judge from a remarkable bust of him which exists, and which would have made him do many other things, had he chosen, besides curing stammering. And the man who tries to trade on his conclusions, without possessing his faculty, or having worked through his experiments, will be like him who should try to operate in the hospital theatre after cramming up a book on anatomy; or throw himself into a pond after hearing a lecture on swimming. He will apply his rules in the wrong order, and to the wrong he will be puzzled by a set of unexpected and unclassified symptoms, and be infallibly wrong in his diagnosis.

cases;

For instance. Put two men before a second-hand pretender of this kind, one of whom (to give a common instance) stammers from a full lung, the other from an empty one. Each requires to be started on a different method, and he will most probably (unconscious of the difference between them) try the same method for both; while if the empty-lunged man have a hard round chest, and the full-lunged man a soft and flat one, he will never find out which is which. The matter is a study by itself; and had Dr. James Hunt in his book told all he knew of the methods of cure, he would not have injured himself one whit-except in as far as he might have raised up a set of quacks, whether medical other, trading on his name, and bringing him into disrepute by their failures.

or

Therefore perhaps he was wise to hold his tongue. Certainly, had his father held his tongue it would have been better; for on his death a host of pretenders sprang up, all, of course, professing his system; and all, as far as I have ever heard (and Heaven knows I have had cause to hear enough), failing, and ducking under again into their native mud.

One man, a Wesleyan deacon, or some such functionary, used old Mr. Hunt's testimonials, boldly announced himself his successor, and received without a word of explanation, inquirers and pupils who came to seek him.

This was a pretty sharp state of

business,' as our transatlantic brethren say; and one is puzzled to guess whether (and if so, in what terms) he related his experiences and exercises' on the subject to his class-leaders or other father-confessors. But probably he had arrived at that state of sinless perfection boasted of by some of his sect, in which such legal and carnal distinctions as honesty and dishonesty vanish before the spiritual illumination of the utterly renewed man. Whether he practises now or not, I neither know nor care. I suppose he has gone the way of other pretenders.

And now one word as to Dr. Hunt, son of the worthy old Dorsetshire gentleman, and author of the book mentioned at the head of this article. I could say very much in his praise which he would not care to have said, or the readers of Fraser perhaps to hear. But as to his power of curing the average of stammerers, I can and do say thisthat I never have yet seen him fail where as much attention was given as a schoolboy gives to his lessons. Of course the very condition of the cure the conscious use of the organs of speech-makes it depend on the power of self-observation, on the attention, on the determination, on the general intellectual power, in fact, of the patient; and a stupid or volatile lad will give weary work. Yet I never have seen even such go away unrelieved. For nature, plastic and kind, slips willingly into the new and yet original groove, and becomes what she was meant all along to be; and though to be conscious of the cause of every articulate sound which is made, even in a short sentence, is a physi cal impossibility, yet a general watchfulness and attention to certain broad rules enable her, as she always is inclined to do, to do right on the whole. For after all, right is pleasanter than wrong, and health more natural than disease and the proper use of any organ, when once the habit is established, being in harmony with that of all other organs, and with the whole universe itself, slips on noiselessly and easily, it knows not how, and the old bad habit of years dies out in a month, like the tricks which a

1859.]

child learns one day to forget the

next.

But, over and above what Mr. Hunt or any other man can teach; stammerers, and those who have been stammerers need above all men to keep up that mentem sanam in corpore sano, which is now-a-days called, somewhat offensively, muscular Christianity-a term worthy of a puling and enervated generation of thinkers, who prove their own unhealthiness by their contemptuous surprise at any praise of that health which ought to be the normal condition of the whole human race.

But whosoever can afford an enervated body and an abject character, the stammerer cannot. With him it is a question of life and death. He must make a man of himself, or be liable to his tormentor to the last.

Let him therefore eschew all base perturbations of mind; all cowardice, servility, meanness, vanity, and hankering after admiration; for these all will make many a man, by a just judgment, stammer on the spot. Let him, for the same reason, eschew all anger, peevishness, haste, even pardonable eagerness. In a word, let him eschew the root of all evil, selfishness and self-seeking; for he will surely find that whensoever he begins thinking about himself, then is the dumb devil of stammering close at his elbow. Let him eschew, too, all superstition, whether of that abject kind which fancies that it can please God by a starved body and a hang-dog visage, which pretends to be afraid to look mankind in the face, or of that more openly self-conceited kind which upsets the balance of the reason by hysterical raptures and self-glorifying assumptions. Let him eschew, lastly, all which can weaken either nerves or digestion; all sexual excesses, all intemperance in drink or in food, whether gross or effeminate, remembering that it is as easy to be unwholesomely gluttonous over hot slops and cold ices as over beef and beer.

