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Updated: June 26, 2025
Meanwhile, Cole followed him with his eye till he was out of sight, and then muttered to himself, "Never was there a fitter addition to old Barclay's 'Ship of Fools'! I should not wonder if this man's patriotism leads him from despising the legislature into breaking the law; and, faith, the surest way to the gallows is less through vice than discontent: yet I would fain hope better things for him; for, methinks, he is neither a common declaimer nor an ordinary man."
The sublime, the eloquent, the figurative orator, the plain, the connected, the metaphysical reasoner, the classical, the learned, and the solemn declaimer, in a succession of speeches so full of energy and enthusiasm, so interesting in their nature, so important in their consequence, created a variety of sensations even in the bosom of a stranger, and could scarcely fail of exciting some sympathy with a nation which was doomed to close for ever that school of eloquence which had so long given character and celebrity to Irish talent."
It was told of James Scott, who was a very quiet reserved man, that once when he was in the Highlands he was insulted by a party of Highland gentlemen; from better it came to worse, and ended in Scott nearly killing every man of them. Halliburton was much respected, but he was a great declaimer as to prices of cattle falling when he was a purchaser.
The sleepy countenances of the audience, the whispered conversation carried on at scattered intervals, the listless attitudes of some, the frequent yawns of others, the eagerness with which attention was attracted to the opening door, when it admitted some new object of interest, the desperate resolution with which some of the more energetic turned themselves towards the orator, and then, with a faint shake of the head, turned themselves again hopelessly away, were all signs that denoted that no very eloquent declaimer was in possession of the "house."
The farmer or mechanic, not endowed with "college larnin'," is sure to become a bad declaimer, perhaps a demagogue, when he abandons those natural illustrations and ornaments of his speech which spring from his individual experience, and strives to emulate the grandiloquence of those graduates of colleges who have the heathen mythology at the ends of their fingers and tongues, and can refer to Jove, Juno, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Vulcan, and Neptune, as though they were resident deities and deesses of the college halls.
The people in question were a gentleman and his lady lately arrived from England, in their way to Paris. The husband was a man of good fortune, who had been a libertine in his youth, and a professed declaimer against matrimony.
Surely, no mere declaimer however enchanting, no sublime babbler on the rights of man, no political charlatan strutting about for the display of his preternatural gift of articulate wind, could have grappled in keen debate, for all those weeks, on the greatest of earthly subjects, with fifty of the ablest men in America, without exposing to their view all his own intellectual poverty, and without losing the very last shred of their intellectual respect for him.
Accordingly, his intellect grasps nothing and yields him nothing; he is a sententious and overexcited declaimer, an artificial spirit always on the stretch, full of affectations, his talent reducing itself down to the rare flashes of a somber imagination, a pupil of Robespierre, as Robespierre himself is a pupil of Rousseau, the exaggerated scholar of a plodding scholar, always rabidly ultra, furious through calculation, deliberately violating both language and ideas, confining himself to theatrical and funereal paradoxes, a sort of "grand vizier" with the airs of an exalted moralist and the bearing of the sentimental shepherd.
Without industry, legal knowledge, or sound principles of action, what was he good for? He would do for a political stump declaimer but, as a lawyer, in any case of moment, he was not worth a copper." And thus saying, the lawyer turned away, and left Judge Gray to his own thoughts.
I once talked with Colley Cibber , and thought him ignorant of the principles of his art. Garrick, Madam, was no declaimer; there was not one of his own scene-shifters who could not have spoken To be, or not to be, better than he did ; yet he was the only actor I ever saw, whom I could call a master both in tragedy and comedy ; though I liked him best in comedy.
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