to be capable of appreciating the niceties of method
and style, and of being affected by the same sort of sentiment,
illustration, and cool remark, which affects those who have been
accustomed to be moved and guided by the dumb and lifeless pages of a
book. He therefore talks to them calmly, is more anxious for correctness
than impression, fears to make more noise or to have more motion than
the very letters on his manuscript; addressing himself, as he thinks, to
the intellectual part of man; forgetting that the intellectual man is
not very easy of access, that it is barred up, and must be approached
through the senses and affections and imagination.

There was a class of rhetoricians and orators at Rome in the time of
Cicero, who were famous for having made the same mistake. They would do
every thing by a fixed and almost mechanical rule, by calculation and
measurement. Their sentences were measured, their gestures were
measured, their tones were measured; and they framed canons of judgment
and taste, by which it was pronounced an affront on the intellectual
nature of man to assail him with epithets, and exclamations, and varied
tones, and emphatic gesture. They censured the free and flowing manner
of Cicero as "tumid and exuberant," nec satis pressus, supra modum
exultans et superfluens. They cultivated a more guarded and concise
style, which might indeed please the critic or the scholar, but was
wholly unfitted to instruct or move a promiscuous audience; as was said
of one of them, oratio--doctis et attente audientibus erat illustris; a
multitudine autem et a foro, cui nata eloquentia est, devorabatur. The
taste of the multitude prevailed, and Cicero was the admiration of the
people, while those who pruned themselves by a more rigid and
philosophical law, _coldly correct and critically dull_, "were
frequently deserted by the audience in the midst of their harangues."[2]

[2] Middleton's Life of Cicero, III. 324.

We may learn something from this. There is one mode of address for books
and for classical readers, and another for the mass of men, who judge by
the eye and ear, by the fancy and feelings, and know little of rules of
art or of an educated taste. Hence it is that many of those preachers
who have become the classics of a country, have been unattractive to the
multitude, who have deserted their polished and careful composition, for
the more unrestrained and rousing declamation of another class. The
sing