, an
alarming loss of perception of the passage of time, a selfish
enjoyment of his sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferings
of the audience.

Plato says, that the punishment which the wise suffer, who refuse to
take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse
men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the
penalty of abstaining to speak, that they shall hear worse orators
than themselves.

But this lust to speak marks the universal feeling of the energy of
the engine, and the curiosity men feel to touch the springs. Of all
the musical instruments on which men play, a popular assembly is that
which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by genius
and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn. An audience is not
a simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathy
gives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in his
own degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a battery is
charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can survey
the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised of new
opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being agitated to
agitate. How many orators sit mute there below! They come to get
justice done to that ear and intuition which no Chatham and no
Demosthenes has begun to satisfy.

The Welsh Triads say, "Many are the friends of the golden tongue." Who
can wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress, or the
bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society
are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his
devotion. All other fames must hush before his. He is the true
potentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they who
know how to govern. The definitions of eloquence describe its
attraction for young men. Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch's
ten orators, advertised in Athens, "that he would cure distempers of
the mind with words." No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but two
or three words can dishearten it. There is no calamity which right
words will not begin to redress. Isocrates described his art, as "the
power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was
great";--an acute, but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art
assumed a Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon. Socrates
says, "If any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the
Lacedaemonians, he