a satire, or a leading article of any sort, with the view of producing an immediate impression on a pending question. The very idea seems little better than a joke. How is it to be multiplied? How is it to be circulated? Who is to know any thing about it, within any assignable period, save the author himself, the slaves who may copy it, or the friends to whom he may read it, at the bath or the supper, in the garden or the school? How many persons of their own time, think you, could have been roused by the Panegyric of Isocrates, or been charmed with the history of Herodotus, had they not been recited at the Olympic Games? Where but for this would have been the inspiration and emulation which produced the immortal work of Thucydides?

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It is hardly too much to say, that the ancients could have composed none of their writings with a view to immediate, general influence as writings. The cumbrous and clumsy character of their writing materials, which must have rendered the briefest billet doux hardly more manageable for slipping slyly into a fair hand than a modern family Bible or one of yesterday's bachelor diplomas, obviously precluded that ready multiplication and circulation of copies, which such a purpose would have required. They spoke, as we have seen, to the present; but they must have written to the future, if, indeed, they were conscious of writing for anybody except (as the admirable Niebuhr would seem to suggest) for the friends to whom they dedicated their books.* And who can cease to wonder that so many noble works of philosophy and history and poetry should have been composed under such discouraging circumstances? Who can cease to wonder that such splendid diction, such magnificent imagery, such sublime sentiment and glowing narration, should have been reached, without the inspiration which modern authors seek and find in the prospect of immediate and widespread publication and perusal? How, like a caged eagle, must the soul of Cicero have chafed itself against the bars and barriers by which its utterances were restrained and hindered! How deeply must he have felt the force of such considerations as he has put into the mouth of Africanus, in that exquisite literary Torso, the dream of Scipio, to prove that there was "no glory worthy of a wish, to be obtained from the praise of men"!

* Niebuhr's letter to Count de Serre, 9 February, 1823.

"Of this little world," says he," the inhabited parts are neither numerous nor wide; even the spots where men are to be found are broken by intervening deserts, and the nations are so separated as that nothing can be transmitted from one to another. With the people of the South, by whom the opposite part of the world is possessed, you have no intercourse; and by how small a tract do you communicate with the countries of the North? The territory which you inhabit is no more than a scanty island, enclosed by a small body of water, to which you give the name of the Great Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. And even in this known and frequented continent, what hope can you entertain that your renown will pass the stream of Ganges or the cliffs of Caucasus? Or, by whom will your name be uttered in the extremities of the North or South, towards the rising or the setting sun?"

Oh, could the incomparable Roman, with that burning love of fame which not even his own divine philosophy could extinguish, with that restless craving for applause and notoriety which nothing but his splendid genius and sublime energy could have saved from contempt; could he, by means of some of the auguries and vaticinations to which he so often appealed, have caught a glimpse of the great discoveries and inventions, by which not only has the old world, as he knew it, been almost immeasurably enlarged, but a new one added to it, and the great centres and capitals of them both brought nearer together than even Rome and Athens were in his own day;* could he have foreseen, too, that marvellous mystery of Koster, and Faust, and Guttenberg, and Schoeffer, and have known that among the first uses to which it should be applied was the printing of his own treatises De Senectute and De Officiis, † and that from that day forward his

* Cicero, writing to his wife from Athens, says, "Acastus met me upon my landing, with letters from Rome, having been so expeditious as to perform his journey in one-and-twenty days."

† Complete printing dates from 1452. There was a German edition of the De Officiis in 1466; and the following is the title of the second book ever printed in England:

"The boke of Tulle of Old age emprynted by me simple persone William Caxton in to Englysshe as the playsir solace & reverence of men growynge in to old age the xij day of August the yere of our lord M.cccc.lxxxj.”

It was printed within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, where the first printing press in England was erected by Caxton in 1471.

orations and disputations and essays should be a standard work in every library beneath the sun, the companions and counsellors and consolers of the greatest minds of all ages, who shall say to what new heights of speculation, to what brighter heaven of invention, he might not have mounted! With how much bolder and more confident an emphasis would he not have uttered those prophetic words, "Ego, vero, omnia quæ gerebam, jam tum in gerendo, spargere me ac disseminare arbitrabar in orbis terræ memoriam sempiternam"! He would not, then, have been found looking so eagerly and so imploringly for his standing with posterity to the poetry of an Archias, or to the history of a Lucceius,*-names, which, as it happens, have owed their own preservation from oblivion to his orations and letters; but he would have felt and realized, as all the world. now realizes, that nothing but his own glowing and glorious words were needed to perpetuate the memory of his own noble and heroic life!

