promptitude, even though sometimes a man may err for want of due deliberation, will, in the long run, more often conduct to success than a slow judgment, that comes too late." This is the secret. The capacity to see this truth and the resolution to act upon it, is the capacity to rise above common men. Innumerable people will strike out a course and pursue it— while all goes well-but the temper of greatness ever remains unshaken by reverses. It places its life on the hazard of a well-chosen plan, and looks for failures and defeats, but relies on the "long run" of persistency for success. The intellectual character of the Duke of Wellington, so far as it has been displayed in civil affairs, accords with what his military exploits indicates. A simple and brief directness are the qualities of his speeches. "He strips a subject of all extraneous and unnecessary adjuncts, and exposes it in its natural proportions. He scents a fallacy afar off, and hunts it down at once without mercy. He has certain constitutional principles which are to him real standards. He measures propositions or opinions by these standards, and as they come up or fall short, so they are accepted or disposed of." The Duke of Wellington early took sides he learned well the principles of which he would become the partisan. I have italicised the words in the sentence just quoted from "Fraser," which indicates his intellectual habit. It is hard to tell, generally, what are the "constitutional principles" of British liberty. But it is not hard to tell what they are when you know who uses the phrase. The principles of the Throne and Court may be expressed in three propositions. The Duke having adopted these, sits at ease, and measures the plausible speeches of progress by them, and unmasks the sophism of the quasiliberal. But, however directed, men will ever respect straightforwardness of character. It is heroic in that man, whoever he may be, who looks over the troubled sea of time, and manfully elects his course. Stern is the on-look of Necessity: Not without shudder may a human hand There is heroism in the very act-which cannot be too much applauded. It is this which converts life from being a phantom or a manœuvre into a reality and a process. It throws into ignoble shade your petty men of expedients. Principle either gives success or confers dignity-by chicanery all may be lost, and nothing noble can ever be gained. By manœuvre weak men seek to cheat human nature, cajole fate, and win a glorious destiny by paltry tricks. But the whole order of things is against it. Such a course may triumph, but it is the triumph of luck-not success. It is accident-not merit. Dignity is alone born of principle and purpose. He who by principle is swayed In truth and justice still the same, Is neither of the crowd afraid, Tho' civil broils the state inflame, Nor to a haughty tyrant's frown will stoop, Nor to a raging storm when all the winds are up.* What decision is to character, what principle is to morals -so is method to literature. To have a clear purpose, and vigorously pursue it, is the strong element of rhetorical success. It is this feature which leads to the delineation of individual character. Coleridge has shown that the character of Hamlet is decided by the constant recurrence, in the midst of every pursuit, of philosophic reflections. Mrs. Quickly's talk is marked by that lively incoherence so common with garrulous women, whereby the last idea suggests the successor, each carrying the speaker further from the original subject. After this manner:-"Speaking of tails-we always like those that end well-Hogg's, for instance-speaking of hogs-we saw one of these animals the other day lying in the gutter, and in the opposite one a well-dressed man; the first had a ring in *Horace, Ode 3, Lib. III. his nose, the latter had a ring on his finger. The man was drunk, the hog was sober. A man is known by the company he keeps," &c. As Dr. Caius clips English, some of Bulwer's characters amplify periods. Dominie Sampson exclaims, "Prodigious." Sam Weller talks slang. In other cases an overwhelming passion pervades a character, or an intellectual idiosyncrasy is the peculiar quality, leading the possessor to look at everything in a given light. But whatever may be the feature fixed upon, its methodical working out constitutes individuality of character. In the courts young barristers are drilled in an iron method. A judge always expects, at the outset, the enunciation of the object of the speech. A judicious speaker will always observe this rule for the sake of his audience. As a system of reasoning proceeds from certain axioms which can never be lost sight of except at the peril of confusion, so a discourse proceeds on something which is taken for granted, and which must be confessed and explained at the beginning, or the speaker will be considered only as indulging in airy speculations, and his hearers will be bewildered instead of enlightened, and be anxious about the danger of a fall instead of intent on the scene placed before them. The advantages of the course here advised have been well enforced in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana. "In purely argumentative statement, or in the argumentative division of mixed statements, and especially in argumentative speeches, it is essential that the issue to be proved should be distinctly announced in the beginning in order that the tenour and drift that way of everything that is said may be the better apprehended; and it is also useful when the chain of argument is long, to give a forecast of the principal bearings and junctures whereby the attention will be more easily secured, and pertinently directed throughout the more closely consecutive detail, and each proposition of the series will be clenched in the memory by its foreknown relevancy to what is to follow." These are well known rules which it were superfluous to cite except for the instruction of the young. But examples may be occasionally observed of juvenile orators who will conceal the end they aim at, until they have led their hearers through the long chain of antecedents in order that they may produce surprise by forcing a sudden acknowledgment of what had not been foreseen. The disadvantage of this method is that it puzzles and provokes the hearer through the sequence, and confounds him in the conclusion; and gives an overcharged impression of the orator's ingenuity on the part of those who may have attended to him sufficiently to have been convinced. It is a method by which the business of the argument is sacrificed to a puerile ostentation in the conduct of it, and the ease and satisfaction of the auditors sacrificed to the vanity of the arguer. But though the purport of a speech must be avowed, the drift of an illustration may be concealed. One of Mr. Fox's Covent Garden orations affords a brilliant example. He took the case of certain poachers who had, about that time, suffered imprisonment in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and he calculated the days of their incarceration, and the pecuniary loss their families had sustained by their detention from labour. The statistics were dry as summer's dust. What this had to do with the question of the corn laws no one could divine-when, by a masterly turn of thought, he asked—“ If poachers are so punished who take the rich man's bird, how ought peers to be punished who take the poor man's bread?" The house rose with surprise. The climax had the effect of a light applied to a funeral pile, in which the arguments of the protectionists were to be consumed before the meeting. Method is often of moment in trivial things. Some years ago it was the custom in Glasgow, when a fire broke out in the evening, for the police to enter the theatre and announce the fire and the locality, that if any person concerned was present he might be apprised of the impending loss, On one occasion when the watch commenced to announce "Fire-45 Candleriggs," the audience took alarm at the word Fire, and concluded that it applied to the theatre. A rush ensued which prevented the full notice being heard, and several persons lost their lives. The inversion of the order of announcement, " 45 Candleriggs-Fire," would have prevented the disaster. But afterwards the practice of such announcements was forbidden, it being impossible, I suppose, to reform the rhetoric of policemen. Of the effect of the want of method in neutralising the most magnificent powers, Burke is a remarkable instance. As an orator, Burke dazzled his hearers, then distracted them, and finished by fatiguing or offending them. And it was not uncouth elocution and exterior only, which impaired the efficacy of his speeches. Burke almost always deserted his subject, before he was abandoned by his audience. In the progress of a long discourse he was never satisfied with proving that which was principally in question, or with enforcing the single measure which it was his business and avowed purpose to enforce,-he diverged to a thousand collateral topics, -he demonstrated as many disputed propositions,—he established principles in all directions, he illuminated the whole horizon with his magnificent, but scattered lights. There was, nevertheless, no keeping in his spoken compositions,—no proportion, no subserviency of inferior groups to greater,-no apparent harmony or unity of purpose. He forgot that there was but a single point to prove, and his auditors in their turn forgot that they had undergone the process of conviction upon any. When Fadladeen essays his critical opinion on the poem of Feramorz, he commences thus :-"In order to convey with clearness my opinion of the story this young man has related, it is necessary to take a review of all the stories that have ever " "My good Fadladeen!" exclaimed Lalla Rookh, interrupting him, we really do not deserve that you should 66 |