deficient in the means of imparting flexibility and grace to the mental and bodily faculties.

It is a matter of frequent observation among the people of other countries, and a fact noted also by English writers, themselves, that the characteristic manner of the English, is ungainly and rigid, in comparison with that of other nations. A sullen taciturnity of habit, a surly brevity of reply, a constrained stiffness of posture and motion, and a confined, reluctant gesture, are the predominating national traits in daily intercourse. The New Englander seems to inherit a full share of the hereditary stiffness and constraint, though not of the taciturnity and bluffness of the family stock. This feature of the common lineage, becomes haughtiness in the Englishman. But in the New Englander it degenerates into mere rigidity and unmeaning stiffness.

A genial early culture, and a wide intercourse with mankind, tend equally to render the human being plastic and flexible: they give him the power and the spirit of self-adaptation; they give him ease and fluency in address, and the power of eliciting sympathy from others. But the general defect of established modes of education, is that, from the absence of due provision for the development of man's social and moral nature, youth is left destitute of appropriate aids to the formation of exterior manner in the daily communications of private life, and in the function of public speaking.

Hence it happens that we so often see the juvenile speaker on the academic stage, rigid in posture, and awkward in movement and action. The want of early training leaves him utterly deficient in the natural ease and grace of a cultivated and polished youth. His body seems nailed to the floor, his members galvanized into metallic stiffness, his head glued to his neck, his eye motionless in its socket, his arm pinioned to his side. His whole visible mien and movement are those of an ill-adjusted machine. His voice, too, possesses the same inflexible character, in its monotonous utterance.

A degree of this style continues to exert its injurious influence on the college student and the professional man.

A

rigid, inflexible air, and a mechanical stiffness in gesture, are, accordingly, in many instances, the habitual style of the speaker in the pulpit. These faults unavoidably attract the attention of the audience to the preacher's personal manner, more than to his subject; as a messenger of ungainly, rigid manner and aspect, presents himself, rather than his message, to those whom he accosts. And, even when the mind has become somewhat enured to the fault of manner, there is still a hinderance caused by it, in regard to any effectual access to the feelings. Men naturally refuse to yield the sympathy of the heart to a speaker whose manner is so inappropriate in point of judgment and taste. The stiff attitude and inflexible features do not solicit and win attention; and the rigid arm and rigid hand are incapable of executing a motion which shall come as an appeal to the heart.

The correctives for rigid habit in a speaker's manner, are, in part, to be sought in the cultivation and refinement of taste, by which the mind is guarded against every uncouth and repulsive effect in expression. An excellent remedial influence will always be derived from habitual contact with the ease and polish of elevated society. The meliorating influence of the fine arts should ever be solicited by the student whose purpose is to addict himself to public speaking. But the express study of gesture, as a part of elocution, will exert the most direct influence on manner and habit. It will lead the student to discern the character and effect of every attitude and action of the body. It will teach him that there is no escape from the impression which external manner produces; that the speaker who neglects this part of elocution, incurs the effects of inappropriateness and awkwardness, and, sometimes, of self-contradiction, in the discrepance between the style of his gesture and the language of his tongue; that he who flatters himself with the hope of escaping inapppropriate manner by avoiding action, gives, by his statue-like and motionless posture, the lie to any earnestness betrayed in his voice. Earnestness warms and impels the heart; and, by the law of our constitution, the same nerve which glows and quivers at

the fountain head thrills along the arm to the expressive hand, and solicits its action. The rigid speaker who attempts to counteract this effect, kills, equally, his own emotions and those of his audience: he destroys the natural character of communication, and defeats its purposes.

PROPRIETY OF MANNER.

Nothing so effectually prevents the existence of eloquence in a speaker's manner, as a fastidious primness in his style of utterance and action, which hems him in on every side, and allows him no latitude of tone or scope of expressive action. There can be no interest felt in the address of a preacher whose whole elocution is so pruned and pared that it is utterly destitute of the natural freedom and exuberance of life.

It is not less true, however, that if there is any form of public speaking, in which a strict regard to propriety is demanded, it is that of a discourse delivered from the pulpit. The comparative freedom of manner in the accustomed forms of general society among us, ought to inspire a noble dignity of address, in our public speakers. Its actual effect, however, on individuals, is often to create an indifference, or even recklessness of deportment, which is anything but appropriate, in connection with sacred oratory.

