kers fail through lack of _pace_ in the delivery.
The interest is lost in the pauses between the sentences. A
slow delivery is only effective when a thought is obviously
being born, for which the audience is kept intently waiting.

But the most remarkable thing in the article is the following quotation
from Talma, the actor:--

"We were rhetoricians and not characters. What scores of
academical discourses on the theatre, how few simple words! But
by chance I found myself one evening in a drawing-room with the
leaders of the party of the Gironde. Their sombre countenance,
their anxious look, attracted my attention. There were there,
written in visible letters, strong and powerful interests. They
were men of too much heart for those interests to be tarnished
by selfishness; I saw in them the manifest proof of the danger
of my country. All come to enjoy pleasure; not one thinking of
it! They began to discuss; they touched on the most thrilling
questions of the day. It was grand! Methought I was attending
one of the secret councils of the Romans. 'The Romans must have
spoken like these,' said I. 'Let the country be called France
or Rome, it makes use of the same intonations, speaks the same
language: therefore, if there is no declamation here before me,
there was no declamation down there, in olden times; that is
evident!' These reflections rendered me more attentive. My
impressions, though produced by a conversation thoroughly free
from bombast, deepened. 'An apparent calm in men agitated stirs
the soul,' said I; 'eloquence may then have strength, without
the body yielding to disordered movements.' I even perceived
that the discourse, when delivered without efforts or cries,
renders the gesture more powerful and gives the countenance
more expression. All these deputies assembled before me by
chance appear to me much more eloquent in their simplicity than
at the tribune, where, being in spectacle, they think they must
deliver their harangue in the way of actors--and actors as we
were then--that is, declaimers, full of bombast. From that day
a new light flashed on me; I foresaw my art regenerated."

LECTURE V.

THE PREACHER AS A FALSE PROPHET.

Upon anyone who is studying the physiognomy of the age of the prophets
there is one disagreeable feature which obtrudes itself so constantly
that even in the briefest sketch