Let him avoid those same hot slops (to go on with the corpus sanum), and all else which will injure his wind and his digestion, and let him betake himself to all manly exer

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cises which will put him into wind, and keep him in it. Let him, if he can, ride, and ride hard, remembering that (so does horse exercise expand the lungs and oxygenate the blood) there has been at least one frightful stammerer ere now who spoke perfectly plainly as long as he was in the saddle. Let him play rackets and fives, row, and box; for all these amusements strengthen those muscles of the chest and abdomen which are certain to be in his case weak. Above all, let him box; for so will the noble art of self-defence' become to him over and above a healing art. If he doubt this assertion, let him (or indeed any narrowchested porer over desks) hit out right and left for five minutes at a point on the wall as high as his own face (hitting, of course, not from the elbow, like a woman, but from the loin, like a man, and keeping his breath during the exercise as long as he can), and he will soon become aware of his weak point by

a

severe pain in the epigastric region, in the same spot which pains him after a conyulsion of stammering. Then let him try boxing regularly, daily; and he will find that it teaches him to look a man not merely in the face, but in the very eye's core; to keep his chest expanded, his lungs full of air; to be calm and steady under excitement; and lastly, to use all those muscles of the torso on which deep and healthy respiration depends. And let him, now in these very days, join a rifle-club, and learn in it to carry himself with the erect and noble port which is all but peculiar to the soldier, but ought to be the common habit of every man; let him learn to march; and more, to trot under arms without losing breath; and by such means make himself an active, healthy, and valiant man.

Meanwhile, let him learn again the art of speaking; and having learnt, think before he speaks, and say his say calmly, with selfrespect, as a man who does not talk at random, and has a right to a courteous answer. Let him fix in his mind that there is nothing on earth to be ashamed of, save doing wrong, and no being to be feared save Almighty God; and so go on

making the best of the body and the soul which Heaven has given him, and I will warrant that in a few months his old misery of stammering will lie behind him, as an ugly and all but impossible dream when one awakes in the morning.

One word more and I have done. I said that this book of Dr. Hunt's should be in the hands of all clergymen. I say it again. From it they will get some hints at least as to the strange mechanism and the right employment of those organs of voice which they so sadly abuse every Sunday. Abuse-yes. No milder word can be employed. There is no class of men who, on an average, neglect more those organs which God has given them, so they hold, for the most momentous of purposes. It raises strange thoughts in more men than Habitans in Sicco, the listening to an average sermon ; aye, to nine sermons out of ten. That a large class of men should believe that they have the power of saving human beings from endless torture by the use of their tongues, and then not only employ for that purpose the dull talk which is to be heard in average pulpits, but also deliver the same with a voice and manner which sets a whole congregation asleep, and which would destroy the custom of a barrister, an auctioneer, and even of a penny pieman, or a cheap Jack at a country fair.-This does seem to some one of the most astounding facts of an enlightened age; one which might move tears, had some people not secret reasons for merely smiling at the poor man's vast assumptions, and his futile method of carrying them out.

It is a question, no doubt, whether the average preacher ought to be taught how to preach. For if his matter be not worth hearing, still more if it be in some respects false and pernicious, it is undoubtedly a boon to society that he delivers himself so badly that he touches no hearts, and so does no harm. Many a preacher has one heard utter words at which one has looked anxiously round the church, in hopes of finding as many as possible asleep-andnot, thank Heaven, in vain. But supposing that a

man has (as very many have) something to say worth saying, why will he take no trouble whatsoever to learn the right method of saying it? Look at an average Low-Church clergyman in an average country pulpit. Why, when he is uttering words which if true-and a great deal of them is but too true-should make angels weep and devils tremble, are his eyes fixed on his book, his chin bent down on his breast, his jaw fixed as by paralysis, his lips hanging motionless and apart, and his voice droning forth in a monotone as of a bee in a bottle?

Not

so did Henry Martyn and Simeon, not so did Wesley or Whitfield, strike barbed arrows to the hearts of living men. But they believed what they said, and perhaps the poor man does not. Not that he is a conscious hypocrite: Heaven forbid! But he does not believe: he only believes in believing. He has got his doctrine by rote, at secondhand, out of a book. It is not life of his life, and thought of his thought; if you translated it for him out of its conventional school phraseology into plain everyday English he would not know it again; if, instead of talking of sanctification,' you spoke of being made good,' he would stare at you, and suspect Arminianism, Pantheism, Pottheism, or the last found heresy of which he has read in his religious paper. No. He does not believe, in the sense in which Wesley believed; and he is half conscious of that fact at moments, for every now and then he wakes himself up with a half-impatient jerk, and tries to lay a little emphasis on a preposition or an article-as who should say in his heart, No! I AM in earnest after all, and I'll show it. I say, Christian brethren, don't you see I am in earnest?' Poor man! He cannot do it. He knows not the trick of art: and the trick of nature -the self-taught eloquence which comes from intense and passionate conviction, from clear imaginative vision, he has it not, and never will have. That eloquence of belief we cannot give him; but in default of that shall we send him to Mr. Hunt, and subscribe for a few elocution lessons for him? Shall we awaken him to the ugly fact

that he knows simply nothing about the trade which he professes? that having the most momentous of all duties to do, he has never learnt or tried to learn how to do that same, from the day he entered orders till now? Perhaps we may, if he will promise us one thing -not to use his faculty, when he acquires it, for the purpose of reviling and insulting his congrega. tion. The smallest child knows how to scold, and so may that man if once he finds his tongue.

