Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Set a New-Englander to describe any accident which happened in his presence. What hesitation and reserve in his narrative He tells with difficulty some particulars, and gets as fast as he can to the result, and, though he cannot describe, hopes to suggest the whole scene. Now listen to a poor Irishwoman recounting some experience of hers. Her speech flows like a river, ?so unconsidered, so humorous, so pathetic, such justice done to all the parts It is a true transubstantiation, ? the fact converted into speech, all warm and coloured and alive, as it fell out. Our Southern people are almost all speakers, and have every advantage over the New England people, whose climate is so cold that, 'tis said, we do not like to open our mouths very wide. But neither can the Southerner in the United States, nor the Irish, compare with the lively inhabitant of the south of Europe. The traveller in Sicily needs no gayer melodramatic exhibition than the table d'Mte of his inn will afford him in the conversation of the joyous guests. They mimic the voice and manner of the person they describe; they crow, squeal, hiss, cackle, bark, and scream like mad, and, were it only by the physical strength exerted in telling the story, keep the table in unbounded excitement. But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigour is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art But eloquence must be attractive, or it is none. The virtue of books is, to be readable, and of orators, to bt interesting; and this is a gift of Nature; as Demosthenes, the most laborious student in that kind, signified his sense of this necessity when he wrote Good Fortune as his motto on his shield. As we know, the power of discourse of certain individuals amounts to fascination, though it may ha...