the joints between the previously prepared commonplaces or illustrations and
their application to the matter in hand are too visible, the language is
artificially phrased, and wanting in spontaneity and ease. There are also parts
of the court speeches in which the orator seems to have calculated out all the
possible methods of meeting a particular case, and to be applying them in turn
with more ingenuity than convincingness. An appearance of unreality also arises
at times (again principally in the earlier speeches) from a certain want of
imagination. He attributes feelings and motives to others, which they were
really most unlikely to have entertained, and argues from them. Some of the
sentiments which he expects Artaxerxes or Artemisia to feel (in the Speeches on
the Naval Boards and for the Rhodians) were certainly not to be looked for in
them. Similar misconceptions of the actual or possible sentiments of the
Spartans appear in the Speech for the Megalopolitans, and of those of the
Thebans in the Third Olynthiac (Sec. 15). The early orations against Philip also
show some misunderstanding of his character. And if, in fact, Demosthenes lived
his early years largely in solitary studiousness and was unsociable by
disposition, this lack of a quick grasp of human nature and motives is quite
intelligible. But this defect grew less conspicuous as his experience increased;
and though even to the end there remained something of the sophist about him, as
about all the disciples of the ancient rhetoric, the greatness of his best work
is not seriously affected by this. For, in his greatest speeches, and in the
greatest parts of nearly all his speeches, the orator is white-hot with genuine
passion and earnestness; and all his study and preparation resulted, for the
most part, not in an artificial product, but in the most convincing expression
of his real feeling and belief; so that it was the man himself, and not the
rhetorical practitioner that spoke.

The lighter virtues of the orator are not to be sought for in him. In
gracefulness and humour he is deficient: his humour, indeed, generally takes the
grim forms of irony and satire, or verges on personality and bad taste. Few of