l
all get to speak yet, if it please Heaven. "Some of you shall be
book-writers, eloquent review-writers, and astonish mankind, my young
friends: others in white neckcloths shall do sermons by Blair and
Lindley Murray, nay by Jeremy Taylor and judicious Hooker, and be
priests to guide men heavenward by skilfully brandished handkerchief and
the torch of rhetoric. For others there is Parliament and the election
beer-barrel, and a course that leads men very high indeed; these shall
shake the senate-house, the Morning Newspapers, shake the very spheres,
and by dexterous wagging of the tongue disenthrall mankind, and lead our
afflicted country and us on the way we are to go. The way if not where
noble deeds are done, yet where noble words are spoken,--leading us if
not to the real Home of the Gods, at least to something which shall more
or less deceptively resemble it!"

So fares it with the son of Adam, in these bewildered epochs; so, from
the first opening of his eyes in this world, to his last closing of
them, and departure hence. Speak, speak, oh speak;--if thou have
any faculty, speak it, or thou diest and it is no faculty! So in
universities, and all manner of dames' and other schools, of the very
highest class as of the very lowest; and Society at large, when we
enter there, confirms with all its brilliant review-articles, successful
publications, intellectual tea-circles, literary gazettes, parliamentary
eloquences, the grand lesson we had. Other lesson in fact we have none,
in these times. If there be a human talent, let it get into the tongue,
and make melody with that organ. The talent that can say nothing for
itself, what is it? Nothing; or a thing that can do mere drudgeries, and
at best make money by railways.

All this is deep-rooted in our habits, in our social, educational and
other arrangements; and all this, when we look at it impartially, is
astonishing. Directly in the teeth of all this it may be asserted that
speaking is by no means the chief faculty a human being can attain to;
that his excellence therein is by no means the best test of his general
human excellence, or availability in this world; nay that, unless we
look well, it is liable to become the very worst test ever devised for
said availability. The matter extends very far, down to the very roots
of the world, whither the British reader cannot conveniently follow me
just now; but I will venture to assert the three following things, and
invit