| is an insidious appeal to the passions of men. Let the ghastly form of despotism groan from his hollow lungs and bloodless heart, that eloquence is the instrument of turbulence and the weapon of faction. Nay, let the severe and honest moralist himself pronounce in the dream of abstraction, that truth and virtue need not the aid of foreign ornament. Answer; silence them all. Answer; silence them forever, by recurring to this great and overpowering truth. Say, that by the eternal constitution of things it was ordained, that liberty should be the parent of eloquence; that eloquence should be the last stay and support of liberty; that with her she is ever destined to live, to flourish, and to die. Call up the shades of Demosthenes and Cicero to vouch your words; point to their immortal works, and say, these are not only the sublimest strains of oratory, that ever issued from the uninspired lips of mortal men; they are at the same time the expiring accents of liberty, in the nations, which have shed the brightest lustre on the name of man,

LECTURE III.

ORIGIN OF ORATÓRY.

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HAVING endeavoured in my former lectures to define with precision the objects, upon which I am in future to discourse, and attempted to vindicate their utility, I shall now proceed to give you some account of their history; in doing which I shall, for the sake of perspicuity, continue to preserve the distinction, which I first laid down, between the science of rhetoric and the art of oratory.

The origin of oratory has undoubtedly the priority in point of time. Such must obviously be the case with all the arts. Many a house

must have been built, before a system of architecture could be formed; many a poem composed, be

Philo

fore an art of poetry could be written. The practice must in the nature of things precede the theory. All didactic treatises must consist of rules, resulting from experience; and that experience can have no foundation, other than previous practice. Now the practice of oratory must in all probability be coeval with the faculty of speech. sophical inquirers into the origin of language have, with some appearance of reason, affirmed, that the first sounds, which men uttered, must have been exclamations, prompted by some pressing want or vehement passion. These, by the constitution of human nature, would be best calculated to excite the first sympathies of the fellow-savage, and thus afford the first instance of an influence, exercised by man over man, through the medium of speech. The character, derived from this original, it has preserved through all its progress, and to a certain degree must forever retain; so that even at this day eloquence and the language of passion But are sometimes used, as synonymous terms. however the practice of oratory may have existed in the early ages of the world, and among those civilized nations, whose career of splendor preceded that of the Grecian states, we have no monuments, either written or traditionary, from which

we can infer, that the art of speaking was ever reduced into a system, or used for the purposes, to which eloquence has since been employed. In the sacred scriptures indeed we have numerous examples of occasions, upon which the powers of oratory were exercised, and many specimens of the sublimest eloquence. But these were of a peculiar nature, arising from the interpositions of providence in the history and affairs of the Jewish people. There we learn, that the faculty of speech was among the special powers, bestowed by immediate communication of the Creator to our first parents. Thus if the first cries of passion were instigated by physical nature, the first accents of reason were suggested by the father of spirits. But of the history of profane eloquence there is no trace or record remaining earlier, than the flourishing periods of the Grecian states.

There were three circumstances in their constitution, which concurred to produce their extraordinary attachment to this art, and with it to so many others, which have immortalized their fame. Their origin is involved in such a tissue of fables, that it is impossible to rely upon any particulars of their early history. Thus much however may be considered as certain, that the Assyrian, Persian,

and Egyptian states, whose national existence was earlier than theirs, were all single governments, and all unlimited monarchies; while from the remotest ages Greece was divided into a number of separate sovereignties, each independent of all the others, but all occasionally connected together upon certain objects and enterprizes, which concerned their common interests. Such were the expe. dition of the Argonauts under the conduct of Jason; the war of Thebes by the confederacy of seven princes against Eteocles; and finally the Trojan war; that war, the memory of which the energies of one poor, blind, vagrant poet have rendered as imperishable, as the human mind.

With all their great and shining qualities, the Greeks were ever notorious for a propensity to the marvellous; and a Roman poet has applied to the whole nation an epithet, which St. Paul tells us had been justly appropriated to the Cretans. Thus, of these three great expeditions, the causes, and almost all the story, as related by the Greeks, were undoubtedly fabulous. Some ingenious

modern writers have taken occasion from these manifest falsehoods of detail, to raise doubts concerning the reality of the whole history, and even to contend, that no such city as Troy ever existed,