erned.
These are all matters of acquisition, and of difficult acquisition;
possible to be attained, and well worth the exertion that must be made.

The history of the world is full of testimony to prove how much depends
upon industry; not an eminent orator has lived, but is an example of it.
Yet in contradiction to all this, the almost universal feeling appears
to be, that industry can effect nothing, that eminence is the result of
accident, and that every one must be content to remain just what he may
happen to be. Thus multitudes, who come forward as teachers and guides,
suffer themselves to be satisfied with the most indifferent attainments,
and a miserable mediocrity, without so much as inquiring how they might
rise higher, much less making any attempt to rise. For any other art
they would have served an apprenticeship, and would be ashamed to
practise it in public before they had learned it. If any one would sing,
he attends a master, and is drilled in the very elementary principles;
and only after the most laborious process dares to exercise his voice in
public. This he does, though he has scarce any thing to learn but the
mechanical execution of what lies in sensible forms before his eye. But
the extempore speaker, who is to invent as well as to utter, to carry on
an operation of the mind as well as to produce sound, enters upon the
work without preparatory discipline, and then wonders that he fails! If
he were learning to play on the flute for public exhibition, what hours
and days would he spend in giving facility to his fingers, and attaining
the power of the sweetest and most impressive execution. If he were
devoting himself to the organ, what months and years would he labor,
that he might know its compass, and be master of its keys, and be able
to draw out, at will, all its various combinations of harmonious sound,
and its full richness and delicacy of expression. And yet he will fancy
that the grandest, the most various, the most expressive of all
instruments, which the infinite Creator has fashioned by the union of an
intellectual soul with the powers of speech, may be played upon without
study or practice; he comes to it, a mere uninstructed tyro, and thinks
to manage all its stops, and command the whole compass of its varied and
comprehensive power! He finds himself a bungler in the attempt, is
mortified at his failure, and settles it in his mind forever that the
attempt is vain.

Success in every art,