Cicero concludes his celebrated books De Oratore with some precepts for pronunciation and action, without which part he affirms that the best orator in the world can never succeed; and an indifferent one, who is master of this, shall gain much greater applause. What could make a stronger impression,' says he, than those exclamations of Gracchus?" Whether shall I turn? Wretch that I am! to what place betake myself? Shall I go to the capitol? Alas! it is overflowed with my brother's blood. Or shall I retire to my house; Yet there I behold my mother plunged in misery, weeping and despairing!" These breaks and turns of passion, it seems, were so inforced by the eyes, voice, and gesture of the speaker, that his very enemies could not refrain from tears. I insist,' says Tully, upon this the rather, because our orators, who are as it were actors of the truth itself, have quitted this manner of speaking; and the players, who are but the imitators of truth, have taken it up.'

I shall therefore pursue the hint he has here given me, and for the service of the British stage I shall copy some of the rules which this great Roman master has laid down; yet without confining myself wholly to his thoughts or words: and to adapt this essay the more to the purpose for which I intend it, instead of the examples he has inserted in this discourse out of the ancient tragedies, I shall make use of parallel passages out of the most celebrated of our

own.

The design of art is to assist action as much as possible in the representation of nature; for the appearance of reality is that which moves us in all representations, and these have always the greater force the nearer they approach to nature, and the less they show of imitation.

Nature herself has assigned to every motion of the soul its peculiar cast of the countenance, tone of voice, and manner of gesture, through the whole person; all the features of the face and tones of the voice answer, like strings upon musical instruments, to the impressions made on them by the mind. Thus the sounds of the voice, according to the various touches which raise them, form themselves into an acute or grave, quick or slow, loud or soft, tone. These too may be subdivided into various kinds of tones, as the gentle, the rough, the contracted, the diffuse, the continued, the intermitted, the broken, abrupt, winding, softened, or elevated. Every one of these may be employed with art and judgment; and all supply the actor, as colours do the painter, with an expressive variety.

Anger exerts its peculiar voice in an acute, raised, and hurrying sound. The passionate character of king Lear, as it is admirably drawn by Shakspeare, abounds with the strongest instances of this kind.

Fiery! what quality?-why Gloster! Gloster!

I'd speak with the duke of Cornwall and his wife.
Are they inform'd of this? my breath and blood!
Fiery! the fiery duke!-

&c.

Sorrow and complaint, demand a voice quite different; flexible, slow, interrupted, and modulated in a mournful tone: as in that pathetical soliloquy of cardinal Wolsey on his fall.

'Farewell!-a long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man!-to day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls as I do."

We have likewise a fine example of this in the whole of Andromache in The Distrest Mother, particularly in these lines,

"I'll go, and in the anguish of my heart
Weep o'er my child-

-If he muft die, my life

wrapt in his, I shall not long survive,
"Tis for his sake that I have suffer'd life,
Groan'd in captivity, and out-liv❜d Hector.
Yes, my Astyanax, we'll go together!
Together to the realms of night we'll go;
There to thy ravish'd eyes thy sire I'll show,
And point him out among the shades below.'

Fear expresses itself in a low, hesitating, and abject sound. If the reader considers the following speech of lady Macbeth, while her husband is about the murder of Duncan and his grooms, he will imagine her even affrighted with the sound of her own voice while she is speaking it.

Alas! I am afraid they have awak'd,

And 'tis not done; th' attempt, and not the deed,
Confounds us-Hark!-I laid the daggers ready,
He could not miss them. Had he not resembled
My father as he slept, I had done it.'

Courage assumes a louder tone, as in that speech of Don Sebastian.

Here satiate all your fury;

Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me;
I have a soul that like an ample shield

Can take in all, and verge enough for more.'

Pleasure dissolves into a luxurious, mild, tender, and joyous modulation; as in the following lines in Caius Marius.

• Lavinia! O there's music in the name,

That, softening me to infant tenderness,

Makes my heart spring like the first leaps of life.'

And perplexity is different from all these; grave, but not bemoaning, with an earnest uniform sound of voice; as in that celebrated speech of Hamlet.

To be, or not to be!

-that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The stings and arrows of outrageous fortune;
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ach, and a thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd! To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream! Ay, there's the rub;
For, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause-There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrongs, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardles bear,
To groan and sweat under a weary life?
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather choose those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.'

As all these varieties of voice are to be directed by the sense, so the action is to be directed by the voice, and with a beautiful propriety, as it were, to enforce it. The arm, which by a strong figure Tully calls the orator's weapon, is to be sometimes raised and extended; and the hand, by its motion, sometimes to lead, and sometimes to follow, the words as they are uttered. The stamping of the foot too has its proper expression in contention, anger, or absolute command. But the face is the epitome of

the whole man, and the eyes are as it were the epitome of the face; for which reason, he says, the best judges among the Romans were not extremely pleased even with Roscius himself in his mask. No part of the body, besides the face, is capable of as many changes as there are different emotions in the mind, and of expressing them all by those changes. Nor is this to be done without the freedom of the eyes; therefore Theophrastus called one, who barely rehearsed his speech with his eyes fixed, an 'absent

actor.'

As the countenance admits of so great variety, it requires also great judgment to govern it. Not that the form of the face is to be shifted on every occasion, lest it turn to farce and buffoonery; but it is certain that the eyes have a wonderful power of marking the emotions of the mind; sometimes by a stedfast look, sometimes by a careless one-now by a sudden regard, then by a joyful sparkling, as the sense of the word is diversified: for action is, as it were, the speech of the features and limbs, and must therefore conform itself always to the sentiments of the soul. And it may be observed, that in all which relates to the gesture there is a wonderful force implanted by nature; since the vulgar, the unskilful, and even the most barbarous, are chiefly affected by this. None are moved by the sound of words but those who understand the language; and the sense of many things is lost upon men of a dull apprehension: but action is a kind of universal tongue: all men are subject to the same passions, and consequently know the same marks of them in others, by which they themselves express them,

Perhaps some of my readers may be of opinion that the hints I have here made use of out of Cicero are somewhat too refined for the players on our theatre; in answer to which, I venture to lay it down