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Updated: June 7, 2025
He rarely attempted to express more than one thought in a single sentence; so that his sentences never wearied an audience, being always logical and precise, not involved and long and complicated, like the periods of Chalmers and Choate and so many of the English orators. It was only in his grand perorations that he was Ciceronian.
In this resolution Cicero thought that they made a fatal mistake; fine emotions were good in their place, in the perorations of speeches and such like; Antony, as Cicero admitted, had been signally kind to him; but the killing Caesar was a serious business, and his friends should have died along with him. It was determined otherwise. Antony and Lepidus were not to be touched.
Jane was in the habit of reading him passages that she considered particularly effective. In listening to her perorations he sometimes felt himself as assisting at the liquidation of the universe. "Now, here we are," proceeded Jane, with unabated exegetical energy, "an old family, with position and plenty of means and everything to make an impression. Why can't we do it?
Carmichael used, indeed, to relate how, in a great stress of business, some one moved that the Presbytery should adjourn for dinner, and the court argued for thirty minutes, with many precedents, whether such a motion touching as it did the standing orders could even be discussed, and, with an unnecessary prodigality of testimony, he used to give perorations which improved with every telling.
All day long that edifice, hitherto chastely familiar with American doctrine alone, with patriotic oratory, with perorations that dwelt upon the wrongs and woes of Ireland part of our national propaganda all day long that edifice rang with strange, exotic speech, sometimes guttural, often musical, but always impassioned, weirdly cadenced and intoned.
One fact about the method of his speaking is easily detected. In debate, at least, he had no use for perorations, and the reader who looks for them will often find that Lincoln just used up the last few minutes in clearing up some unimportant point which he wanted to explain only if there was time for it.
But a sublime height is always reached in his perorations. In other words, the manner functions perfectly. But where is the divine substance? This is not there why should it be if it were he might not be there. "Substance" is not featured in this discovery.
Often also when employed in amplifying a case, an oration is poured forth harmoniously and volubly with the approbation of all men. That perhaps we have never quite accomplished; but we have certainly very often attempted it; as our perorations in many places show that we have, and indeed that we have been very eager to effect it.
The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they reveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius.
It is true he has defects; but who has not? unless it be a deacon; still there is something in his style which indicates earnestness, something in his language, demonstrative of culture and eloquence. His main pulpit fault is that he "goes off" too soon and too frequently. In the course of a sermon he will give you three or four perorations, and sometimes wind up without treating you to one.
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