f genuine feeling, concluded amid the long and renewed cheers of all
parties.

The truth is, Eloquence is the child of Knowledge. When a mind is full,
like a wholesome river, it is also clear. Confusion and obscurity are
much oftener the results of ignorance than of inefficiency. Few are
the men who cannot express their meaning, when the occasion demands
the energy; as the lowest will defend their lives with acuteness,
and sometimes even with eloquence. They are masters of their subject.
Knowledge must be gained by ourselves. Mankind may supply us with facts;
but the results, even if they agree with previous ones, must be the work
of our own mind. To make others feel, we must feel ourselves; and to
feel ourselves, we must be natural. This we can never be, when we
are vomiting forth the dogmas of the schools. Knowledge is not a mere
collection of words; and it is a delusion to suppose that thought can
be obtained by the aid of any other intellect than our own. What is
repetition, by a curious mystery ceases to be truth, even if it were
truth when it was first heard; as the shadow in a mirror, though it move
and mimic all the actions of vitality, is not life. When a man is not
speaking, or writing, from his own mind, he is as insipid company as a
looking-glass.

Before a man can address a popular assembly with command, he must know
something of mankind; and he can know nothing of mankind without knowing
something of himself. Self-knowledge is the property of that man whose
passions have their play, but who ponders over their results. Such a man
sympathises by inspiration with his kind. He has a key to every heart.
He can divine, in the flash of a single thought, all that they require,
all that they wish. Such a man speaks to their very core. All feel that
a master-hand tears off the veil of cant, with which, from necessity,
they have enveloped their souls; for cant is nothing more than
the sophistry which results from attempting to account for what is
unintelligible, or to defend what is improper.

Perhaps, although we use the term, we never have had oratory in England.
There is an essential difference between oratory and debating. Oratory
seems an accomplishment confined to the ancients, unless the French
preachers may put in their claim, and some of the Irish lawyers. Mr.
Shiel's speech in Kent was a fine oration; and the boobies who taunted
him for having got it by rote, were not aware that in doing so he only
wisel