The following is as literal a delineation as the writer's command of words enables him to give of impressions received by him, from the manner of an eminent preacher. At the appointed hour for commencing service, the minister came bustling along the aisle,-ran rapidly up the pulpit steps, and, on entering the pulpit began rubbing his hands in compliment to the cold air of the wintry morning,-dashed open the leaves of the Bible,-rattled off a few verses in the style of the most violent hurry, calling out the words in rapid succession, -implored a blessing on the services in nearly the same style of voice,-read the hymn after the fashion of a lively paragraph in a newspaper,-called out a prayer in which

every portion-adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and petition, all alike, had no slight resemblance to the style of military command or of a popular harangue. The sermon, in its bold, rapid, and vehement style, was eloquent with the tones of the most indignant invective, accompanied by the effects of the most arrogant and dogmatic expression of head, eye, and person. The speaker's whole manner imbodied the language of natural signs, in a style so marked and fierce, that a phrenologist would have found his eye instinctively wandering over the surfaces of the preacher's head to trace its associated indications in the regions of combativeness' and 'selfesteem,' in confirmation of his theory of human tendencies.

The moral proprieties of the pulpit, are not, it is true, very often violated to this extent. Yet we frequently hear tones, in the exercise of devotion, which the ear is accustomed to recognize as those of deciding, ordering, and commanding, rather than of supplicating. We hear, sometimes, a strain, in prayer, which reminds us rather of familiar talking than of devotion; we hear, sometimes, in a sermon, the tone of domestic scolding; and we see, occasionally, in the speaker's manner, the frown of personal anger, and the clinched fist of the popular partizan.

All these undeniable indications of misdirected and unmodified habit, are unintentional,-in effect, at least. They are the natural results of unrestrained and undisciplined violence of personal tendency in the individual: they are, to him, but the expressions of earnest feeling. Yet could a friendly hand present to the speaker's eye, in one of his paroxysms of excitement, the reflection of his own countenance and figure in a mirror, he would need no other monitor to remind him, that how natural soever these results of emotion might have become in his own habits, or innocuous to himself personally, they are grossly immoral in their effect on others. A very moderate degree of attention to the study and practice of elocution, would assist speakers of this stamp to subdue the voice to the tones of decency, and the person to the aspect of decorum, and to win the hearers whom they otherwise dis

gust and repel. The discipline of elocution, in its connection with the pulpit, if it is true to its purposes, suggests to the speaker, that, in sacred oratory, the chastening spirit of Christian meekness, is ever a most eloquent though silent effect.

Many preachers, whose temperament and habit secure them from the moral improprieties of manner, fail in the due observance of that species of propriety, which has been termed obedience to the code of minor morals. The legion of negligent, not to say low, personal habits, which defective early education, at home, leaves so generally prevalent among us, as a people, are by no means excluded from the pulpit. It may be sufficient, here, to allude to the Scottish preacher stopping, in the midst of his discourse, to regale his nostrils with their wonted portion of snuff, as finding his 'pendant' in the picture of our own Southern preacher attending, in the face of his congregation, to the nauseating process which necessity or habit entails on the chewing of tobacco. We forbear, likewise, to enlarge on the gross offences committed against decency, in the not unusual act of combing the hair with the fingers, during the intervals of active duty;-the public exhibition and display of the handkerchief which has just been employed to prove its very serviceable character in cases of catarrh ;the tooth-pickings and nail-cleanings, which are sometimes deferred to be done in the pulpit ;-the copious indulgence in coughing and expectoration, which is often more a necessity of habit than of disease; the lollings, and loungings, and leanings, and multiform free and easy postures occasionally exhibited.

When, amid sights of this description, the hearer happens to advert to the fact, that the preacher is, for the moment, the ambassador of Infinite Majesty, the shock of incongruous. feeling is too much to be endured. The preacher's standard of personal manner ought certainly to be at least as high as any that the highest elevation of genuine taste and refinement has ever established.

The study of elocution would, in relation to propriety of effect in aspect and bearing, suggest, in a single lesson of a