in the long continued, and, to him, afflictive position of standing to address the people. Nothing of the effect which he produced depended on extraneous circumstances. There was no pomp, no rhetorical flourish, and few (though whenever they did occur, very appropriate) images, excepting toward the close of his sermon, when his imagination became excursive, and he winged his way through the loftiest sphere of contemplation. His sublimest discourses were in the beginning didactic and argumentative, then descriptive and pathetic, and finally, in the highest and best sense, imaginative. Truth, to him, was their universal element, and to enforce its claims was his constant aim. Whether he attempted to engage the reason, the affections, or the fancy, all was subsidiary to this great end. He was always in earnest, profoundly in earnest. But it is also true that

as a chaste, concise, and energetic style is more effective than a florid, turgid, and prolix one, so the judicious employment of moderate gesture is more effective upon the genius of the English people, who love moderation, than any possible amplification of spasmodic attitudes or redundancy of grimace.

The prompting of Lucio to Isabel, when pleading before Angelo for the life of her brother, as rendered by Shakspeare in Measure for Measure, is one of the happiest practical lessons in elocutionary art on record. As a piece of preceptive teaching, neither the rhetoric of ancient or modern times has produced anything so happy, so concise, and yet so comprehensive, as Hamlet's directions to his players. It is a manual of elocution in miniature.*

*See Note B, page 168.

CHAPTER III.

THEORY OF PERSUASION.

He takes to pieces the This is what the young

"RHETORIC," says Plato, "is the art of ruling the minds of men;" but to rule mind you must know it. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin: but we cannot touch nature through the rules of art without knowing nature. "He who in an enlightened and literary society aspires to be a great poet must become a little child. whole web of his mind."* rhetorician must do. He must tread backward the path of life to the first moment of consciousness, and ask all possible questions of his own experience. Carlyle has said that a healthy man never asks himself such personal questions. But a thoughtful man does. Could the disembodied experience of men be presented to view, so that the conscious life of each could be palpable in bodily form, how few figures would present the entire lineaments of mankind. We should behold an assemblage of mutilated figures, the limbs of some, the arms of others, the trunk, or the head, would be invisible; so little, as respects consciousness, do men generally possess themselves. As, however, man is himself essentially his own standard of judgment, is himself the measure of other men, it is inevitable that he will form a defective estimate of others who is defective himself. The rhetorician, then, who would hope to operate on the natures of others, must primarily make himself acquainted with his own.

*Macaulay, Crit. and Hist. Essays, vol. i.

An appeal to experience is the best test we have of the force of an inducement. "The argument," says Emerson, "which has not the power to reach my own practice, I may well doubt will fail to reach yours. I have heard an experienced counselor say, that he never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that his client ought to have a verdict." A remarkable instance of the result of an appeal to personal conviction is afforded in Bailey's Review of Berkeley's Theory of Vision. "Many years ago," says Mr. Bailey, "I held what may be styled a derivative opinion in favor of Berkeley's Theory of Vision; but having in the course of a philosophical discussion had occasion to explain it, I found on attempting to state in my own language the grounds on which it rested, that they no longer appeared to me to be so clear and conclusive as I had fancied them to be. I determined to make it the subject of a patient and dispassionate examination. The result has been a clear conviction. in my own mind of its erroneousness, and a desire to state to the philosophical world the grounds on which that conviction has been formed." A philosophical illustration of the truth of Emerson's observation, that that statement is only fit to be made public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity. Men may live, and think, and reason, with the mere surface knowledge which life presents to every observer; but no one can master persuasion, as an art, unless he passes in review the origin of ideas and analyzes the motives of men.

A sound theory of intelligence is the basis of all systematic persuasion. Metaphysical philosophy has been prolific in its dissertations on the facts and attri

butes of human mentality; but the classification of intelligence laid down by some of the more judicious followers of Gall is the most scientific, and, consequently, the most intelligible which the student can follow. It is not possible to indicate a particular theory in detail with a chance of its being universally useful. For the general characteristics of humanity are variously combined with the national, local, and individual, in every audience who may be addressed by tongue or pen. The simple elements of humanity, like the letters of the alphabet, are, according to the arrangement of circumstances, spread out into countless volumes of character, each written in a peculiar language, and requiring a copious lexicon to render it intelligible to the reader.* The general principles, say of phrenology, indicate the outlines of human nature, and the study of men and manners fills up the detail. An old writer, I think Ralph Cudworth, says: "It is acknowledged by all, that sense is passion. And there is in all sensation, without dispute, first a passion in the body of the sentient, which bodily passion is nothing else but local motion impressed upon the nerves from the objects without, and thence propagated and communicated to the brain, where all sensation is made. For there is no other action of one body upon another, nor other change or mutation of bodies conceivable or intelligible, besides local motion; which motion in that body which moves another, is called action; in that which is moved by another, passion. And, therefore, when a compound object very remotely distant is perceived by us, since it is by some passion made upon our body, there must of necessity be a

*Mrs. L. Grimstone.

continual propagation of some local motion of pressure from thence unto the organs of our sense or nerves, and so unto the brain. As when we see many fixed stars sparkling in a clear night, though they be all of them so many semi-diameters of the earth distant from us, yet it must, of necessity, be granted that there are local motions or pressure from them, which we call the light of them, propagated continually or uninterruptedly through the fluid heaven unto our optic nerves, or else we could not see them." This indicates very plainly the philosophy of impressions. We have nothing to do here with the controversies of metaphysicians concerning the transcendentalism of intuitive knowledge. It may be supernatural. It is, however, certain that a great proportion of human knowledge is the result of material relations, and to these relations the precepts of knowledge apply. We may therefore indicate with sufficient accuracy for practical purposes, that the consciousness of external things is produced or generated by the actions of those things on the organs of sense. The brain has no power to create, only a susceptibility to receive notions. The brain is the forge of thought,* and the rhetorician is the smith who hammers out ideas in it.

So far as human conduct is influenced by material considerations, and these are capable of being combined into a system, confidence can be imparted to the speaker, and certainty infused into his efforts.

It might be illustrated at considerable length and by distinguished examples, that appeals to religious sentiments will always be avoided by a judicious orator when addressing mixed assemblies. They See Note C, page 170.

* Carlyle.