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lived from his youth in the great world , and having been familiarly conversant with the classics of all nations , his most unprepared speaking
( or if Critics will have it so , his most negligent ) must have been at least grammatical , which it not only uniformly was , but distinguished by its taste . more than that could not have
belonged to it , without the very care which his habits and his talents equally rejected . He undoubtedly attended as little to the musical intonation of his speeches as to the language in which they were
expressed—his emphases were the unstudied effusions of nature—the vents of a mind , burning intensely with the generous flame of public spirit and benevolence , beyond all controul or management when impassioned , and above the rules to which inferior
things are properly subjected : his sentences often rapidly succeeded , and almost mixed themselves with one another , as the lava rises in bursts from the mouth of a volcano , when the resistless energies of the subterranean world are at their height .
These last remarks require , however , some explanation ; that I may not appear to depreciate the executive part of public speaking , which is worthy of the utmost care and cultivation . — No man admired it more than
Mr . Fox , nor was a juster , though always a liberal and indulgent critic of performances upon the stage . Theatrical representations which demand the talent of Eloquence , are generally the works of great poets , with which the cultivated parts of the audience are familiar , which they have , of course , almost present to their memories , and
which , involving no consequences beyond the emotions they are calculated to administer , exact the most perfect representations . —In such cases , the least departure from the justest
expression of the passions , the smallest defects in voice or gesture , diminish the fame of the actor ; but , upon the real stage of life , where the great affairs of the world are transacted , and
where men speak their own sentiments in their own natural language , the case is somewhat different . No man , in either Douse of Parliament , or in our our Is of Justice , ever felt
as if he were ia a box at Covent Garden or Drury Lane ; and , even upon the stage itself , it will be found ,
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after all , that the rare talent of the actor has ^ its seat in the superior sen sibilities of the mind , which identif " him for the moment with the ch a ^ racters he represents . —Yet , certainly neither the actor nor the orator can be
said to have reached the summit of their arts without the utmost attention to all the delicacies and graces of the most perfect delivery j not , indeed thought of at the moment , which would be utterly unworthy of a great statesman engaged in the mighty concerns
of an empire , but to be insensibl y acquired by studious observation , and wrought as it were into the habit , so as to be as much a component part of the man as his countenance or his address . —I thought it necessary to introduce these observations , lest 1 should
appear to undervalue such essential parts of public speaking as utterance and action . —Demosthenes seems to have thought them almost every thing ; and , even with our habits , so different from those of the ancients ,
they would be to most men immense advantages , though nothing at all to Mr . Fox . My admiration of his talents , and my zeal for the lustre of his memory have already led me much farther than I intended when I began my answer to your letter ; yet I find it difficult
now to close it without saying something upon the principles which uniformly characterize his speeches , after he had arrived at that maturity of thought and reflection , which laid the foundations of his exalted character as
a statesman . It is not my intention to examine them in their order , nor in their details , but to advert only , and very shortly , to such of them as most strikingly illustrate the distinguishing features of them all . t
The spirit which will be found o pervade and animate them is the pure but regulated spirit of liberty , which he justly considered to be , not only the prime blessing of private life , but the fulcrum upon which every civu establishment must rest for its security . —For my own part , 1 have always been convinced , that the Jaws which govern the natural world are not more fixed and unalte rable , tm those which preside over the sate ^ and happiness of man in a state ot ciety . Mighty powers , indeed , m « be vested in all governments , «*<* constituted , and many restraints ru
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332 Lord Erskine ' s Character of Mr . Foxy as an Orator and Statesman .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1815, page 332, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1761/page/4/
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