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. Quickley'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 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," etc. As Dr. Caius clips English, some of Bulwer's characters amplify periods. Dominie Sampson exclaims, "Prodigious." Sam Weller talks slang. In other cases an overwhelmning 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 judi cious 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 Encyclopedia 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 tenor 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 wellknown 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 discourse, 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 labor. 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 theater 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 Candle riggs," "the audience took alarm at the word "fire," and concluded that it applied to the theater. A rush ensued which prevented the full notice being heard, and several persons lost their lives. The inversion of the order of the announcement, "45 Candleriggs, Fire," would have prevented the disaster. But afterward 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 neutralizing the most magnificent powers, Burke is a remarkable instance. As an orator, Burke dazzled his hearers, and 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 give yourself so much trouble. Your opinion of the poem we have just heard will, no doubt, be abundantly edifying, without further waste of your valuable erudition." "If that be all," replied the critic, evidently mortified at not being allowed to show how much he knew about everything but the subject immediately before him, "if that be all that is required, the matter is easily dispatched." He then proceeded to analyze the poem. The wit of Moore was never more happily expended than in satirizing this learned discursiveness. The race of Fadladeen is immortal. A few years ago a distinguished clergyman of the Universalist denomination was accused, while in Lowell, of "violently dragging his wife from a revival meeting and compelling her to go home with him." He replied: "Firstly, I have never attempted to influence my wife in her views, nor her choice of a meeting. Secondly, my wife has not attended any of the revival meetings in Lowell. Thirdly, I have not attended even one of those meetings for any purpose whatever. Fourthly, neither my wife nor myself has any inclination to attend those meetings. And, fifthly, I never had a wife!" This divine must have had "Order" large. Be Next to those who talk as though they would never come to the point, are a class of bores who talk as though they did not know what the point was. fore they have proceeded far in telling a story, they stumble upon some Mr. What's-his-name, whom they |