er a rare or remarkable
endowment. It is wholly a thing of habit; and is exercised by every
village lawyer with various degrees of power and grace."[1] If there be
circumstances which render the habit more difficult to be acquired by
the preacher, they are still such as may be surmounted; and it may be
made plain, I think, that the advantages which he may thus ensure to
himself are so many and so great, as to offer the strongest inducement
to make the attempt.

[1] Europe; &c. by a Citizen of the United States.

That these advantages are real and substantial, may be safely inferred
from the habit of public orators in other professions, and from the
effects they are known to produce. There is more nature, more warmth in
the declamation, more earnestness in the address, greater animation in
the manner, more of the lighting up of the soul in the countenance and
whole mien, more freedom and meaning in the gesture; the eye speaks, and
the fingers speak, and when the orator is so excited as to forget every
thing but the matter on which his mind and feelings are acting, the
whole body is affected, and helps to propagate his emotions to the
hearer. Amidst all the exaggerated colouring of Patrick Henry's
biographer, there is doubtless enough that is true, to prove a power in
the spontaneous energy of an excited speaker, superior in its effects to
any thing that can be produced by writing. Something of the same sort
has been witnessed by every one who is in the habit of attending in the
courts of justice, or the chambers of legislation. And this, not only in
the instances of the most highly eloquent; but inferior men are found
thus to excite attention and produce effects, which they never could
have done by their pens. In deliberative assemblies, in senates and
parliaments, the larger portion of the speaking is necessarily
unpremeditated; perhaps the most eloquent is always so; for it is
elicited by the growing heat of debate; it is the spontaneous combustion
of the mind in the conflict of opinion. Chatham's speeches were not
written, nor Sheridan's, nor that of Ames on the British treaty. They
were, so far as regards their language and ornaments, the effusions of
the moment, and derived from their freshness a power, which no study
could impart. Among the orations of Cicero, which are said to have made
the greatest impression, and to have best accomplished the orator's
design, are those delivered on unexpected emergencies, w