pure-minded statesman, whose noble lineaments he has traced in his delineation of the oúußovλos, which this great limner of character painted for a likeness of himself, to be hung up in the gallery of history as a pendant to the demagogue.* It is the misfortune of some of the world's greatest minds to be abundantly eulogized, but sparingly studied. It is much easier to glorify Bacon than to fathom his philosophy. It requires less labor to crown Newton with our praises than to follow him patiently through his Principia. Multitudes are lavish of compliments to "The blind old bard of Scio's rocky isle," who are quite content to pass through life without ever reading a verse of the Iliad. The peerless Athenian is no exception to this declaration. Many are profuse in vague encomiums who have never read one of his thrilling periods in the glowing Attic words which set. on fire the souls of the Athenian demos. It is to be feared that many public speakers, having collegiate diplomas in their drawers, have never formed an intimate and pleasing acquaintance with this chaste exemplar of manly eloquence. In the curriculum of academic study they hastily ran through one or two Philippics, satisfied with some insight into the grammatical relations of the words, while blind to the ravishing rhetorical beauties which unfold themselves only beneath a long and earnest scrutiny. Since they pronounced their orations on commencement day-on which occasion Demosthenes and Cicero were spoken of in very flattering phrase those distinguished gentlemen of antiquity have been quite forgotten, or remembered only as the authors of much vexation and disquietude to the halcyon days of university life. We are aware that there exists a strong prejudice in many minds against the earnest study of a master orator, grounded on the fear lest there would be more lost in originality than would be gained in other excellences. But why should the orator fear, rather than the painter and the sculptor, who from all civilized lands make pilgrimages to Italy, that shrine of the arts, and spend years in the study of the immortal productions of Titian and Michael Angelo? It is said that the orator should take lessons of the great teacher, * Oratio De Corona, sec. 189. Champlin's edition. nature. As well might you send the artist to nature for his studies, locking him out of the repositories of art in the Vatican, as to send the student of eloquence to nature, shutting him out from the contemplation of those great monarchs of the human soul, whose words have come down to us through twenty centuries enkindling the hearts of all the intervening generations. If man's noblest study is man, his best textbook is the great orator, who has trodden the mysterious avenues to millions of hearts. The successful speaker must be erudite in the knowledge of human nature. The sources of this knowledge are first of all the word of God, which is the discerner and the revealer of men's hearts; secondly, self-scrutiny; and lastly, observation upon our fellow-men. This, we contend, is wonderfully simplified and facilitated by the study of the drama, or the speech which has the power to move men; just as we may often arrive at a more accurate knowledge of the structure of a lock by inspecting the key which unlocks it, than by trying to pry into the lock itself. But he is not to be decried as an oratorical picklock, who has acquired, by the patient study of some great patterns, the high art of turning back the bolts of prejudice and passion in human souls, and of opening them to the ingress of truth. The prolonged and thorough study of the words which swept the souls of the hearers, and which thrill with intense emotion the bosoms of the readers ages afterward, is necessary to complete the rhetorical studies of the schools. In school rhetoric we have the disjecta membra of anatomized writers and speakers, thrown together as illustrations of the various principles of the art, as detached bones are arranged in the cabinet of a college of surgery. With the contemplation of these dry bones the school rhetoric ends. If the student ever see bone come to his bone, and the sinews and flesh come upon them, and if he ever see them stand upon their feet as mailed and victorious warriors, he must give his days and his nights to the study of those acknowledged standards of eloquence from which the rhetorician collects his paradigms. It is fortunate for the world that the highest of these standards, the speeches of the great Pæanian, have descended to the present time in the very syllables in which they flowed from his pen and fell from his lips. For these productions were most industriously elaborated in the closet; they are not the fragments of impromptu utterances, caught up by some Attic reporter in the Pnyx, and amplified by some Athenian Grubstreet. They all bear unmistakable internal evidence of their genuineness. The brief, simple, modest, and sometimes prayerful exordium, the lucid statement, the rapid, crystal stream of logic, the stirring appeal, the impressive peroration, all indicate the ad unguem factum oratorem as surely as the lion is known by his claw. We have said that the elements of power in Demosthenes are adapted to influence universal man; that the thoughts and sentiments packed into his periods, uttered in his impetuous manner in any age, to any people, would produce substantially the same effects. Hence we argue his fitness for a model for the Christian ministry whose commission contemplates the exertion of suasive influence upon every creature, even to the end of the world. There is one historical testimony to this characteristic of Demosthenes which it is instructive to contemplate. From his age to the present philanthropists, patriots, and statesmen remarkable for generous impulses and elevated moral sentiments, who have stood forth as