Page:Plutarch's Lives (Clough, v.5, 1865).djvu/15

 DEMOSTHEXES. 7 ■which, by breaking and disjointing his sentences, much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke. So that in the end, being quite disheartened, he forsook the assembly ; and as he was walking carelessly and saunter- ing about the Pu-teus, Eunomus, the Thi'iasian, then a very old man, seeing him, upbraided him, saying that his dic- tion was very much like that of Pericles, and that he was wantina; to himself throus-h cowardice and meanness of sphit, neither bearing up with coiurage against popular outcry, nor fitting his body for action, but suffering it to languish through mere sloth and negligence. Another time, when the assembly had refused to hear him, and he was going home with his head muffled up, taking it very heavily, they relate that Satyrus, the actor, followed him, and being his famihar acquaintance, en- tered into conversation with him. To whom, when De- mosthenes bemoaned himself, that having been the most industrious of all the pleaders, and having almost spent the whole strength and vigor of his body in that employ- ment, he coidd not j^et find an}^ acceptance with the people, that drunken sots, mariners, and iUiterate fellows were heard, and had the hustings for their own, while he himself was despised, "You say true, Demosthenes," replied Satyrus, " but I will quickly remedy the cause of all this, if you will repeat to me some passage out of Euripides or Sophocles." Which when Demosthenes had pronounced, Satyrus presently taking it up after him, gave the same passage, in his rendering of it, such a new form, by accompanying it with the proper mien and ges- ture, that to Demosthenes it seemed quite another thing. By this being convinced how much grace and ornament language acquires from action, he began to esteem it a small matter, and as good as nothing for a man to exer- cise himself in declaiming, if he neglected enunciation and delivery. Hereupon he built himself a place to study