dious? There was
a depth of tone in it, a volume, a compass, a rich and tender harmony,
which invested all he said with majesty. We heard it last when he was
an old man past seventy; and all he said was a few words of
acknowledgment to a group of ladies in the largest hall in
Philadelphia. He spoke only in the ordinary tone of conversation; but
his voice filled the room as the organ fills a great cathedral, and
the ladies stood spellbound as the swelling cadences rolled about the
vast apartment. We have heard much of Whitefield's piercing voice and
Patrick Henry's silvery tones, but we cannot believe that either of
those natural orators possessed an organ superior to Clay's majestic
bass. No one who ever heard him speak will find it difficult to
believe what tradition reports, that he was the peerless star of the
Richmond Debating Society in 1795.

Oratory was then in the highest vogue. Young Virginians did not need
to look beyond the sea in order to learn that the orator was the man
most in request in the dawn of freedom. Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan,
and Pitt were inconceivably imposing names at that day; but was not
Patrick Henry the foremost man in Virginia, only because he could
speak and entertain an audience? And what made John Adams President
but his fiery utterances in favor of the Declaration of Independence?
There were other speakers then in Virginia who would have had to this
day a world-wide fame if they had spoken where the world could hear
them. The tendency now is to undervalue oratory, and we regret it. We
believe that, in a free country, every citizen should be able to stand
undaunted before his fellow-citizens, and give an account of the faith
that is in him. It is no argument against oratory to point to the
Disraelis of both countries, and say that a gift possessed by such men
cannot be a valuable one. It is the unmanly timidity and
shamefacedness of the rest of us that give to such men their
preposterous importance. It were a calamity to America if, in the
present rage for ball-playing and boat-rowing, which we heartily
rejoice in, the debating society should be forgotten. Let us rather
end the sway of oratory by all becoming orators. Most men who can talk
well seated in a chair can _learn_ to talk well standing on their
legs; and a man who can move or instruct five persons in a small room
can learn to move or instruct two thousand in a large one.

That Henry Clay cultivated his oratorical talent