Let us go to another church, from the pulpit whereof proceeds noise enough, which may betoken, and as it happens really does betoken, earnestness. There raves and screams a young curate of the opposite school. Heu quantum mulatus ab illo! For twenty years ago, when there were giants in the earth, among Tractarians as among others, stood in that pulpit a great genius and a great orator, who knew how to use his voice. Perfectly still he stood, disdaining the slightest show of passion, trusting to eye and voice alone-to the eye, which looked through and through every soul with the fascination of a serpent; to the voice, most sweet and yet most dreadful, which was monotonous indeed: but monotonous with full intent and meaning, carrying home to the heart, with its delicate and deliberate articulation, every syllable of words which one would have too gladly escaped; words which laid bare the inmost fibres of the heart, and showed to each his basest and his weakest spot, and with their passionless and yet not untender cynicism, made the cheeks of strong men flame, whom all the thunders of a Spurgeon would only have roused to manly scorn.

Oh, thou great and terriblesophist, shall I call thee? or prophet? Why art thou worse than dead to Englishmen? Why is thy once sweet voice all jarred, thy once pure taste all fouled, by bitter spite and insult to thy native land? Why hast thou taken thyself in the net of thine own words, and bewildered thy subtle brain with thy more subtle tongue? I know not, and perhaps I need not know; but this I know, and gaze astounded as

13

I see it, that raw lads are dreaming that they can stand forsooth, painfully posturing and balancing, where thou didst fall perforce; and that they can carry out the ideal which, after devoting thy life to it, thou hadst to relinquish with bitter grief as impossible. And this I know, that they are trying now, as a last despairing effort, to 'rouse the masses' by screaming.

Truly does the whirligig of time bring round its revenges. Twenty years ago so that great orator taught us-we were to leave passion and excitement to Dissenters, and preach as Anglican priests, who spoke not of themselves, but, calm and motionless, delivered the oracular and changeless fiat of the Church. But those were days in which the great man could write a book, exposing bitterly enough the quaint likeness between Romanism and popular Protestantism.' Now all tides are changed. The great man is we know where too well; the little man his disciple, who dare not follow him into the reality, can stay at home content, and play with the Sham; and having discovered that Romish priests use, and always have used, those very impassioned appeals to the emotions which were once so shocking in Dissenters, copies gladly, of course not the dissenter, but the priest.

With this difference-that the Romish priest has learnt how to do it, and he has not. He is trying at this moment certainly to use his lips like that most admirable of preachers, the Bishop of Oxford; but the result is curiously different. Where the Bishop pours a noble stream of sound, round as a bell, from the bottom of a full lung, the curate is forcing a stream as flat as a ribbon from the top of an empty one. He has not wind enough to fill the vowel-sounds; and the over-action of his lips, which is meant for earnestness, caricatures the consonants; so that one hears but half of his pitiful story, save when his voice cracks into a falsetto, and symbolizes with its howlings the cries of those lost souls upon whose torments he is expatiating. Alas! alas! If a really well-meaning young man will think that the business of an

English clergyman is to frighten women, at least let him learn how to fulfil his mission without ruining his own lungs and throat. Shall we subscribe to send him too to Mr. Hunt? At least, let him go for an hour to any good Romish chapel, to hear how the burly preacher there contrives, by use of his jaw as free and strong as when he is masticating his dinner (which, to judge from his complexion, is not a bad one), to make the Irishwomen forget their fleas, and listen. Or let him go for an hour into the Old Bailey, and watch any distinguished member of the bar. I have one now before my mind's eye, but I will mention no names, where all know their work, and can do it. He has to live by his lips, like a Dissenting preacher; and therefore, like him, he has taken the trouble to learn how to do so. Watch him, how he sets up his chest defiantly, stoutly, and calls a fulltoned word up out of its depths, and catches it in the great unctuous cup of that loose lower lip, and rolls it about there genially, lovingly, till every atom of every consonant has told upon your car. Watch the light of his eye, the real humour playing round his nostril and his cheek, the sham pathos, so perfectly sham that it does as well as real; the racy English, the practised power and ease of the whole man; and then ask yourself, is it not worth while to take as much trouble about doing God's work, as that man

takes that he may simply earn his bread?

As for the great Mr. Spurgeonwho, after all, though the curate knows it not, is his model-he must not enter unballowed walls that he may hear him. So he must be content to learn from those who can tell him by ear and eye-sight that he owes his extraordinary success chiefly to the two physical facts, that he has a very large chest, and that he keeps himself upright; and so contrives to do the duty which lies nearest him-of making himself at least heard. We will add to this that inestimable gift of nature, which Aristotle (in those wise Ethics which the curate read at Oxford) calls Banausia; a gift of which it is written

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen die Götter selbst vergebens.

And again

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

But that gift, to do the curate justice, he does not possess by nature; nor will he. I am sure, wish to acquire it. Wherefore, as he will never equal Mr. Spurgeon, he had better give up imitating him, and learn how to speak in the pulpit-as he can very well when he is out of it-like a Christian gentleman. And if he fancies that the strain of making five hundred persons listen to him, instead of one, precludes that possibility, let him study Mr. Hunt's book, and he will find himself mistaken.

C. K.