the Revolutionary movement were the speeches
of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy,
in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of
a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and
in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and
congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished
naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a
rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson's orotund prose, of the
declamatory _Letters of Junius_, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox,
Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early
Congresses. The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is
largely traditionary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page
loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A speech is
good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is
sought. But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional,
rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are
really literature. If this is true, even where the words of an orator
are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we
have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the
oration produced. The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were
either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that
posterity can judge of them only at second-hand. Patrick Henry has
fared better, many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not
in the letter, in Wirt's biography. Of these the most famous was the
defiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing
down the gauge of battle to the British ministry. The ringing
sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by school-boys, and
many of them remain as familiar as household words. "I have but one
lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. . . .
Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. . . . Is life
so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains
and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others
may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" The
eloquence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich. But
if such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come