The English language, strange
compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the
difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet
made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as
ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin. Again: perhaps no
nation, after the Greeks and Romans, has so clearly felt in what true
rhetoric, rhetoric of the best kind, consists, and reached so high a
pitch of excellence in this, as the English. Our sense for rhetoric
has in some ways done harm to us in our cultivation of literature,
harm to us, still more, in our cultivation of science; but in the
true sphere of rhetoric, in public speaking, this sense has given us
orators whom I do think we may, without fear of being contradicted
and accused of blind national vanity, assert to have inherited the
great Greek and Roman oratorical tradition more than the orators of
any other country. Strafford, Bolingbroke, the two Pitts, Fox,--to
cite no other names,--I imagine few will dispute that these call up
the notion of an oratory, in kind, in extent, in power, coming nearer
than any other body of modern oratory to the oratory of Greece and
Rome. And the affinity of spirit in our best public life and
greatest public men to those of Rome, has often struck observers,
foreign as well as English.
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