earnest. And Plutarch tells us
that Cicero's friends feared he would kill himself by bursting a
blood-vessel, with such intense energy did he speak.

Both of these men had that instinctive taste of the great speaker
which Shakespeare has described better than any one else in
literature, when he makes Hamlet tell the players not to "mouth it, as
many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.
Nor do not saw the air too much--your hand thus: but use all gently:
for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of
passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it
smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig
pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the
ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of
nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I could have such a
fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you,
avoid it."

When I was a very young boy I saw a fist-fight which impressed me as
powerfully as any lesson I ever learned at school. An overtall and
powerful man, about forty years old, had become angry at a
medium-sized but very compact man of about the same age. As his
passion increased his violence grew, until finally he was shouting his
denunciations. The little man stood quietly alert.

Finally, with a great volume of sound, the big man rushed upon the
little one with arms swinging in the air, and I looked with interest
and curiosity to see the smaller man either run or be demolished. He
did neither. His fists were raised quickly but intensely before him,
and when the big man was almost upon him, it seemed to me that his
right hand did not shoot out farther than ten or twelve inches; but it
did shoot out, and the result was as if the big man had been shot,
sure enough.

He fell like a slaughtered ox, but rose and came on again, only again
to be knocked down. This continued for three or four times, for the
giant was "game"; but finally he was "thrashed to a standstill," as
the expression has it.

It was a great lesson in life and a great lesson in speaking, which is
only a phase of life. The victor came to the point. He did not
dissipate his energies. It is so in the manner of speaking. The
greatest contrast to the perfect method of Ingersoll which I ever
beheld in a man of equal eminence was in the delivery of a lecture by
Joseph Cook.

He came on the stage with