"
Read the passage in the eulogy on Choate where he describes
him arming himself in the entire panoply of his gorgeous
rhetoric--and you will get some far-away conception of the
power of this magician.
One thing especially distinguishes our modern orator from
the writer in the closet, where he writes solely for his readers,
or where he has prepared his speeches beforehand--that is,
the influence of the audience upon him. There is nothing
like it as a stimulant to every faculty, not only imagination,
and fancy, and reason, but especially, as every experienced
speaker knows, memory also. Everything needed seems to come
out from the secret storehouses of the mind, even the things
that have lain there forgotten, rusting and unused. Mr. Everett
describes this in a masterly passage in his Life of Webster.
Gladstone states it in a few fine sentences:
"The work of the orator, from its very inception," he says,
"is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in the
mould offered to him by the mind of his hearers. It is an
influence principally received from his audience (so to speak)
in vapor, which he pours back upon them in a flood.
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