Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/27

 and how many have shared the fate of a certain senior wrangler who assured his clients that he would plead their cause triumphantly before the Lord Chancellor! "But, Lord! Sir," said the clients, "the Lord Chancellor would not listen to to him." Alas! for the glory of medallists, senior wranglers, double firsts, and the whole tribe of such! Eloquence is not more capable of being taught than poetry. It is as true of the orator as of the poet, that he must be born not made; and the votes and verdicts gained by studying Demosthenes and Cicero may be classed with the battles won by lessons of tactics and strategics, and the epic poems written by the rules of criticism.

It is not after a short or narrow course of observation that I have come to this conclusion. In early life I was one of a party of young men who met at the chambers of one of them to study some of the mechanical parts of public speaking—such as articulation, modulation, expression in reading aloud. Two of those who thus met became eminent—one as a parliamentary speaker, the other as a philosophical writer, and late in life as a clear and logical parliamentary speaker. But neither of these two men, who may be said to have studied oratory, became nearly so great, either as orators