indifferent extemporaneous
preachers are listened to with unabated attention for a full hour. In
the former case there is a certain uniformity of tone, and a perpetual
recurrence of the same cadences, inseparable from the manner of a
reader, from which the speaker remains longer free. This difference is
perfectly well understood, and was acted upon by Cecil, whose success as
a preacher gives him a right to be heard, when he advised young
preachers to "limit a written sermon to half an hour, and one from notes
to forty minutes."[3] For the same reason, those preachers whose reading
comes nearest to speaking, are universally more interesting than others.

[3] _Cecil's Remains_--a delightful little book.

Thus it is evident that there is an attractiveness in this mode of
preaching, which gives it peculiar advantages. He imparts greater
interest to what he says, who is governed by the impulse of the moment,
than he who speaks by rule. When he feels the subject, his voice and
gesture correspond to that feeling, and communicate it to others as it
can be done in no other way. Though he possess but indifferent talents,
yet if he utter himself with sincerity and feeling, it is far pleasanter
than to listen to his cold reading of what he wrote perhaps with little
excitement, and delivers with less.

In thus speaking of the interest which attends an extemporaneous
delivery, it is not necessary to pursue the subject into a general
comparison of the advantages of this mode with those of reading and of
reciting from memory. Each has prevailed in different places and at
different periods, and each undoubtedly has advantages and disadvantages
peculiar to itself. These are well though briefly stated in the
excellent article on Elocution in Rees' Cyclopaedia, to which it will be
sufficient to refer, as worthy attentive perusal. The question at large
I cannot undertake to discuss. If I should, I could hardly hope to
satisfy either others or myself. The almost universal custom of reading
in this part of the world, where recitation from memory is scarcely
known, and extempore speaking is practised by very few except the
illiterate, forbids any thing like a fair deduction from observation. In
order to institute a just comparison, one should have had extensive
opportunities of watching the success of each mode, and of knowing the
circumstances under which each was tried. For in the inquiry, which is
to be preferred in the pulpit,--we m