which comes of a persuaded judgment. For that reason I cannot help
thinking that the influence of Bismarck in German politics was more
wholesome than is that of Mr. John Temple Graves.

For eloquence _per se_--considered merely as an art of pleasing--I
entertain something of the respect evoked by success; for it always
pleases at least the speaker. It is to speech what an ornate style is to
writing--good and pleasant enough in its time and place and, like
pie-crust and the evening girl, destitute of any basis in common sense.
Forensic eloquence, on the contrary, has an all too sufficient
foundation in reason and the order of things: it promotes the ambition
of tricksters and advances the fortunes of rogues. For I take it that
the Ciceros, the Mirabeaus, the Burkes, the O'Connells, the Patrick
Henrys and the rest of them--pets of the text-bookers and scourges of
youth--belong in either the one category or the other, or in both.
Anyhow I find it impossible to think of them as highminded men and
right-forth statesmen--with their actors' tricks, their devices of the
countenance, inventions of gesture and other cunning expedients having
nothing to do with the matter in hand. Extinction of the orator I hold
to be the most beneficent possibility of evolution. If Mr. Goss has done
anything to retard that blessed time when the Bourke Cockrans shall
cease from troubling and the weary be at rest he is an enemy of his race.

"What!" exclaims the thoughtless reader--I have but one--"are not the
great forensic speeches by the world's famous orators good reading?
Considering them merely as literature do you not derive a high and
refining pleasure from them?" I do not: I find them turgid and tumid no
end. They are bad reading, though they may have been good hearing. In
order to enjoy them one must have in memory what, indeed, one is seldom
permitted to forget: that they were addressed to the ear; and in