into his head, and then write it again. But he soon found
that in that way if he used again the very words of his author
he got no advantage, and if he used other language of his
own, the author had already occupied the ground with the best
expression, and he was left with the second best. So he gave
up the practice and adopted instead that of translating from
the Greek.

But to go back to what makes an orator. As I have said,
his object is to excite the emotions which, being excited, will
be most likely to impel his audience to think or act as he
desires. He must never disgust them, he must never excite
their contempt. He can use to great advantage the most varied
learning, the profoundest philosophy, the most compelling
logic. He must master the subject with which he has to deal,
and he must have knowledge adequate to illustrate and adorn
it. When every other faculty of the orator is acquired, it
sometimes almost seems as if the voice were nine-tenths, and
everything else but one-tenth, of the consummate orator. It
is impossible to overrate the importance to his purpose of
that matchless instrument, the human voice.

The most fastidious critic is by no means the best judge,
seldom even a fairly good judge, of the public speaker. He
is likely to be a stranger to the emotion which the orator
inspires and excites. He is likely to fall into mistakes like
that which Goldwin Smith makes about Patrick Henry. Mr.
Smith ridicules Henry's speech and action and voice. The
emotion which the great Virginian stirred in the breasts of
his backwoodsmen seems very absurd to this cultured Englishman.
The bowing and changes of countenance and gesticulating of
the orator seem to him like the cheapest acting. Yet to us
who understand it, it does not seem that Patrick Henry in
the old church at Richmond need yield the palm to Chatham
in St. Stephen's Chapel, either for the grandeur of his theme
or of his stage, or the sublimity of his eloquence.

Matthew Arnold had the best pair of intellectual eyes of
our time. But he sometimes made a like mistake as a critic
of poetry. He speaks slightingly of Emerson's Fourth of
July Ode--

Oh tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.

What did the Englishman know of the Fourth of July emotion
which stirred all Americans in the days when the country
had just escaped destruction, and was entering upon