bined project was carried out without hesitation or delay; and "the intelligence of his victory and death," adds the same historian, "arrived in England only three days after the publication of that despatch by which he had prepared his country for the failure of the service intrusted to him. The revulsion of the public mind was therefore the greater at this glorious disappointment of their general's gloomy anticipations."

Who can deny that a similar revulsion of the public mind might have been produced by Lord Raglan, had not the French commanders so repeatedly damped his prudent and politic ardour? Who can say that, had the original plan of the campaign been fairly carried out, the Duke of Newcastle's warministry might not have commenced as gloriously as Lord Chatham's?

34

AMERICAN ORATORS AND STATESMEN.*

(FROM THE QUARTERLY REVIEW, MARCH, 1841.)

1. Eloquence of the United States. Compiled by E. B. WILLISON. 5 vols. 8vo. Middletown, Conn. 1827. 2. Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry. By WILLIAM WIRT, of Richmond, Virginia. 9th edition, corrected by the Author. Philadelphia, 1838. 3. Orations and Speeches on various occasions. By EDWARD EVERETT. Boston, 1836.

4. Speeches and Forensic Arguments. By DANIEL WEBSTER. 2 vols. Boston, 1838.

SYDNEY SMITH once wrote an article in the Edinburgh Review (re-published amongst his works), proving, to the entire dissatisfaction of the Americans, that they had produced no names in art, science, or literature, since they became a nation, capable of standing a minute's competition with those produced by England within the same period. This was a little too much; and one of their crack reviewers was commissioned to answer the divine. After a little preliminary castigation, he proceeded to demolish him, by a set of searching interrogatories, commencing somewhat in this fashion:

"Has this writer never heard of Jared Sparks, or Timothy Dwight? Has he never heard of Buckminster, Griscom, Ames, Wirt, Brown, Fitch, Flint, Frisbie, and Silliman?"

Now it is most assuredly no matter of boast; for many of the writers on the list were men of un

* Three or four passages have been transferred to this essay from an article by the same writer on "French Orátory" (Q. R. Oct. 1839).

doubted talent, and have since obtained well-merited celebrity; but we much fear that Sydney Smith never had heard of one of them. If he had, he would cer tainly have been proportionally in advance of the great majority of the reading English public at the time. We have since done a little towards supplying our deficiencies in this respect; but if we were put through the same sort of catechism, most of us should still betray a lamentable degree of ignorance as to the indigenous literature of the United States, -and not less as to their oratory. During Mr. Webster and Miss Sedgewick's visit to England last spring, it was quite amusing to watch the puzzled faces of the company on the announcement of their names in a drawing-room; for notwithstanding the reprint of Miss Sedgewick's "Tales," and the constant mention of Mr. Webster by the "Genevese Traveller ” of the "Times," nine persons out of ten in the élite of English society had about as accurate a notion of their respective claims to celebrity as Lord Melbourne of Mr. Faraday's, when it was proposed to add that gentleman's name to the pension list.

To prevent the recurrence of such scenes when Mr. Clay, Mr. Calhoun, or Mr. Everett, shall honour us with a visit, we propose, in the present article, to bring our readers acquainted with the leading orators and statesmen of the United States, by short sketches of their career and characteristic passages from their speeches, -to play, in short, the " Timon" of America; and any comparison we may afterwards choose to institute as to the respective excellence of the two countries in this branch of intellectual exertion, will at least not expose us to the reproach of having selected a field. in which the advantage is necessarily on the side of the mother-country. Seventy years of democratic institutions may not be sufficient to form a style or perfect a school of art, but they are enough, in all

conscience, to show what a nation can do in eloquence and statesmanship.

The eloquence of the Americans, like that of the French, dates from their revolution; but they started under widely different auspices. When the National Assembly was first called together, the members were utterly unacquainted with the forms of business, or the tactics of debate. Dumont tells us that the only orators who possessed any talent for improvisation were Maury, Clermont-Tonnerre, Barnave, and Thouret ; and of these Barnave alone was capable of extemporising an entire speech of any length. Mirabeau clearly was not; and most of his best passages are short, rapid, and electrical, flashing out from between the trains of argument laboriously prepared for him, like lightning through clouds. In North America, on the contrary, the habit of public speaking was as familiar as in the mother-country: each provincial assembly was a school; and the first Congress conducted debates and carried resolutions, in as orderly and business-like a manner as if the contending parties had been led by the leaders of our House of Commons, with Lord Canterbury to preside; indeed, in a much more orderly and businesslike manner than since the excitement of the crisis has passed away. Unluckily their most momentous sittings were held with closed doors: newspaper reporters did not come into existence as a class, even in England, till full twenty years afterwards; and the vanity of publication had no influence in such a crisis on men whose lives and fortunes were at stake. General descriptions of the principal speakers (Adams, Lee, Dickenson, Hancock) have come down to us; but the one orator who had fire and force enough to stamp his very words and image upon the memory, and blend them indissolubly with the best traditions of the land, was Patrick Henry.

Demosthenes left corrected copies of all his best speeches. Demades left none. For aught we know to the contrary, therefore, Theophrastus might have been quite right in saying, as reported in Plutarch, that Demosthenes was worthy of Athens, and Demades above it. But when a speaker takes his fair chance with his fellows, and his thoughts and expressions are laid up in cedar for no other reason than from their being of a kind that the world would not willingly let die, the bare fact is decisive of his claims. If, for example, we knew nothing of Lord Chatham's eloquence but what is recorded by Walpole, we should entertain no doubt of his superiority to Fox or Pulteney; and the few genuine fragments of Mirabeau which have been preserved - preserved only by constant repetition at the time are more conclusive than volumes; for if the specimens do not entirely come up to the traditional reputation of the man, we are rather tempted to suppose that the thought or expression has lost something of its original brightness on its way to us, than that the concurrent voices of his contemporaries spoke false.

-

Applying the same criterion to Henry, we cannot well err in placing his name at the head of our list. His authenticated remains consist merely of a few insulated passages, enchased in the note-book of some zealous admirer, or handed down from mouth to mouth; but what are called "Henry's speeches," form the favourite subjects of declamation in the schools; and the traditionary accounts of the effects produced by his voice and manner, with all those other nameless attributes which Demosthenes included under the word action, transcend most things of the kind recorded in history; except the consummate acting of Lord Chatham, who folded his flannels round him like a toga, and awed his adversaries into silence by a sweep of his crutch. Jefferson, no mean autho