the orator himself. He regains his seat, hot and hard, sultry and stiff, with a burning cheek and an icy hand; repressing his breath lest it should give evidence of an existence of which he is ashamed, and clenching his fist, that the pressure may secretly convince him he has not as completely annihilated his stupid body as his false reputation."*

How admirable a compendium is this of the history of rhetorical blockheads, who think that "in the great arena their little bow-wow" will be taken for "the loftiest war-note the lion can pour," just as if they were in their own small councils, and clubs, and societies! D'Israeli is said to have failed in this manner on the Spottiswoode business in the House of Commons; but afterward, as the world knows, he achieved brilliant distinction. Tact alone can teach a man to feel his way and measure the men opposed to him; it dictates judgment and effort, or silence.

Reputation and fortune are often made by Tact alone. The late Sir William Follett is an example. One of his obituary notices said: We do not, by any means, mean to say that at any period of his life he could be compared, as a scientific lawyer, (to scholarship he had no pretensions at all,) to Tindal, Maule, Patteson, Campbell; or, in the equity courts, to Pepys, Pemberton, or Sugden. Thus his professional position was attributable neither to the superiority of his professional knowledge nor to any talent above his cotemporaries. In Parliament he was not to be compared with Plunkett, Brougham, Sir William Grant, or Perceval. He possessed not the strong, eloquent, and condensed power of diction, joined to *"Young Duke," by D'Israeli.

the closest and severest reasoning, of Plunkett; he had neither the stores of political, literary, and economical information, the versatility, the power of vigorous invective, nor of sarcasm, of Brougham; the calm, philosophic spirit of generalization of Grant; nor had he the dauntless daring and parliamentary pluck of Perceval. It must be admitted that he was neither an orator, nor a man of genius, nor a man of learning, apart from the specialité of his profession. He had neither passion, nor imagination of the fancy or of the heart. In what, then, lay his barristerial superiority? In his capability to play the artful dodge. His greatest skill consisted in presenting his case in the most harmonious and fair-purposed aspect. If there was anything false or fraudulent, a hitch, or a blot of any kind in his cause, he kept it dexterously out of view, or hurried it trippingly over; but if the blot was on the other side, he had the eye of the lynx and the scent of the hound to detect and run down his game. He had the greatest skill in reading an affidavit, and could play the "artful dodge" in a style looking so like gentlemanly candor, that you could not find fault.

I do not give this example as imitable, only as illustrative of Tact. Tact so employed may denote a very good lawyer, but a very indifferent man.

Those who had the pleasure of hearing Thom, the weaver poet, converse, know the Spartan felicity of expression which he commanded. His conversation was often a study in rhetoric. He told a story in the best vein of Scotch shrewdness. He was one day recounting an anecdote of Inverury, or old Aberdeen, to a coterie of listeners. The point of the story rested on a particular word spoken in fitting place.

When he came to it he hesitated as though at a loss for the term. "What is it you say under these circumstances," he asked: "not this, nor that," he remarked, as he went over three or four terms by way of trial as each was endeavoring to assist him: "Ah," he added, apparently benevolent toward the difficulty into which he had thrown them, "we say "for

want of a better word. This, of course, was the word wanted; the happiest phrase the language afforded. He gained several things by this finesse; he enlivened a regular narrative by an exciting disgression, which increased the force and point of the climax. He created a difficulty for his auditors, for who, when suddenly asked, would be able to find a term which seemed denied to his happy resource? or, finding it, would have the courage to present it to such a fastidious epithetist? and he exalted himself by suggesting what appeared out of their power, and excited an indefinite wonder at his own skill in bringing a story to so felicitous an end, by the employment of a makeshift phrase. What would he have done if he could have found the right one? was naturally thought. This was tact. It was a case analogous to that given by Dickens in one of his early papers, where the President, at an apparent loss for a word, asks, "What is that you give a man who is deprived of a salary which he has received all his life for doing nothing, or, perhaps worse, for obstructing public improvement?" "Compensation!" suggests the vice. The case was the same, except that Thom was his own vice-president.

An instructive lesson in Tact is given in the preface of Thomas Cooper to his "Purgatory of Suicides." Those who know the variety of

historic incidents which crowded for record in his career, wonder at the discretion with which he confines himself to the few which stand at the portal of his majestic poem, to inform you of its origin and design.

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PART II.

ACQUIRED POWERS.

CHAPTER VII.

ORIGINALITY.

ORIGINALITY is reality. In reference to thought, it is the conception of the truth of nature in opposition to the truth of custom.

The material of which Originality is made has been discussed in previous chapters.* Its manifestation in literature has been well illustrated by the author of "Time's Magic Lantern," in a dialogue between Bacon and Shakspeare; an extract from which is to this effect:

"Bacon. He that can make the multitude laugh and weep as you do, Mr. Shakspeare, need not fear scholars. A head naturally fertile and forgetive is worth many libraries, inasmuch as a tree is more valuable than a basket of fruit, or a good hawk better than a bag full of game, or the little purse which a fairy gave to Fortunatus, more inexhaustible than all the coffers in the treasury. More scholarship might have sharpened your judgment, but the par

*Logic of Facts, chaps. iv, v.

ago.

A series of papers that appeared in "Blackwood some years