Page:The parallel between the English and American civil wars.djvu/38

 speeches of the two, it is the self-taught man who seems the educated man. Lincoln's lucid and orderly arrangement of his subject, his clear and cogent logic, his simple yet perfect expression of the thought he wishes to convey, his restraint as well as his eloquence all these qualities reveal not merely natural gifts, but patient labour, minute study of the best models, acute discrimination of their merits, and severe self-criticism. Cromwell, as he himself frankly owned, was no orator; he was convincing because he made it his business "to speak things," not to "play the orator." An admirer said that he spoke home just as he charged home. One must make allowance for the difference between the instruments Cromwell and Lincoln had to handle: it was more difficult for the best speaker to express things clearly in the involved syntax of the seventeenth century than it was when two centuries of use had simplified the structure of the English sentence. But though Cromwell was capable of hammering out a powerful phrase, and rose sometimes to 30