"inspiration of the moment" find out when too late that the moment has come without the inspiration. Special preparation should always be made if time permits. You have no right to impose on the audience in this way. The people in the audience have a right to the best you can give them. Cautions. Always keep a few good speeches "on tap." You often are called upon when you least expect it. Keep a few good stories, a few salient ideas, a paragraph from some good speech, which with little modification you can adapt to meet many emergencies. Many a man has been admired for his ability to extemporize or speak impromptu when he was speaking a set speech or repeating a partly memorized prayer. However, the speaker is not always conscious of doing this. Choice bits of your own composition may have been memorized years ago and these will naturally and spontaneously come to your mind; and all you need to do is to recall the thought and they will clothe themselves in the same choice language as upon a previous and more formal occasion. Channing said, "The day of inspiration has gone by. Everything which I have ever said which was worth remembering, was all carefully prepared."

CHAPTER VIII

EXTEMPORE SPEAKING

Quintilian said, "the richest fruit of all our study, and the most ample recompense for the extent of our labor is the faculty of speaking extempore. Not that I make it an object that an orator should prefer to speak extempore; I only wish that he should be able to do so."

Since the ability to speak extemporaneously is considered the best all-round method, and since it is demanded especially in our day and time, let us give it a little more detailed attention.

EXTEMPORE SPEAKING IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS. Can extempore speaking advantageously be taught to pupils in high schools? Yes; but, of course, any plan adopted must be suited to the ages of the pupils. The reason that many teachers who try to teach this method do not succeed as well as they should like, is largely due to their lack of faith in this manner of speaking. They give up too soon. Results do not appear at once. Like the cultivation of all life habits, it takes time. The ability to think logically while before an audience, and to select automatically and instantaneously the right words to express one's thoughts does not come "over night."

CAN EXTEMPORE SPEAKING BE ACQUIRED? Can this method of speaking be taught at all? Or is it a gift, a natural endowment, like brown eyes? Here is some testimony. Professor Bredif says that "Pericles never wrote his orations. Like Aristotle, Themistocles, and other ancient orators, he improvised after laborious meditation."

Cicero usually used the memoriter method, but when pressed for time resorted to the extempore.

Of the group of famous parliamentary orators in England during the eighteenth century, William Pitt, Lord Mansfield, and Charles James Fox all used the extempore method. Mr. Pitt, along with his gifts, natural and acquired, had a marked susceptibility for being aroused by the occasion. His overwhelming spontaneity and high personal character swept everything before him. It is said that such was the excitement when he spoke that it was impossible to report him, and the speech which in its delivery and publication overthrew Walpole's ministry was reduced to writing by Dr. Johnson.

Mansfield was pre-eminent as an extempore speaker. At an early age he gave promise of that ready command of his mother tongue which was later shown in his speeches. This was secured by a constant translation and retranslation of Greek and Roman orators, which also gave him a knowledge of the principles of eloquence, a study which he began to pursue with all diligence upon his entry into the university. This he continued after beginning his law studies, especially in the practice of extempore speaking, for which he prepared himself with such fullness and accuracy that his notes were useful to him in after life, both at the bar and on the bench.

The fame of Fox as a parliamentary orator and debater is well known, although he began awkwardly and abounded in repetitions. He was an extempore speaker solely. Oratorically, Fox's ambition was to become a powerful debater, "one who goes out in all weathers," instead of carrying with him to the House a set speech drawn up beforehand. In this course he persevered until he became the acknowledged leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons. He answered well to his own definition of an orator,-"one who can give immediate, instantaneous expression to his thoughts." He mastered his subject and accumulated facts.

How he used these facts depended upon the mood of the assembly that he rose to address. Burke affirmed him to be "the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw.'

Of English parliamentary orators, the two most illustrious examples are: John Bright and William Gladstone. Bright began by committing his speeches to memory, but he soon abandoned this method as both clumsy and exhausting. Turning now to American orators, we find that the most famous representative of the early period of our history, Patrick Henry, never wrote a line of his speeches. The sparks of his eloquence flew hot from the anvil of his thought. He owed his success to early practice in conversation and public speaking, and to the courage and readiness with which he met a crisis.

We are apt to think the great triumvirate—Calhoun, Clay, and Webster-as less ready in purely extemporaneous speech than the average legislator of to-day, and yet each of these three great orators showed a gradual development in facility as extempore speakers. Calhoun cultivated extempore speaking with great success while in the law school at Litchfield, and he pursued this method in the "iron logic" of his speeches in Congress. Clay, too, early practiced the extempore method in a debating club at Richmond, and his yet earlier practice with cornfield or woods as an audience is well known. Webster, "a steam engine in breeches," often prepared his speeches with great care; but when pressed for time, as in many of his great cases at the bar, he spoke from carefully prepared notes.

Sargent S. Prentiss, "the most eloquent of all Southerners," says Wendell Phillips, was at his best only when speaking extempore. Wendell Phillips himself was an adept at the art; so was Henry Ward Beecher.

Here is the testimony of four modern speakers:

Hon. B. R. Tillman, United States Senator from South Carolina: "I get chock full of ideas and facts, and then

turn loose without much thought or preparation. I very often think over what I am going to say, and then, when I get on my feet, never think of what I intended to say. Practice has enabled me to speak with more ease and without getting excited, but I doubt if my speeches are as effective as when they are belched forth like lava from a volcano."

Hon. William J. Bryan: "I first read all I can on the subject to be discussed, examining the question from all standpoints; then prepare an outline dividing the subject into heads and subheads; then fill in the details. I seldom write a speech complete. Where I have the subject thoroughly in hand, it is easier to use the language which comes at the moment than to remember set phraseology."

Dr. Lyman Abbott in a recent number of the Outlook states that there were two literary societies at New York University. He and his brother belonged to one of them. "It was here," says Dr. Abbott, "I first learned to think upon my feet, and so laid the foundation for my lifelong habit of extemporaneous speech. For the essential condition of really extemporaneous speech is ability to think upon one's feet. Without that ability the extemporaneous address is either a memoriter, though unwritten, oration, or a rambling and discursive talk unfreighted with any thought. The value of the old-time debating societies in village, school, and college appears to me to be underestimated in our times. 'In the Westminster debating societies,' says Alfred Austin in his autobiography, 'I at least acquired a facility, sometimes an extemporaneous facility, of utterance that has been useful to me, I think, all through life.'"

But, says the student, these are great orators. That is true, but they acquired their power through a long course of practice. So may you. Some have an easier task than others, but often those who have the most to overcome have become the most proficient in the art. If you cannot become as brilliant as Webster, as powerful as Mirabeau, as fluent