generation of the world."

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1. What, in your own words, is personality?

2. How does personality in a speaker affect you as a listener?

3. In what ways does personality show itself in a speaker?

4. Deliver a short speech on "The Power of Will in the Public Speaker."

5. Deliver a short address based on any sentence you choose from this
chapter.

CHAPTER XXX

AFTER-DINNER AND OTHER OCCASIONAL SPEAKING

The perception of the ludicrous is a pledge of sanity.

--RALPH WALDO EMERSON, _Essays_.

And let him be sure to leave other men their turns to speak.

--FRANCIS BACON, Essay on _Civil and Moral Discourse_.

Perhaps the most brilliant, and certainly the most entertaining, of all
speeches are those delivered on after-dinner and other special
occasions. The air of well-fed content in the former, and of expectancy
well primed in the latter, furnishes an audience which, though not
readily won, is prepared for the best, while the speaker himself is
pretty sure to have been chosen for his gifts of oratory.

The first essential of good occasional speaking is to study the
occasion. Precisely what is the object of the meeting? How important is
the occasion to the audience? How large will the audience be? What sort
of people are they? How large is the auditorium? Who selects the
speakers' themes? Who else is to speak? What are they to speak about?
Precisely how long am I to speak? Who speaks before I do and who
follows?

If you want to hit the nail on the head ask such questions as these.[35]
No occasional address can succeed unless it fits the occasion to a T.
Many prominent men have lost prestige because they were too careless or
too busy or too self-confident to respect the occasion and the audience
by learning the exact conditions under which they were to speak. Leaving
_too_ much to the moment is taking a long chance and generally means a
less effective speech, if not a failure.

Suitability is the big thing in an occasional speech. When Mark Twain
addressed the Army of the Tennessee in reunion at Chicago, in 1877, he
responded to the toast, "The Babies." Two things in that after-dinner
speech are remarkable: the bright introduction, by which he subtly
_claimed_ the interest of all, and the humorous use of military terms
throughout:

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: "The Babies." Now, that's something
like. We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladi