arried by great
masters; in particular, by Edmund Burke, who carried it, in fact, to
such excess, and to a point which threatened so much to disturb the
movement of public business, that, from that cause more perhaps than
from rude insensibility to the value of his speculations, he put his
audience sometimes in motion for dinner, and acquired (as is
well-known) the surname of the Dinner Bell.[18]

[Footnote 18: Yet this story has been exaggerated; and, I believe, in
strict truth, the whole case arose out of some fretful expressions of
ill-temper on the part of Burke, and that the name was a retort from a
man of wit, who had been personally stung by a sarcasm of the offended
orator.]

Now, in the Athenian audience, all this was impossible: neither in
political nor in forensic harangues was there any license by rule, or
any indulgence by usage, or any special privilege by personal favour,
to the least effort at improving an individual case of law or politics
into general views of jurisprudence, of statesmanship, of diplomacy;
no collateral discussions were tolerated--no illustrative details--no
historical parallelisms--still less any philosophical moralisations.
The slightest show of any tendency in these directions was summarily
nipped in the bud: the Athenian gentlemen began to [Greek: thoryzein]
in good earnest if a man showed symptoms of entering upon any
discussion whatever that was not intensely needful and pertinent in
the first place--or which, in the second place, was not of a nature to
be wound up in two sentences when a summons should arise either to
dinner, or to the theatre, or to the succession of some variety
anticipated from another orator.

Hence, therefore, finally arises one great peculiarity of Greek
eloquence; and a most unfortunate one for its chance of ever
influencing a remote posterity, or, in any substantial sense, of its
ever surviving in the real unaffected admiration of us moderns--that
it embodies no alien, no collateral information as to manners, usages,
modes of feeling--no extrinsic ornament, no side glimpses into Grecian
life, no casual historical details. The cause, and nothing but the
cause--the political question, and nothing but the question--- pealed
for ever in the ears of the terrified orator, always on sufferance,
always on his good behaviour, always afraid, for the sake of his party
or of his client, lest his auditors should become angry, or become
impatient, or become weary.