ned to those wonderful discourses can
never be persuaded that eloquence did not die with Christopher North.
They were all addressed to the hearts of his listeners, and thrills, and
tears, and laughter that was not loud but deep, accompanied his speech
from the beginning to the very end. Let one who thus listened to him
speak:--

"We have heard him in the assembly-rooms, speaking on the genius of
Scott, a little after the death of the Wizard, and in the tremble
of his deep voice could read his sorrow for the personal loss, as
well as his enthusiasm for the universal genius. We have heard him
in his class-room, in those wild and wailing cadences, which no
description can adequately re-echo, in those long, deep-drawn,
slowly expiring sounds, which now resembled the moanings of a
forsaken cataract, and now seemed to come hoarse and hollow from
the chambers of the thunder, advocating the immortality of the
soul, describing Caesar weeping at the grave of Alexander,
repeating, with an energy which might have raised the dead, Scott's
lines on the landing of the British in Portugal, and discovering
the secret springs of laughter, beauty, sublimity, and terror, to
audiences whom he melted, electrified, subdued, solemnized,
exploded into mirth, or awed into silence, at his pleasure."

His eloquence gained little from his personal appearance, about which
there was something savage, leonine, massive, but little that was
refined or attractive in the usual sense of that word. Still his face is
described by some as magnificent, and his gray, flashing eyes, as being
remarkably expressive. In his dress he was exceedingly slovenly except
upon state occasions. His professor's gown, as he stalked along the
college-terraces, flew in tattered stripes behind him, his shirts were
usually buttonless, and his hat like a reminiscence of a pre-historic
age. His yellow hair always floated over his shoulders, in confusion
worse confounded, and he wore immense unkempt whiskers hanging upon his
breast. Dickens thus describes him:--

"At his heels followed a wiry, sharp-eyed shaggy devil of a
terrier, dogging his steps as he went slashing up and down, now
with one man beside him, now with another, and now quite alone, but
always at a fast rolling pace, with his head in the air, and his
eyes as wide open as he could get them. A bright,
clear-comple