weight and intrinsic worth. It is also inconsistent with the
voice of storm and the hurricane manner.

And men in deadly earnest do not talk loudly. It has been my fortune
to see men angry and aroused to the point of killing; they were
intense, but quiet. I have also seen that bravado and drunken
boisterousness which thought it imitated, and meant to imitate,
genuine rage; it was always strident and violent, never dangerous,
never sincere. The same thing is true in speech.

There have only been two or three roarers in effective
oratory--Mirabeau, by all accounts (though anything can be forgiven a
man who can make such speeches as the great Frenchman made), and
Demosthenes, if AEschines is to be believed, which I think he is not to
be in this particular. He was only excusing his own defeat, and he had
to attribute it to delivery. (I think any unprejudiced mind will agree
that AEschines made the better argument.) All the other great speakers
have, even in their most intense passages, and in situations where
life and death were involved, been comparatively quiet so far as mere
volume of sound is concerned.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the first great speaker I ever
heard. It was Robert G. Ingersoll, delivering a lecture in Des Moines,
Iowa, in 1884. He had an audience which would have inspired eloquence
in almost any breast. He came on the stage alone, and was very
carefully, even elegantly attired, to the smallest item of his
grooming.

His address was in manuscript, and imperfectly committed to memory. He
laid it down on a little table at the back of the stage (returning to
it occasionally to refresh his memory), and then, in a very natural
and matter-of-fact way, walked to the footlights, and, looking the
audience frankly in the eyes, began without an instant's hesitation,
and in a voice precisely as if he were talking to a friend.

But he was as dramatic at his climaxes as Edwin Booth ever was in
Hamlet. His face paled, or seemed to pale; his hands clinched with a
desperate energy, and the whole attitude of the man was that of one in
awful wrath. Yet his voice was not raised above the common current of
the evening's address--if anything, it was lower. While the mature
mind cannot endure Ingersoll's rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that
his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coarse) was
nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips. Still, in his intense
passages Ingersoll was almost fiercely