the culture of manner in expressive utterance. Not so with the blunt, surly, and taciturn Englishman, or with the angu lar, mechanical, and constrained New Englander.

But our impediments to eloquence of manner, do not lie in constitution and habit only; they are embedded into our systems of education. Our schools and colleges equally tend to produce a false and inexpressive style of speaking. We take a boy, at an early age, without previous moulding, and place him on the platform of the school rostrum, to speak a set speech, a formal declamation, or a political harangue, of which he knows little, and feels less. Such is our first step in oratorical training. Could the result be other than what it so generally is? Our boys early acquire an unnatural, formal, old-man-like style of speaking, which has no heart, -no truth, no reality,-no vividness,-no genuine earnestness; although, under the exciting influence of circumstances, it may be forced, occasionally, from the monotony of the pulpit, into the hacking and jagged style of the bar, the turgid vehemence of the popular declaimer, or the unnatural violence of the partisan champion.

The unmeaning tone and manner, thus contracted in early years, become, unconsciously to the individual, the fixed habits of after life; the college declamation confirms the style acquired at school; and the professional institution stamps, with its irrevocable seal, the manner of the man in his maturity. Hence the rarity, among us, of the accomplishment of a chaste, easy, and natural style of speaking, of the power of rising gracefully and appropriately with the inspiration of a subject,-of becoming forcible, yet free from violence, of expressing strong emotion, without turbulence.

Cultivation of manner in speaking, is rendered highly important, not only by circumstances which affect races and communities of men, but by those, also, which act upon the individual. Who is there that can say he has been duly educated, by the silent but most effective of all teaching,that of perfect example, operating from childhood to manhood? Who is there, of whom it can be justly said, that he

is free from every vice of organ and of habit, in speech or action? The fault of misarticulating a single letter, may effectually vitiate a speaker's habit of enunciation; a single ungainly trick of gesture, may render his whole manner ridiculous. How often is a gross and glaring fault the predominating characteristic of the self-confident speaker who derides the idea of cultivation !

Objections to the study of elocution, however, are usually founded on erroneous views of its design and effect. It is thought to involve artificial processes and artificial results,— to be a fabricated attempt to imitate nature, a process of wirepulling, by which the voice and the arms are to be mechanically moved and displayed, by rule. No view can be more false than this. Elocution is, indeed, the art of managing the voice and the person, in the act of speech. But, like every other form of genuine art, it is only the highest and the best, the truest forms of nature imbodied in practice.

Man naturally possesses and employs all the elements of this art. The child is, in his sphere, the perfect model for the orator,-the living poet of expression. But the child, as he emerges successively into the boy, the youth, the man,just, as according to the poet, he lets the divine ray within him 'fade into the common light of day,'-loses this original and admirable faculty, in the dull routine of formal education. He unconsciously sacrifices nature to the lowest of all the shapes of art, that of conventional habit,-the machinery of arbitrary form.

The human being, as he goes on from that beautiful spot in his early life, where all was truth and beauty and power, poetry and eloquence,—from the time when every look, and tone, and action was inspired with the truest and most expressive life, would carry the atmosphere of that scene with him, and expand in power of expression, as his intellect expanded. But the expressive powers of the boy, are neglected, and left to wither. Our places of education make no provision for the culture of imagination and feeling,—the main-springs of living communication.

The young child is surrounded, in the great school of nature, with innumerable objects which elicit expression from the heart; and his impressible imagination assimilates itself to the scene, and takes on and gives off, with ease, and with brilliant effect, the choicest forms of eloquent tone, attitude, and action. But when the period of school-life is arrived, these rich sources of influence are, in a degree, cut off, or he is debarred from them. The close room, the bench, and the book, take the place of the inspiring air, the green bank, and its alphabet of flowers. The oxygen of life is withdrawn; the lungs play feebly; the circulation lags; the spirit of communication is quenched; the brain becomes dull and inert; the mind is impoverished; the heart is quelled; the fancy languishes; the hours become irksome from the sense of weariness and restraint. Nor does an inspiring intellectual activity take the place of nature's incitements: the mental processes, on the contrary, are, principally, mechanical and insipid,-a weary round of senseless reiteration of unmeaning and unintelligible sounds, amid which the attention works with the movement of the mill-horse, in its never ending, never changing round.

