office which I had voluntarily taken on my shoulders, and beneath which
I might be crushed by no moral delinquency on my own part, but could not
shirk without cowardice and shame. My subsequent fortune was various.
Once, though I felt it to be a kind of imposture, I got a speech by
heart, and doubtless it might have been a very pretty one, only I forgot
every syllable at the moment of need, and had to improvise another as
well as I could. I found it a better method to prearrange a few points
in my mind, and trust to the spur of the occasion, and the kind aid of
Providence, for enabling me to bring them to bear. The presence of any
considerable proportion of personal friends generally dumbfounded me. I
would rather have talked with an enemy in the gate. Invariably, too, I
was much embarrassed by a small audience, and succeeded better with a
large one,--the sympathy of a multitude possessing a buoyant effect,
which lifts the speaker a little way out of his individuality and tosses
him towards a perhaps better range of sentiment than his private one.
Again, if I rose carelessly and confidently, with an expectation of
going through the business entirely at my ease, I often found that I
had little or nothing to say; whereas, if I came to the scratch in
perfect despair, and at a crisis when failure would have been horrible,
it once or twice happened that the frightful emergency concentrated my
poor faculties, and enabled me to give definite and vigorous expression
to sentiments which an instant before looked as vague and far-off as the
clouds in the atmosphere. On the whole, poor as my own success may have
been, I apprehend that any intelligent man with a tongue possesses the
chief requisite of oratorical power, and may develop many of the others,
if he deems it worth while to bestow a great amount of labor and pains
on an object which the most accomplished orators, I suspect, have not
found altogether satisfactory to their highest impulses. At any rate, it
must be a remarkably true man who can keep his own elevated conception
of truth when the lower feeling of a multitude is assailing his natural
sympathies, and who can speak out frankly the best that there is in him,
when by adulterating it a little, or a good deal, he knows that he may
make it ten times as acceptable to the audience.

* * * * *

This slight article on the civic banquets of England would be too
wretchedly imperfect, without an