rly the
Athenians, were to this object. It is also a study among the Italians and
the French; witness their respective academies and dictionaries for
improving and fixing their languages. To our shame be it spoken, it is
less attended to here than in any polite country; but that is no reason
why you should not attend to it; on the contrary, it will distinguish you
the more. Cicero says, very truly, that it is glorious to excel other men
in that very article, in which men excel brutes; SPEECH.

Constant experience has shown me, that great purity and elegance of
style, with a graceful elocution, cover a multitude of faults, in either
a speaker or a writer. For my own part, I confess (and I believe most
people are of my mind) that if a speaker should ungracefully mutter or
stammer out to me the sense of an angel, deformed by barbarism and
solecisms, or larded with vulgarisms, he should never speak to me a
second time, if I could help it. Gain the heart, or you gain nothing; the
eyes and the ears are the only roads to the heart. Merit and knowledge
will not gain hearts, though they will secure them when gained. Pray,
have that truth ever in your mind. Engage the eyes by your address, air,
and motions; soothe the ears by the elegance and harmony of your diction;
the heart will certainly follow; and the whole man, or woman, will as
certainly follow the heart. I must repeat it to you, over and over again,
that with all the knowledge which you may have at present, or hereafter
acquire, and with all merit that ever man had, if you have not a graceful
address, liberal and engaging manners, a prepossessing air, and a good
degree of eloquence in speaking and writing; you will be nobody; but will
have the daily mortification of seeing people, with not one-tenth part of
your merit or knowledge, get the start of you, and disgrace you, both in
company and in business.

You have read "Quintilian," the best book in the world to form an orator;
pray read 'Cicero de Oratore', the best book in the world to finish one.
Translate and retranslate from and to Latin, Greek, and English; make
yourself a pure and elegant English style: it requires nothing but
application. I do not find that God has made you a poet; and I am very
glad that he has not: therefore, for God's sake, make yourself an orator,
which you may do. Though I still call you boy, I consider you no longer
as such; and when I reflect upon the prodigious quantity of manure that
has