And now, Mr. President, if we turn to the writers and speakers of the present age, and to the means which they enjoy of moulding and marshalling the Public Opinion of our own day, the contrast is too obvious and too glaring to require, or even to bear, a word of comment.

It would perhaps be an extravagant remark, were I to say that the last thing which a speaker of modern times cares about, is the number or the character of his audience. It would certainly be a most ungracious remark for one standing in the immediate presence, and appealing to the immediate indulgence, of so distinguished and brilliant an assembly. Great results, I know, are to be produced, and great results are often, in fact, produced, in these days as in days of yore, by the influence of the spoken word upon the many or the few who hear it. And much greater results might be accomplished in this way than any which are witnessed

There are few things more remarkable in literary history than the letter of Cicero to Lucius Lucceius, in which, after acknowledging that he has a strong passion for being celebrated in the writings of Lucceius, and assuring him that he will find the subject not unworthy of his genius and eloquence, he adds, “I will venture, then, earnestly to entreat you not to confine yourself to the strict laws of history, but to give a greater latitude to your encomiums than, possibly, you may think my actions can claim."

in modern times, if the voice, the manner, the emphasis, the gesture, the whole art of oratory were more carefully studied and cultivated. There are many occasions, moreover, when present, practical, and most important consequences depend upon the success of an immediate oratorical effort. In the pulpit, that noblest of all rostrums, and at the bar, the first business of the speaker is to instruct, animate, convince, and carry away captive, if possible, those whom he directly addresses. Now and then, too, there is a popular meeting, or a legislative assembly, at which great measures are to be lost or won, great principles vindicated or overthrown, momentous issues finally made up and decided. Nor have there been wanting among us those able to meet such emergencies.

*

I deem it to be no disparagement to any one, among the living or the dead, to express the opinion, in this connection, that for immediate power over a deliberative or a popular audience, no man in our republic, since the republic has had a name or a being, has ever surpassed the great statesman of the West, over whom the grave is just closing. His words will not be referred to in future years, like those of some of his contemporaries, for profound expositions of permanent principles, or for luminous and logical commentaries upon the Constitution or the laws. But for the deep impressiveness and almost irresistible fascination of his immediate appeals, for prompt, powerful, persuasive, commanding, soul-stirring eloquence upon whatever theme was uppermost in his large, liberal, and patriotic heart, he has had no superior, and hardly an equal, in our country's history. Owing nothing to the schools, nothing to art or education, he has furnished a noble illustration of what may be accomplished by the fire of real genius, by the force of an indomitable will, by the energy of a constant and courageous soul, uttering itself through the medium of a voice, whose trumpet tones will be among the cherished memories of all who ever heard it, and which God never gave to be the organ of any thing less than a master-mind.

But how little, under all ordinary circumstances, is the influence of a modern speaker confined by the accidents of voice or

* Henry Clay.

of audience? I have heard, and you, Mr. President,* have far more frequently heard, a past or a present Premier of England, rising at midnight, in a little room hardly more ample or more elegant than many of our common country school-houses or town halls, and in the presence of two or three hundred rather drowsy gentlemen, and with not half a dozen hearers besides ourselves in the galleries, diplomatic box and all, pronounce words which not merely determined the policy of a colossal empire, but which, before another sun had set, were read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested by the whole reading population of the United Kingdom, and which, before the next week had ended, had settled the judgment, and fixed the public opinion of the whole Continent of Europe, on the subject to which they related.

Nor need we cross the ocean for illustrations of this sort. Where can be found a more striking and impressive example of the pervading and almost miraculous power of the spoken word at the present day, than that which has been witnessed in our own land during the last few months! A wandering exile from the banks of the Danube embarks for America. Fresh from a long and cruel imprisonment, he comes to thank our Government and our people for the sympathy and succor to which, in part, he had owed his liberation. A Shakspeare and a Johnson's Dictionary, carefully studied during a previous confinement, have sufficed to furnish him with a better stock of English than is possessed by the great majority of those to whom it is native, and he comes to pour forth in our own tongue the bitter sorrows and the stern resolves which had been so long pent up within his own aching breast. He comes to pray a great and powerful people to aid and avenge his down-trodden country. He lands upon our shores. He puts forth his plea. He speaks. And within one week from his first uttered word, the whole mind and heart and soul of this vast nation is impressed and agitated. Domestic interests are forgotten. Domestic strifes are hushed. Questions of commerce, and questions of compromise, and questions of candidacy, are postponed. New thoughts take possession of all our minds. New words are in all our mouths. A new

* Hon. Edward Everett, late American Minister at London, occupied the chair on this occasion, as President of the Association.