m bends the branches of the forest. Hence it is
that in all times this wonderful power has been something longed for
and striven for. Demosthenes, on the beach, struggling with the
pebbles in his mouth to perfect his articulation, has been the great
example. Yet it is often true of the orator, as of the poet;
_nascitur_ _non_ _fit_. Patrick Henry seemed to be inspired as
"Give me liberty or give me death" rolled from his lips. The
untutored savage has shown himself an orator.

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an
ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the
appeals of counsel! Do we not all feel the magic of the power, and
when occasionally we are permitted to listen to a great orator how
completely we lose ourselves and yield in willing submission to the
imperious and impetuous flow of his speech! It is said that after
Webster's great reply to Hayne every Massachusetts man walking down
Pennsylvania Avenue seemed a foot taller.

This marvelous power is incapable of complete preservation on the
printed page. The presence, the eye, the voice, the magnetic touch,
are beyond record. The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize
and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird,
illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator
subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel
dissecting knife of the critic. It is the marvelous light flashing
out in the intellectual heavens which no Franklin has yet or may
ever draw and tie to earth by string of kite.

But while there is a living something which no human art has yet been
able to grasp and preserve, there is a wonderful joy and comfort in
the record of that which the orator said. As we read we see the very
picture, though inarticulate, of the living orator. We may never know
all the marvelous power of Demosthenes, yet _Proton_, _meg_, _o_
_andres_ _Athenaioi_, suggests something of it. Cicero's silver speech
may never reach our ears, and yet who does not love to read _Quousque_
_tandem_ _abutere_, _O_ _Catilina_, _patientia_ _nostra_? So if on
the printed page we may not see the living orator, we may look upon
his picture--the photograph of his power. And it is this which it is
the thought and purpose of this work to present. We mean to
photograph the orators of the world, reproducing the words which they
spake, and trusting to the vivid imagination of the thou