Page:Sketches of the life and character of Patrick Henry.djvu/438

 414 SKETCHES OF THE

ed, indeed, indispensable to the full effect of his pecu- liar diction and conceptions. In point of time^ he was veiy happy: there was no slow and heavy dragging, no quaint and measured drawling, with equidistant pace, no stumbling and floundering among the fractured members of deranged and broken periods, no undigni- fied hurry and trepidation, no recalling and recasting of sentences as he went along, no retraction of one word and substitution of another not better, and none ol' those affected bursts of almost inarticulate impetuosity, which betray the rhetorician rather than display the orator. On the contrary, ever self-collected, deliberate, and dignified, he seemed to have looked through the whole period before he commenced its delivery; and hence his delivery was smooth, and firm, and well accented; slow enough to take along with him the dullest hearer, and yet so commanding, that the quick had neither the power nor the disposition to get the start of him. Thus he gave to every thought its full and appropriate force; and to every image all its ra- diance and beauty.

No speaker ever understood better than Mr. Henry, the true use and power of the jjause; and no one ever practised it with happier effect. His pauses were never resorted to, for the puipose of investing an insignificant thought with false importance; much less were they ever resorted to as a Jimsse, to gain time for thinking. The hearer was never disposed to ask, " why that pause ?'^ nor to measure its duration by a reference to his watch. On the contrary, it always came, at the very moment, when he would himself have wished it, in order to weigh the striking and important thought which had just been uttered; and the interval was always filled by the speaker with a matchless energy of look, which

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