champions of the right, and as swift witnesses against every form of tyranny and wrong, have been instinctively attracted to Demosthenes, and have lingered with delight over his pages, and have imbibed his spirit and imitated his style. The patriot Cicero, the advocate of outraged Sicily, and the successful pilot of the Roman Republic through the perils of civil commotion and dark treason; the philanthropic Brougham, whose youthful, fiery denunciations struck the fetters from eight hundred thousand slaves in the British colonies, and banished forever from English law "the wild and guilty fantasy of property in man;" and our own heroic Sumner, who rises from the floor of the American Senate crimsoned with his own blood, and before the vulture eyes of slavemasters pale with rage, hurls his resistless thunders at the baneful system which they love better than the Union cemented in their fathers' blood; these, and many other illustrious names which the world will not willingly let die, all confessedly drew inspiration from the orations of the enemy of the ambitious Macedonian and the devoted friend of Athens. If the preacher of Christ's Gospel is set, not for the utterance of mere theological dogmas, but to show to men their sins; if it is his office, like his Master, to move among men an incarnate conscience, unmasking hypocrisy, and denouncing the woes of God upon every form of iniquity; if the world has a right to expect the pulpit to be the organ of a higher and clearer sense of right, and the fountain of a purer and warmer philanthropy than the legislative hall, then should the divinely appointed expounder and defender of human rights not only be thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his high office, but he should be perfectly familiar with the best models for the expression of that spirit. We now call attention to some of the prominent characteristics of Demosthenes, which if reproduced in the pulpit would greatly enhance its power. 1. Demosthenes never attempts to move his hearers till he has laid down a foundation of massive, sterling thought. It is supposed by many that his success resulted chiefly from his manner; that, in his own language, action is the first, second, and third quality of a victorious orator. But his enemies, when they intimated that his speeches were redolent of the lamp, more sagely divined the secret strength of that young Samson who had suddenly mounted the bema with a power to sway Attica and to shake the Hellenic States at his will, and to foil the perfidious Philip by a half-hour's speech. They could not, however, have asserted this from any appearance of art and severe labor in the structure of his orations, for every thought appears to spring up easily and spontaneously from the occasion. He had learned the perfection of all learning and labor, the Ars celare artem. So unartificial do his speeches appear, that the reader is constantly deluded with the thought that it is a thing perfectly practicable for himself to give expression to his thoughts in a style equally felicitous. Thus Horace's test of literary excellence is satisfied three centuries before the Venusian poet penned the Ars Poetica. Ex noto fictum carmen sequar, ut sibi quivis Speret idem, sudet multum frustraque laboret His enemies judged that he had consumed the midnight hours in the preparation of his orations because they felt the unusual weight of thought with which they were laden, as gold is detected by its superior gravity. Other men could act as well as Demosthenes. Why did not others produce similar effects? Because they had no mighty thought in their souls to act out, and to transfuse into the souls of their hearers. Hence they were mere declaimers and ranters. Had Demosthenes framed platitudes into intense and earnest expressions, his vehemence might have momentarily fixed the attention of his audience. But would those vapid inanities have been treasured up by the most cultivated minds of his age? Would they have been conned over and recited by his great political antagonist in exile as specimens of the most splendid triumphs of oratory; and would they have been sent, as a precious legacy, down the stream of time, wafted by the praises of each succeeding generation? The speaker who is indifferent to the matter of his address, relying chiefly on his impassioned delivery, presents a striking resemblance to the artillerist who loads his rifled ordnance with a ball of cork, thinking to compensate for its lack of weight by quadrupling the quantity of powder. There is, however, a caution to be observed, that the depth of thought be not beyond the plummet of the ordinary intellect. The deepest thinkers are never popular orators, except those rarely constituted minds, composed, like the Gulf Stream, of a surface-current of fervid impulses, and a deeper and colder stream of metaphysical speculation. The calm, profound, and constructive intellect of Bacon was, by reason of its very depth, far less capable of exercising popular sway by speech than many other men of much narrower intellectual range, as the Great Eastern steamship, by her enormous depth of keel, is excluded from many harbors to which vessels of less draught have easy access. Demosthenes never dreams in the cloudland, like the Germán; never dives into psychological abstrusities, like a Scotch philosopher; but he applies to the common understanding those plain, practical truths adapted to secure his purpose. That purpose is higher than to dazzle the mind by the corruscation of specious and vague generalities; it is to persuade to immediate action. He seizes upon a universal principle only as a lever with which to multiply his power to press upon the attention some particular truth. Between the extremes of unadorned, logical conciseness and Ciceronian redundance and ornateness he ever found the golden mean, |