honours by strenuous and systematic exertion in their oratorical functions, before they can enjoy the one and wear the other, and be glorious or pre-eminent in the public sight. It may easily be imagined what an incomparable field for debate is opened by all this vigorous and incessant play of the faculties, and amid these intense contests for supremacy or domination among the debaters. As nothing has equalled an English House of Commons, in its day of glory, for the vehemence and vivacity of its debates, so no other assembly has ever rivalled it in specimens of a varied eloquence. At that most brilliant period of the art, when it shone resplendent in the popular branch of her legislature, England was at the height of opulence and commercial splendour. She had, above all her neighbours, imparted a salutary impulse and quickening energy to moral and political inquiries. She was unsurpassed in intellectual accomplishments and social refinement. She was at an enviable point of elevation as to all the arts and embellishments of civilization. It will be recollected that her Burke, her Sheridan, and her Windham, passed from the delights of intellectual converse and the contests of wit in literary coteries to the ardour and animation of a debate in St. Stephen's Chapel; that Oxford and Cambridge made scholars of the eminent statesmen who embellished and enriched the oratory of her deliberative assemblies with the treasures of classical illustration, and gave vigour to their eloquence by bold views into man's political condition and prospects, and by profound researches into the abstract principles of law, and the social economy. It thence must have followed, that in such a state of riches and refinement and general cultivation, not only would wit lend to oratory its fascination, and polished elegance its grace, but science would pour forth her various wealth to replenish it with a constant fund of thought and illustration, while a taste highly refined, and a judgment classically severe, would chasten and blend all these diversified elements and seemingly dissimilar materials into harmony or happy combination. In the attributes, therefore, of a rich and varied eloquence, the British Parliament, at the period in question, transcended every modern assembly, while in the qualities of vehement and impassioned speech-that speech which is made immortal by its connexion with liberty-our own country, in the days of the revolution, surpassed all modern rivalry.

These views are applicable exclusively to the oratory of senates and deliberative assemblies. The eloquence of the Forum, as exhibited in the speeches of the most eminent of the ancient and modern advocates, will be found to furnish still fewer elements of comparison.

In the first place, the influence of ancient jurisprudence on the intellectual character of the lawyers of that period, was altogether insignificant, while the law of our day has most essentially modified the spirit of our forensic pleadings, as well as the genius of our advocates. If the change has been favourable to law as a system of rules for social ends, it has been unpropitious to that popular eloquence which flourished in the ancient tribunals of justice. If it has operated to give certainty and stability to decisions, affecting personal rights, it has in the same proportion curtailed the sphere of that passionate and pathetic rhetoric which permitted unbounded scope to the orator in the sympathies of his auditors.

In the oratory of the Roman Forum, the judgment invariably waited on the imagination. With the modern advocate this order is exactly reversed. To administer law now in the mode it was dispensed by the ancient judicatures, would be to divest it of all respect and veneration in the eyes of the people. To permit the accents of the multitude, as at Rome, to mingle with the voice that proclaims the oracular decrees of justice, and to permit the advocate to blend with his pleadings the elaborate artifices of rhetoric, would be utterly repugnant to that standard of judicial decorum which modern times have established. But this was exactly the license best adapted to forensic eloquence in its highest pitch of pathos and strain of sublimity. In Rome it is well known the appeal lay to the equity of the Judge and not to the law as it stood recorded, or to precedents. This gave of necessity unbounded scope in the selection of topics. In the defence of their clients, the Roman advocates resorted to themes of invective against the accusers full as much as to arguments of defence for the accused. The most legal speech ever delivered by Cicero, in his capacity as an advocate, excepting that for Cluentius, was the one uttered in the case of Quintius, the brother-in-law of Roscius, the celebrated comedian, and that oration abounds with invective and passion, as well as with pathetic and supplicatory appeals to the judges.

Such was the oratory of the Forum of Rome, at least, until her eloquence perished in the wreck of her freedom. Then her jurisprudence began slowly to exhibit the regularity of system, but then, as was to have been expected, neither the Senate nor the Forum was any longer thronged with the candidates for the glories of eloquence that flourished in brighter days. Neither influence in the Senate, nor popularity among the people, nor the command of armies and of provinces, were any longer to be found to stimulate its toils, and kindle and reward its lofty

ambition. Forensic, no more than any other species of popular eloquence, can fix its roots and bloom in the soil of slavery. There must be the presence of a public to animate the toils of the advocate, to supply his genius with matter and materials in the abounding sympathies of his audience, and reward his strenuous zeal and rhetorical artifice with popular applause and the honours of office. Under these efficient impulses, the genius of lawyers has ever blossomed and put forth immortal fruit. The toils and tasks, therefore, that fit the oratory of the Forum for a high destination and splendid career--that form it with powers to vindicate truth and justice, and swell the tide of human sympathy, until it melts the heart of adamaut, and snatches even the laws themselves from the grasp of tyranny, by the moral courage of its patriotism, have their source in nothing less than a condition of freedom; but such a condition of freedom as was allied at Rome with the infancy of jurisprudence. It follows as a necessary conclusion, that forensic eloquence in ancient and modern days, could possess very few of those traits in common, by which comparative excellence in this division of the art, admits of being determined.

