'I agree with you,' answered Lord Granville, 'that his set speeches were
cold and affected. He was natural only when he was quite careless, or
when he was much excited, and then he was admirable.'

'Did not Thiers improvise?' I asked.

'Never,' answered Tocqueville. 'He prepared himself most carefully. So
did Guizot. We see from the "Revue retrospective" that he even prepared
his replies. His long experience enabled him to foresee what he should
have to answer. Pasquier used to bring his speech ready written. It lay
on the desk before him, but he never looked at it.'

'That seems to me,' I said, 'very difficult. It is like swimming with
corks. One would be always tempted to look down on the paper.'

'It is almost equally difficult,' said Tocqueville, 'to make a speech of
which the words are prepared. There is a struggle between the invention
and the memory. You trust thoroughly to neither, and therefore are not
served thoroughly by either.'

'Yet that,' said Marcet, 'is what our Swiss pastors are required to do.
They are forbidden to read, and forbidden to extemporise, and by practice
they speak from memory--some well, all tolerably.'

'Brougham,' said Lord Granville, 'used to introduce his most elaborately
prepared passages by a slight hesitation. When he seemed to pause in
search of thoughts, or of words, we knew that he had a sentence ready cut
and dried.'

'Who,' I asked Sumner, 'are your best speakers in America?'

'The best,' he said, 'is Seward; after him perhaps comes Winthrop.'

'I should have thought it difficult,' I said, 'to speak well in the
Senate, to only fifty or at most sixty members.'

'You do not speak,' answered Sumner, 'to the Senators. You do not think
of them. You know that their minds are made up. Except as to mere
executive questions, such as the approval of a public functionary, or the
acceptance or modification of a treaty, every senator comes in pledged to
a given, or to an assumed, set of opinions and measures. You speak to the
public. You speak in order that 500,000 copies of what you say, as was
the case with my last speech, may be scattered over the whole Union.'

'That,' I said, 'must much affect the character of your oratory. A speech
meant to be read must be a different thing from one meant to be heard.
Your speeches must in fact be pamphlets, and that I suppose accounts for
their length.'

'That is true,' replied Sumner. 'But when you hear that we speak for a
day, or for