My Memories of Eighty Years by Chauncey M. (Chauncey Mitchell) Depew
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page 23 of 413 (05%)
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more before breakfast. He said to me in explanation that if one
would take an hour before breakfast every morning and concentrate his mind upon his subject, he would soon fill a library. Mr. Raymond had been as a young man a reporter in the United States Senate. He told me that, while at that time there was no system of shorthand or stenography, he had devised a crude one for himself, by which he could take down accurately any address of a deliberate speaker. Daniel Webster, the most famous orator our country has ever produced, was very deliberate in his utterances. He soon discovered Raymond's ability, and for several years he always had Raymond with him, and once said to him: "Except for you, the world would have very few of my speeches. Your reports have preserved them." Mr. Raymond told me this story of Mr. Webster's remarkable memory. Once he said to Mr. Webster: "You never use notes and apparently have made no preparation, yet you are the only speaker I report whose speeches are perfect in structure, language, and rhetoric. How is this possible?" Webster replied: "It is my memory. I can prepare a speech, revise and correct it in my memory, and then deliver the corrected speech exactly as finished." I have known most of the great orators of the world, but none had any approach to a faculty like this, though several could repeat after second reading the speech which they had prepared. In 1862 I was candiate for re-election to the assembly. Political conditions had so changed that they were almost reversed. The enthusiasm of the war which had carried the Republicans into power |
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