itten speech to the bar or into the
senate. The very man who dares not ascend the pulpit without a sermon
diligently arranged, and filled out to the smallest word, if he had gone
into the profession of the law, would, at the same age and with no
greater advantages, address the bench and the jury in language
altogether unpremeditated. Instances are not wanting in which the
minister, who imagined it impossible to put ten sentences together in
the pulpit, has found himself able, on changing his profession, to speak
fluently for an hour.

I have no doubt that to speak extempore is easier at the bar and in the
legislature, than in the pulpit. Our associations with this place are of
so sacred a character, that our faculties do not readily play there with
their accustomed freedom. There is an awe upon our feelings which
constrains us. A sense, too, of the importance and responsibility of the
station, and of the momentous consequences depending on the influence he
may there exert, has a tendency to oppress and embarrass the
conscientious man, who feels it as he ought. There is also, in the other
cases, an immediate end to be attained, which produces a powerful
immediate excitement; an excitement, increased by the presence of those
who are speaking on the opposite side of the question, and in assailing
or answering whom, the embarrassment of the place is lost in the
interest of the argument. Whereas in the pulpit, there is none to
assault, and none to refute; the preacher has the field entirely to
himself, and this of itself is sufficiently dismaying. The ardor and
self-oblivion which present debate occasions, do not exist; and the
solemn stillness and fixed gaze of a waiting multitude, serve rather to
appal and abash the solitary speaker, than to bring the subject forcibly
to his mind. Thus every external circumstance is unpropitious, and it is
not strange that relief has been sought in the use of manuscripts.

But still, these difficulties, and others which I shall have occasion to
mention in another place, are by no means such as to raise that
insuperable obstacle which many suppose. They may all be overcome by
resolution and perseverance. As regards merely the use of unpremeditated
language, it is far from being a difficult attainment. A writer, whose
opportunities of observation give weight to his opinion, says, in
speaking of the style of the younger Pitt--"This profuse and
interminable flow of words is not in itself eith