iration of the hour is the inspiration you yourself bring to it,
bottled up in your spirit and ready to infuse itself into the audience.

If you extemporize you can get much closer to your audience. In a sense,
they appreciate the task you have before you and send out their
sympathy. Extemporize, and you will not have to stop and fumble around
amidst your notes--you can keep your eye afire with your message and
hold your audience with your very glance. You yourself will feel their
response as you read the effects of your warm, spontaneous words,
written on their countenances.

Sentences written out in the study are liable to be dead and cold when
resurrected before the audience. When you create as you speak you
conserve all the native fire of your thought. You can enlarge on one
point or omit another, just as the occasion or the mood of the audience
may demand. It is not possible for every speaker to use this, the most
difficult of all methods of delivery, and least of all can it be used
successfully without much practise, but it is the ideal towards which
all should strive.

One danger in this method is that you may be led aside from your subject
into by-paths. To avoid this peril, firmly stick to your mental outline.
Practise speaking from a memorized brief until you gain control. Join a
debating society--talk, _talk_, _TALK_, and always extemporize. You may
"make a fool of yourself" once or twice, but is that too great a price
to pay for success?

Notes, like crutches, are only a sign of weakness. Remember that the
power of your speech depends to some extent upon the view your audience
holds of you. General Grant's words as president were more powerful than
his words as a Missouri farmer. If you would appear in the light of an
authority, be one. Make notes on your brain instead of on paper.

_Joint Methods of Delivery_

A modification of the second method has been adopted by many great
speakers, particularly lecturers who are compelled to speak on a wide
variety of subjects day after day; such speakers often commit their
addresses to memory but keep their manuscripts in flexible book form
before them, turning several pages at a time. They feel safer for having
a sheet-anchor to windward--but it is an anchor, nevertheless, and
hinders rapid, free sailing, though it drag never so lightly.

Other speakers throw out a still lighter anchor by keeping before them a
rather full outline of their written and committe