and enervate your virtues! No, Chaumette, no! Death
is not "an eternal sleep!" Citizens! efface from the tomb that
motto, graven by sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all
nature a funereal crape, takes from oppressed innocence its
support, and affronts the beneficent dispensation of death!
Inscribe rather thereon these words: "Death is the commencement
of immortality!" I leave to the oppressors of the People a
terrible testament, which I proclaim with the independence
befitting one whose career is so nearly ended; it is the awful
truth--"Thou shalt die!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: _School and College Speaker_, Mitchell.]

[Footnote 7: _School and College Speaker_, Mitchell.]

CHAPTER XV

THE TRUTH ABOUT GESTURE

When Whitefield acted an old blind man advancing by slow steps
toward the edge of the precipice, Lord Chesterfield started up
and cried: "Good God, he is gone!"

--NATHAN SHEPPARD, _Before an Audience_.

Gesture is really a simple matter that requires observation and common
sense rather than a book of rules. Gesture is an outward expression of
an inward condition. It is merely an effect--the effect of a mental or
an emotional impulse struggling for expression through physical avenues.

You must not, however, begin at the wrong end: if you are troubled by
your gestures, or a lack of gestures, attend to the cause, not the
effect. It will not in the least help matters to tack on to your
delivery a few mechanical movements. If the tree in your front yard is
not growing to suit you, fertilize and water the soil and let the tree
have sunshine. Obviously it will not help your tree to nail on a few
branches. If your cistern is dry, wait until it rains; or bore a well.
Why plunge a pump into a dry hole?

The speaker whose thoughts and emotions are welling within him like a
mountain spring will not have much trouble to make gestures; it will be
merely a question of properly directing them. If his enthusiasm for his
subject is not such as to give him a natural impulse for dramatic
action, it will avail nothing to furnish him with a long list of rules.
He may tack on some movements, but they will look like the wilted
branches nailed to a tree to simulate life. Gestures must be born, not
built. A wooden horse may amuse the children, but it takes a live one to
go somewhere.

It is not only impossible to lay down definite rules on this subject,
bu