, in the hands of a competent instructor, it is an admirable collection of examples for reading and enunciation. From the Hon. Gulian C. Verplanck, of New York. The rhetorical instruction as to reading, delivery, emphasis, &c. is excellent. All that is valuable in Walker and the works of other teachers of the art, seems to be embodied here; while much that encumbered them is judiciously omitted. The new selections for reading and declamation are made with taste and skill, and cannot but be found more interesting, and therefore more useful to the young American student, than those that have so long and so uniformly filled up works of this nature, most of which, excellent in themselves, have (as Charles Lamb complains somewhere of one of the very finest of them) been so long "handled and pawed," as to become quite dead for any purpose of interest or excitement. ELOCUTIONIST; FIRST-CLASS RHETORICAL READER AND RECITATION BOOK. CONTAINING THE ONLY ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF ELOCUTION, DIREC- WITH NUMEROUS PIECES FOR READING AND DECLAMATION. DESIGNED FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES. BY JAMES SHERIDAN KNOWLES, Author of "Virginius," "William Tell," "The Hunchback," &c. ALTERED AND ADAPTED TO THE PURPOSES OF INSTRUCTION IN THE BY EPES SARGENT. NEW YORK: JAMES MOWATT & CO. 174 BROADWAY. SOLD ALSO BY ALL PERIODICAL AGENTS AND BOOKSELLERS. 1844. [Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1844, by EPES SARGENT, in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of the state of New-York] DOUGLAS, TYPOGRAPHER, 34 ANN ST. BEDFORD, PRINTER, 138 FULTON ST. PREFACE BY THE AMERICAN EDITOR. THE essential rules of elocution are few and simple. Nothing can be more unprofitable and useless than most of the complicate treatises that have been written on the subject. As well might we manufacture a great poet through the aid of the rules of Aristotle, as an accomplished speaker by initiation into the mysteries of "intensive slides," "absolute emphatic stress," "penultimate pauses," and the whole arbitrary nomenclature, which has been introduced into some of our rhetorical school-books. Goethe says: "Reason and honest feeling want no arts Of utterance-ask no toil of elocution; If feeling does not prompt, in vain you strive; By its own impulse, to impel the hearts Of hearers, with communicated power, In vain you strive-in vain you study earnestly!" How true is all this! And yet, in some of our books of selections for reading in schools, we have "a key of rhetorical notation" attached to the pieces, informing the reader when to raise his voice and when to lower it |