s well-known version of the
"Oration on the Crown."

Canning's attention, while at Eton, was strongly turned to
extemporaneous speaking. They had a debating society, in
which the Marquis of Wellesley and Charles Earl Grey had been
trained before him, in which they had all the forms of the
House of Commons--Speaker, Treasury benches, and an Opposition.
Canning also was disciplined by the habit of translation.

Curran practised declamation daily before a glass, reciting
passages from Shakespeare and the best English orators. He
frequented the debating societies which then abounded in London.
He failed at first, and was ridiculed as "Orator Mum." But
at last he surmounted every difficulty. It was said of him
by a contemporary: "He turned his shrill and stumbling brogue
into a flexible, sustained, and finely modulated voice; his
action become free and forcible; he acquired perfect readiness
in thinking on his legs; he put down every opponent by the
mingled force of his argument and wit; and was at last crowned
with the universal applause of the society and invited by
the president to an entertainment in their behalf." I am not
sure that I have seen, on any good authority, that he was
in the habit of writing translations from Latin or Greek,
but he studied them with great ardor and undoubtedly adopted,
among the methods of perfecting his English style, the custom
of students of his day of translation from these languages.

Jeffrey joined the Speculative Society, in Edinburgh, in
his youth. His biographer says that it did more for him
than any other event in the whole course of his education.

Chatham, the greatest of English orators, if we may judge
by the reports of his contemporaries, trained himself for
public speaking by constant translations from Latin and Greek.
The education of his son, the younger Pitt, is well known.
His father compelled him to read Thucydides into English at
sight, and to go over it again and again, until he had got
the best possible rendering of the Greek into English.

Macaulay belonged to the Cambridge Union, where, as in the
society of the same name at Oxford, the great topics of the
day were discussed by men, many of whom afterward became famous
statesmen and debaters in the Commons.

Young Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield, translated Sallust
and Horace with ease; learned great part of them by heart;
could converse fluently in Latin; wrote Latin prose correctly
and idiomaticall