7. Above all, remember it may be assumed that your hearers are your
friends, and are ready to receive kindly what you have to say. This will
have a wonderfully steadying effect on your nerves. And if your speech
consists only of two or three sentences slowly and deliberately uttered,
they will at least applaud its brevity, and give you credit for having
filled your place on the programme respectably.


It has been often said that Americans are greatly ahead of the English in
general speech-making, but in pleasant after-dinner talking and addresses
they are much inferior. Probably this was once true, but if so, it is
true no longer. The reason of any former deficiency was simply want of
practice, without which no speech-making can be easy and effective. But
the importance of this kind of oratory is now recognized, and, with proper
efforts to cultivate and master it, Americans are taking the same high rank
as in other forms of intellectual effort. Lowell and Depew are acknowledged
as peers of any "toast-responder" or "after-dinner orator" the world has
ever seen. One of the chief elements of their charm consists in the good
stories they relate. Whoever has a natural faculty, be it ever so slight,
as a storyteller, will, if he gathers up and appropriates the good things
that he meets with, soon realize that he is making rapid progress in this
delightful field, and that he gains much more than mere pleasure by his
acquisitions.

The best entertainments are not those which merely make a display of wealth
and luxury. Quiet, good taste, and social attractions are far better. The
English wit, Foote, describes a banquet of the former character. "As to
splendor, as far as it went, I admit it: there was a very fine sideboard of
plate; and if a man could have swallowed a silversmith's shop, there was