, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another ...
Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is not our
neighbour; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, whatever it may be,
is an old creation; and we have good data to calculate all the
mischief to be apprehended from it. When I find Algiers transferred
to Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point--

by quick staccato utterances, such as:--

And is this example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school
of mankind, and they will learn at no other--

or

Our dignity? That is gone. I shall say no more about it. Light lie
the earth on the ashes of English pride!

I say that the eye or ear, caught by such tropes, must (if it be
critical) recognise them at once as _rhetoric_, as the spoken word
masquerading under guise of the written. Burke may pretend to be seated,
penning a letter to a worthy man who will read it in his slippers: but
actually Burke is up and pacing his library at Beaconsfield, now striding
from fire-place to window with hands clasped under his coat tails, anon
pausing to fling out an arm with some familiar accustomed gesture in a
House of Commons that knows him no more, towards a Front Bench peopled by
shades. In fine the pretence is Cicero writing to Atticus, but the style
is Cicero denouncing Catiline.

As such it is not for your imitation. Burke happened to be a genius, with
a swoop and range of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a gift to
enchant, a power to strike and astound, which together make him, to my
thinking, the man in our literature most nearly comparable with
Shakespeare. Others may be more to your taste; you may love others
better: but no other two leave you so hopeless of discovering _how it is
done_. Yet not for this reason only would I warn you against imitating
either. For like all great artists they accepted their conditions and
wrought for them, and those conditions have changed. When Jacques wished
to recite to an Elizabethan audience that

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players--

or Hamlet to soliloquise

To be, or not to be: that is the question--

the one did not stretch himself under a property oak, nor did the other
cast himself back in a chair and dangle his legs. They both advanced
boldly from the stage, down a narrow platform provided for such
recitations and for that purpose built boldly fo