hese is entirely the offspring of
_impulse_: the last of _mechanism_. The one is as full of fancy as it is
bare of facts: the other excludes all fancy, and is weighed down with
facts. The one is all fire, the other all ice: the one nothing but
enthusiasm, extravagance, eccentricity; the other nothing but logical
deductions, and the most approved postulates. The one without scruple,
nay, with reckless zeal, throws the reins loose on the neck of the
imagination: the other pulls up with a curbbridle, and starts at every
casual object it meets in the way as a bug-bear. The genius of Irish
oratory stands forth in the naked majesty of untutored nature, its eye
glancing wildly round on all objects, its tongue darting forked fire:
the genius of Scottish eloquence is armed in all the panoply of the
schools; its drawling, ambiguous dialect seconds its circumspect
dialectics; from behind the vizor that guards its mouth and shadows
its pent-up brows, it sees no visions but its own set purpose, its own
_data_, and its own dogmas. It "has no figures, nor no fantasies," but
"those which busy care draws in the brains of men," or which set off its
own superior acquirements and wisdom. It scorns to "tread the primrose
path of dalliance"--it shrinks back from it as from a precipice, and
keeps in the iron rail-way of the understanding. Irish oratory, on the
contrary, is a sort of aeronaut: it is always going up in a balloon, and
breaking its neck, or coming down in the parachute. It is filled
full with gaseous matter, with whim and fancy, with alliteration and
antithesis, with heated passion and bloated metaphors, that burst the
slender, silken covering of sense; and the airy pageant, that glittered
in empty space and rose in all the bliss of ignorance, flutters and
sinks down to its native bogs! If the Irish orator riots in a studied
neglect of his subject and a natural confusion of ideas, playing with
words, ranging them into all sorts of fantastic combinations, because in
the unlettered void or chaos of his mind there is no obstacle to their
coalescing into any shapes they please, it must be confessed that the
eloquence of the Scotch is encumbered with an excess of knowledge, that
it cannot get on for a crowd of difficulties, that it staggers under
a load of topics, that it is so environed in the forms of logic and
rhetoric as to be equally precluded from originality or absurdity, from
beauty or deformity:--the plea of humanity is lost by