Page images
PDF
EPUB

of the circumstances affecting the progress of your character, in your moral journey. You could not wish to have drawn to yourself the agency of a vaster diversity of causes; you could not wish, on the supposition that you had gained advantage from all these, to wear the spoils of a greater number of regions. The formation of the character from so many materials reminds one of that mighty appropriating attraction, which, on the hypothesis that the resurrection shall re-assemble the same particles which composed the body before, will draw them from dust, and trees, and animals, and ocean, and winds.

CHAP. III.

DIDACTIC PIECES.

SECTION I.

On Study.

STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. The chief use for delight, is in privateness. and retirement; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots, and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience; for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pru

ning by duty, and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them for they teach not what is their own use, but what is wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are

to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly ; and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that should be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not.

SECTION II.

Hamlet's directions to the Players.

SPEAK the speech, I pray you as I pronounced it to you, tripplingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it as many of our players do, I had as leif the towncrier had spoke my lines. And do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and be get a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh!

it offends me to the soul, to hear a robusteous periwigpated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags; to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows, and noise; I would have such a fellow whipt for overdoing Termagant, it out-herods Herod; pray you avoid it.

Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of nature; whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature. Scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the Time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of one of which, must in your allowance overweigh a whole theatre of others. Oh there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise and that highly too, (not to speak it profanely,) that neither having the action of christian, nor the gait of christian, pagan nor man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of Nature's journeyman had made men, and not made them well; they imitated humanity so abominably.

[ocr errors]

And let those that play your clowns, speak no more than is set down for them: for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too: though in the meantime, some necessary part of the play be then to be considered. That's villanious, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

SECTION. III.

Eloquence and Oratory.

ELOQUENCE may be defined to be the art of expressing our thoughts and feelings with precision, force and elegance; and of heightening the impressions of reason, by the colourings of imagination.

It is applicable, therefore, to the whole faculty of verbal discourse, whether oral or written. It addresses itself by the pen to the eye, as well as by the living organs to the ear. Thus we speak (with admitted accuracy) of an eloquent book, as freely as of an eloquent oration; of the eloquent Buffon (alluding to his celebrated work on natural history ;) and of the eloquent writings, as of the eloquent speeches of Edmund Burke. The apostrophe to the queen of France is as genuine a piece of eloquence, as if it had been spoken in the House of Commons.

Oratory, on the contrary, is precise and limited in its application: and, in this respect, indeed, even popular usage is pretty generally correct. It may be defined to be oral eloquence; or the art of communicating, by the immediate action of the vocal and expressive organs, to popular or select assemblies, the dictates of our reason, or our will, and the workings of our passions, our feelings and our imaginations.

Oratory, therefore, includes the idea of eloquence : for no man can be an orator who has not an affluence of thought and language. But eloquence does not necessarily include the idea of oratory; since a man may be rich in all the stores of language and thought, without possessing the advantages of a graceful and impressive delivery.

L

SECTION IV.

Of Elocution.

Elocution is the art, or the act of so delivering our own thoughts and sentiments, or the thoughts and sentiments of others, as not only to convey to those around us (with precision, force, and harmony,) the full purport and meaning of the words and sentences in which these thoughts are clothed; but also to excite and impress upon their minds, the feelings, the imaginations and the passions by which those thoughts are dictated, or with which they should naturally be accompanied.

Elocution, therefore, in its more ample and liberal signification, is not confined to the mere exercise of the organs of speech. It embraces the whole theory and practice of the exterior demonstration of the inward workings of the mind.

To concentrate what has been said by an allegorical recapitulation-Eloquence may be considered as the soul, or animating principle of discourse; and is dependent on intellectual energy and intellectual attainments. Elocution is the embodying form, or representative power; dependent on exterior accomplishrents, and on the cultivation of the organs. Oratory is the complicated and vital existence resulting from the perfect harmony and combination of Eloquence and Elocution.

The vital existence, however, in its full perfection, is one of the choicest rarities of nature. The high and splendid accomplishments of oratory (even in the most favoured age, and the most favoured countries) have been attained by few: and many are the ages, and many are the countries, in which those accomplishments have never once appeared. Generations have succeeded to generations, and centuries have rol Jed after centuries, during which the intellectual desert has not exhibited even one solitary specimen of the

« PreviousContinue »