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Updated: June 13, 2025
Hughes, but perhaps he was thinking of the type of which Mr. Hughes is an eminent example when he said in Paris: "This is not to be a lawyers' peace." Every speech of President Wilson's was, to use a baseball phrase, a home run for the Democratic side. They were delivered without much preparation and were purely extemporaneous in character.
The sun was yet an hour high, as she saw, by the flash of her shrewd, time-keeping eye, and she could bear her little prize down to the cove, and collect unknown quantities of gold and silver shells, and starfish, and salad-dish shells, and white pebbles for her, besides quantities of well turned shavings, brown and white, from the pile which constantly was falling under her father's joiner's bench, and with which she would make long extemporaneous tresses, so that they might play at being mermaids, like those that she had heard her father tell about in some of his sea-stories.
Merritt was a good, hard-headed business man as a rule and he made a first-class lecturer; but when I found that he was taking to 'dropping into poetry' and delivering his descriptions of the freaks in verse, I began to get leary about the condition of the contents of his head. The poetry was always extemporaneous and was pretty bad, but it amused the crowd when it wasn't too sentimental.
The observations contained in the preceding chapter make it sufficiently evident, that the art of extemporaneous speaking, however advantageous to the christian minister, and however possible to be acquired, is yet attended with embarrassments and difficulties, which are to be removed only by long and arduous labor. It is not enough, however, to insist upon the necessity of this discipline.
I can easily conceive that the extemporaneous part of Punch, of which we may even yet form some notion from the puppet-shows, was not always very skilfully filled up, and that many platitudes were occasionally uttered by him; but still, on the whole, Punch had certainly more sense in his little finger than Gottsched in his whole body.
The Lord's Prayer was again said, with even more varieties than before; a few extemporaneous supplications were added. The process of coming-to seemed even more disagreeable, if one may judge by facial expression, than going into the trance.
The Netherlanders were too shrewd a people not to recognize the difference between the king of a great realm, who painted his face and wore satin petticoats, and the woman who entertained ambassadors, each in his own language, on gravest affairs of state, who matched in her wit and wisdom the deepest or the most sparkling intellects of her council, who made extemporaneous Latin orations to her universities, and who rode on horseback among her generals along the lines of her troops in battle-array, and yet was only the unmarried queen of a petty and turbulent state.
In fact, what I have here insisted upon, is exemplified in the case of the extemporaneous writers, whom I have already named. I would only carry their practice a step further, and devote an hour to a discourse instead of a day. Not to all discourses, for some ought to be written for the sake of writing, and some demand a sort of investigation, to which the use of the pen is essential.
When it comes to the actual debate experience shows that speeches committed to memory are almost always ineffective as compared with extemporaneous speaking. Even when your confidence is not disturbed by a slippery memory there is an impalpable touch of the artificial about the prepared speech which impairs its vitality.
A little more of the pachyderm would help me in this respect. Some day I will give you more self-analysis and self-criticism. I am what you might call an extemporaneous writer I write without any previous study or preparation, save in so far as my actual life from day to day has prepared me for it. I do not work up my subject, or outline it, or sketch it in the rough.
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