because he kept his composure when the contagious fury that sometimes seizes upon a public assembly ran away with it. He could always rule the storm.

The colloquial style which was so varied as not to tire was equaled and surpassed by the matter of his speech. This was never heavy nor dull. In the first place his logic was irresistible. He convinced men against their own convictions. They were sure that there were flaws in the reasoning or in their own conclusions, possibly in their inherited prejudices, and for the time it seemed that Phillips must be right. It is probable that for the moment they saw the law of eternal justice and humanity on which he based all his logic rather than on the sophistry which makes the worse appear the better reason. He tore away the disguises of pecuniary interest and political advantage which so long obscured the living issues of the mid-century, and brought men face to face with righteousness. He knew on what his premises were based, and when those should begin to be admitted he had no fear for the conclusion nor the consequence. This iron logic was not, however, cast-iron. It was alive with electric charges of wit, glowed with picturesque description, abounded in anecdote, thrilled with personal appeal, bristled with epithets which were characterizations in themselves. "Vesuvius in full eruption in the calm of a summer day" is the report of a Northern hearer, while a Southern newspaper said, "Wendell Phillips is an infernal machine set to music." He usually spoke without notes, as he composed his speeches without pen.

This does not mean without preparation.

He

was always preparing and storing his memory with facts, pursuing fallacies, linking chains of argument that seemed to have no weakest link, gathering anecdotes, culling illustrations that found their own places when and where they were wanted. Above all for years he cultivated the habit of thinking on the platform and off, and was never so effective as when apparently the most extemporaneous. His own explanation seems simple enough: "The chief thing I aim at is to master my subject. Then I earnestly try to get the audience to think as I do." Many orators, however, might have as laudable aims without his success. It is the constantly recurring reason, that the character and soul of the man was in all his speech with persistent earnestness. He was the incarnation of the cause he championed.

If we should recall the great speakers who made the second and third quarters of the century the golden age of American oratory it would be found that each had some excellence in a superlative degree and that one who should combine all these virtues would be an impossibility. But if the criterion of eloquence be the ability to hold all sorts of audiences in rapt attention for one hour, two hours, and more, in all sections of a broad belt from ocean to ocean, audiences hostile and amicable and sometimes both at once, then the palm must be awarded to Wendell Phillips. He fought his way up through obloquy and opposition, and carried with him the burden of an unpopular cause to its final triumph. He did this without a following or support that in the beginning was of more advantage than disadvantage to him, but in the end a nation

was on his side by virtue of its acceptance of the principles which he advocated at the start. Therefore for every word of detraction and calumny which he endured in the early years and in later years the judgment of the future, looking back as he looked forward, shall return him a thousand words of praise.

XXX.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

T WAS a maxim of the best Hellenic orators that a

IT

composition should not be closed with a climax, but rather that the aroused interest and emotion of the audience should be allowed to decline toward the normal level of ordinary quietude. Perhaps it would be according too much to the subject of the last chapter to place him at the top of the ladder, and too little to the subject of the present one to place him much below the other. Those who have had the good fortune to hear both will follow their recollection in forming their judgment, and those who have not will appeal to the printed speech and contemporaneous testimony here as elsewhere. In the remote future any such comparison will doubtless be of individual qualities rather than of degrees of excellence in several of our recent orators. This last one was something besides an orator, and in his capacity as a man of letters and a journalist may represent an age of transition, or possibly of combination, in which the public speaker and the public press are working together for the welfare of communities. Let it be observed here that it is a narrow and one-sided view which places these two agencies in antagonism or asks which is greater in its influence. Each has its own sphere which the other cannot fill, but each is the complement

and fulfilment of the other's limitations. The orator's audience is multiplied a thousand-fold, and the printed page is suffused with something of the light and heat which belong to the spoken word. Together the platform and the press offer a field to the thinking mind more inviting and wider than any which previous centuries have afforded for the dissemination of useful truths. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS was a man to discern the equal value of both agencies and to employ both with equal effectiveness. The restrictions of the subject, however, confine consideration mainly to his oratorical achievements.

It was in the political campaign of 1856 that he delivered his first important speech, a fair example of that form of oratory by which he made a distinctive reputation. In it the academic and the political elements are found side by side, as might be expected from its title, The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times. Delivered before the literary societies of Wesleyan University the oration touches fondly upon the charms of intellectual pursuits and the delights of a scholar's life. From this pleasant contemplation the speaker turns to say in effect that studies are but a selfish indulgence unless consecrated to the service of something broader than personal gratification. Material success has its dangers for the state as for the citizen, and unless there be a class of men who shall form the public conscience disaster will surely come. "This is the class of scholars. The elevation and correction of public sentiment is the scholar's office in the state. If, then, such be the scholar's office, if he be truly the conscience of