hich precluded
the possibility of previous preparation. Such were his first invective
against Catiline, and the speech which stilled the disturbances at the
theatre. In all these cases, there can be no question of the advantages
which the orators enjoyed in their ability to make use of the excitement
of the occasion, unchilled by the formality of studied preparation.
Although possibly guilty of many rhetorical and logical faults, yet
these would be unobserved in the fervent and impassioned torrent, which
bore away the minds of the delighted auditors.

It is doubtless very true, that a man of study and reflection,
accustomed deliberately to weigh every expression and analyze every
sentence, and to be influenced by nothing which does not bear the test
of the severest examination, may be most impressed by the quiet,
unpretending reading of a well digested essay or dissertation. To some
men the concisest statement of a subject, with nothing to adorn the
naked skeleton of thought, is most forcible. They are even impatient of
any attempt to assist its effect by fine writing, by emphasis, tone, or
gesture. They are like the mathematician, who read the Paradise Lost
without pleasure, because he could not see that it proved any thing. But
we are not to judge from the taste of such men, of what is suitable to
affect the majority. The multitude are not mere thinkers or great
readers. From their necessary habits they are incapable of following a
long discussion except it be made inviting by the circumstances
attending it, or the manner of conducting it. Their attention must be
excited and maintained by some external application. To them,

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant
More learned than their ears.

It is a great fault with intellectual men, that they do not make
sufficient allowance for the different modes of education and habits of
mind in men of other pursuits. It is one of the infelicities of a
university education, that a man is there trained in a fictitious scene,
where there are interests, associations, feelings, exceedingly diverse
from what prevail in the society of the world; and where he becomes so
far separated from the habits and sympathies of other men, as to need to
acquire a new knowledge of them, before he knows how to address them.
When a young man leaves the seclusion of a student's life to preach to
his fellow-men, he is likely to speak to them as if they were scholars.
He imagines them