The audience is a constant metre of the orator. There are many
audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn.
If anything comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence of
the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious, that you might think the
house was filled with them. If new topics are started, graver and
higher, these roisters recede; a more chaste and wise attention takes
place. You would think the boys slept, and that the men have any
degree of profoundness. If the speaker utter a noble sentiment, the
attention deepens, a new and highest audience now listens, and the
audiences of the fun and of facts and of the understanding are all
silenced and awed. There is also something excellent in every
audience,--the capacity of virtue. They are ready to be beatified.
They know so much more than the orator,--and are so just! There is a
tablet there for every line he can inscribe, though he should mount to
the highest levels. Humble persons are conscious of new illumination;
narrow brows expand with enlarged affections: delicate spirits, long
unknown to themselves, masked and muffled in coarsest fortunes, who
now hear their own native language for the first time, and leap to
hear it. But all these several audiences, each above each, which
successively appear to greet the variety of style and topic, are
really composed out of the same persons; nay, sometimes the same
individual will take active part in them all, in turn.

This range of many powers in the consummate speaker and of many
audiences in one assembly leads us to consider the successive stages
of oratory.

Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on
so many occasions, of chief importance,--a certain robust and radiant
physical health,--or, shall I say? great volumes of animal heat. When