But the scene is not shifted, even when ceaseless reiteration has left its mark on the memory, and the arbitrary process of spelling and syllabication, has been repeated till the mind has become expert in the mechanical operation of reading. The little student of written language, is then presented, perhaps, with a book of abstract sentences which, to him, are unintelligible, or, at most, lifeless successions of sound uninspired by feeling; in which imagination, with its utmost stretch of inventive power,-can find no food, and amid which it gradually dies out. Add to all this neglect and privation, the effect of being drilled into the habit of duly 'pausing till you can count one,' at every comma,—of giving an emphasis on the model of the pedantic circumflex of the schoolmaster, and uttering the tones of emotion in the style of his stereotype utterance; and the usual consummation is attained; the power of natural, free, expressive voice,

is utterly eradicated; and the transplanted scion of falsehabit, has taken most effectual root. The eloquent child has become a dull and mistuned reader, and is fully prepared to become, in his next stage of education, a lifeless and soul-less speaker.

What elocution aims at, under these circumstances, is to restore the lost power of expression, to inspire natural life. into the voice, to strip off the incrustation of mechanical habit, and leave the soul again free to utter itself in whatever mood nature prompts to the individual. Elocution prescribes: no technical uniformity of manner: it, in the first place, hands to the student the implements of scientific analysis, and enables him to detect the complexities of tone, and to become familiar with every element, in all its varied aspects of combination; and, since the date of Dr. Rush's masterly analytic exhibition of the human voice, the requisite processes have become as definite and as tangible as those of music. Having accomplished its office as a science, elocution. next presents itself as an art, and aids the student in recon-structing the vocal fabric; inserting every element in its due. place, according to its character, with the observant eyefaithfully fixed on nature, as the only model; but carefully discriminating between the local, corrupted exhibitions. of nature, in mechanical habit, and the free, general work-ing of nature as a principle;-distinguishing the specialities: of actual usage from its broad axioms and laws.

Elocution, when true to its purposes, thus emancipates. the individual from the trammels of mere accidental habit and corrupted custom, and sets him out on a new career of action, in which he is guided by conscious knowledge, by intelligent preference, by recognized truth, by reflective judgment, and deliberate will, by personal organization, and individual character,-the true sources of eloquence in external manner.

Our present defective systems of education, leave this work as a task of self-cultivation, for every student who would succeed in acquiring the power of expressive utter

ance; and years of assiduous endeavour are surely not too high a price to pay for such an acquirement. The eradication of the false habits which neglect and misdirected culture have accumulated, would, alone, render necessary a long and laborious course of application. The universal tone, for example, of our academic exhibitions,' displays false intonation and partial song, throughout. No student gives us, on such occasions, his own personal tone, but a certain average result of all the arbitrary effects of voice, which he has heard others use, in similar circumstances. We hear, from every speaker, but a succession of sentences, in which sound seems, so to speak,-to have become stereotyped of old, and thence to have descended, as an inheritance, to successive generations, to be regularly assumed with the orator's academic gown.*

*That the author's strictures on the deficiencies of established modes of education, as regards systematic culture in elocution, are not unfounded, may be inferred from the following facts, which indicate a spirit of retrogradation, rather than advancement.

When the author commenced his instructions in elocution, at Harvard University, and the Latin and High Schools of Boston, in the year 1825, all the requisite facilities for his purposes were readily extended to him, by the proper authorities, and continued for successive years. But, of late, when, in repeated instances, students, who, in their early life, had been under the author's instruction, have been desirous of continuing to receive it, they have been discouraged or prohibited from doing so; and, even when numbers have formed themselves into classes, and solicited the aid of being allowed to receive their instruction in one of the University halls, the use of a room has been refused. The mere letter of a law prohibiting students from deriving instruction from any source but the university, even if the Gothic policy of such a law can be sanctioned in a free community,-is no plea in a case in which such instruction had been previously approved, and even solicited, at intervals, for nearly twenty years.

It is a fact of kindred character, that those who control the regulations of the Latin and High Schools of Boston,-instead of encouraging, as formerly, the pupils of those schools to study elocution more extensively than the prescribed limits of the school routine allow,-actually restrain them from it, by the most effectual of all prohibitions,-that of striking off from the list of competitors for prizes, the names of those who are known to take the benefit of private tuition. The policy of this measure