But if we possess no popular oratory so vehement, grand and pathetic, as characterized the judicial and political efforts of the ancients, we lay claim to a species unknown to them, and pervaded by proportional pathos, if not by equal sublimity. The oratory of the Pulpit is the offspring of a great intellectual revolution-the type and symbol of a wide and deep spiritual change, establishing the exception, in the clearest manner, to the general fact of the declension of eloquence under the pressure of tyrannical rule. It will be borne in mind, in the first place, that the topics of pulpit oratory are all of them of a peculiar kind, and have little to do with political freedom. The joys of heaven and the torments of hell, the turpitude and atrocity of vice, or the beatitude of virtue-the unspeakable majesty of the Creator, and the harmony and beauty of his works, are the mighty and attractive themes on which the genius of the pulpit orator delights to expatiate, and to set forth and embellish with all the graces and the energies of eloquence and imagination. Pulpit oratory may lift its head and flourish in a despotical court and government, or amidst the worst caprices of tyranny, if there be only taste and encouragement in a few to give it countenance and patronage. The court of Louis XIV. of France, was delighted and edified by the eloquent discourses of the highly gifted divines of that period, whilst eloquence of every other kind was utterly mute.

But in the second place, there is altogether a different species of pulpit oratory-not that which is fostered and perfected in the courts of monarchs, which is nourished and refined by the rare union of taste and imagination, on which the highest finish and most elaborate care are bestowed, and whose triumphs are in the smiles of an approving few; but the kind that appeals, and never appeals without success, to the fanaticism of the multitude, which is nourished by their passions, and stimulated by their prejudices, and rewarded by a complete mastery of their hearts and understandings. Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard, agitated the minds and spirits of multitudes, like the waves of the sea, and in the strong and well-known expression of a writer of that period, "precipitated Europe upon Asia"-and this in the full plenitude of papal authority, and all by the rude eloquence and irresistible logic of the passions! And the oratory of the preachers at the Reformation-what was it but the same description of eloquence renewed in brighter and more permanent forms, with more weight of thought and a greater infusion of learning. Luther in Germany, Calvin in Switzerland, and John Knox in Scotland, used the same potent spell, and replenished and invigorated their imaginations from the same stores of ungovernable feeling and wide-spread enthusiasm in the multitude, with this difference, however, that reason released, and dreading no longer the thunders of the church, lent weapons of higher proof to the eloquence of the passions, than the church had yet wielded.

We thus perceive in what manner the even and monotonous surface which society presents, after a long pause of action and suspension of energy, is broken into irregularity and disorder, and all its elements agitated anew by the feverish and ever-shifting powers and impulses that attend a great intellectual revolution, and how the whole train of inflammable emotions is fired, and all the deeper sympathies of man stirred up in the general agitation. It would be quite natural to suppose, that oratory would take advantage of such great changes, and borrow from the energies and sympathies thus set into activity, all that could convert it into an instrument of most powerful efficacy and influence. It is still more natural to suppose that pulpit oratory, in such agitating times, amid a revolution of creeds, should achieve some of its greatest triumphs-triumphs wrought in the very teeth of power, and by the great aid of the emancipation of human reason and human passions. Not the oratory, certainly, of brilliant qualities and careful finish-not the oratory of taste-not that which lays under contribution the whole territory of science, and perfects an argument with rhetorical skill,

to fit it to the taste of an acute and fastidious auditory-for such can only thrive and bloom in an elevated region-but the oratory of popular force, that roots itself in the imagination and undisciplined enthusiasm of a rude audience—that is filled with traits of unsurpassed vigour and boldness, and redeems its blemishes of taste and its violation of the rules of rhetoric by the sublimity of its aspirations and the importance of its ends. It is evident, therefore, that we are indebted to Christianity, and the moral revolution by which it was accompanied, for the high and impressive oratory of the pulpit, as we are under obligations to the new relations by which intellectual and civilized man is, in our day, associated with the source of all good, for the copiousness of illustration and embellishment which has been lavished upon sacred subjects. The sensual worship of the ancients never could have supplied the elements of such an alliance. It is in this spiritiual connection, and no other, that the accomplished preacher and theologian can find materials to grace and enrich his peculiar topics, to establish the authority of his divine commission-his ministration of pious eloquencein the awakened hearts of his hearers, in the inmost sanctuary of their religious feelings. It is in the modern alliance of the sublime truths of an inward piety with the discoveries which elucidate the power and majesty and intelligence of the Creator, that the whole scheme of the divine polity is fully revealed, and the eloquence by which it is explained and recommended to popular admiration and affection, is constantly recruited.

If the establishment of the papal power delayed the expansion of pulpit eloquence into that full independence by which it was replenished and invigorated from the stores of popular enthusiasm, it will be recollected that it had already wrought some of its most signal achievements, and led the way to the subsequent triumphs of the divine word. If the Reformation has imparted to it a wider scope of thought and a more general influence over the passions, it will be borne in mind that the most sublime aspirations and pathetic appeals to the pity or mercy of heaven, and the most terrible denunciations and awful punishments invoked on the rebellious spirit of man, had been appropriated by the early preachers. If, therefore, greater treasures of illustration and of argument-if more mental independence and a wider theatre of action fell to the lot of their successors, the early theologians, in the loftiest line of pulpit eloquence, may be said to have fully occupied its virginal glories.

On the whole, to the question which has been so much agitated, whether oratory has declined in our day, the final answer