His words come from his mouth; ours from our breast;
He prays but faintly, and would be denied ;

We pray with heart and soul."

The poet may well inquire, "Pleads he in earnest ?"

It is thus, in consideration of Elocution being an attribute virtually common to all races and degrees of men, but marred and perverted by conventional caprice, that it is in this volume founded upon a few simple and natural rules. There are somewhere about 38,000 words in our language, and as thought and feeling is ever transposing those 38,000 words into millions of different positions to imply ten thousand different meanings and shades of meaning, after the manner of the arithmetical rule for permutations and combinations, to form a code of rules equal to every exigency is simply an impossibility. Several elocutionists have bravely attempted it, however, and in a result, unsatisfactory indeed, have produced curve lines, straight lines, and formidable tables, clefs, bars, crotchets, demi-semi-quavers, rule upon rule, line upon line, and precept upon precept, hard, technical, and indigestible, all conspiring to present something to the theoretical rhetorician more recondite and abstruse than the laws of Kepler. All those abstruse rules may be perfectly true and applicable; but so might the complement of three or four hundred more items of rule, exception, observation, and remark, and still leave the subject very far from being exhausted. Orthoepy proper, Elocution proper, is not artificial. The most barbarous and illiterate tribes with which we come in contact have word-symbols, aided by their legitimate and natural accompaniments, which render the members of the tribe mutually intelligible. It is not the province of the elocutionist to propound artificial rules, but to allow art to take care of itself, and to rid from an

incubus a spontaneous principle of nature which art has sophisticated and abused. We wish we had some term less hackneyed than rules for the few simple formula we propound. In our system we observe nature, and simply note the description of the laws by which in speech nature is regulated.

We hold Elocution not to be founded upon rules, but rules upon Elocution. We humbly and only lay claim to show how the subject may be most advantageously approached. Those who pretend to do more, engage to lay stepping-stones through a deep and illimit able ocean, to arrogate to themselves the prerogative of the Almighty, how to manipulate in the grand music of humanity the ten thousand thousand stops and chords of the human soul, in all its affinities with mortality and eternity, weakness, might, and mystery. The duty we have engaged to perform to the student is discharged if we have habituated him to mix his Elocution, like Opie's colours, "With brains, sir," and, let us add, With soul, sir!

In the Table the simplest and most common words in which the elementary sounds of the English language occur have been selected. It may be a beneficial exercise, a priori, to read the example words over frequently and aloud, to accustom the vocal organs and the ear to the utterance of the various sounds. If the student's pronunciation may be provincial, ill-trained, or doubtful, assiduous recourse ought to be had to a good pronouncing-dictionary, of which perhaps that of Webster can be most safely recommended.

CHAPTER I.

THE VOICE.

VOICE is produced by air traversing the larynx simultaneously with its muscular tension. All the modifications of voice depend almost solely upon the different modifications of the tension of the laryngial muscles. The quantity of air that traverses the larynx in a given time has almost nothing to do with the character of vocal effect, as some previous elocutionists have erroneously assumed. In confirmation of this, it is easily ascertained by experiment that a whisper requires as much breath as the most baritone utterance in oratory—the cause of the different vocal result being the muscular action of the vocal organism. Scarcely any truth in the range of natural phenomena is more obvious than this, yet perhaps none is more generally lost sight of. This defect alone goes to form the aggregate of the hissing, exasperated, and unnatural vocalism which we hear not infrequently from the rostrum of the present day. Even a speaker possessing the most masterly resources of language, and the most correct perception of the logical generalisation and analysis of sentences, can never superinduce good Elocution upon such a basis. The raising of the voice to any elevation of pitch involves an air of excitement and flurry incompatible with rhetorical dignity of deportment. The object in view may have been to impart to the oration dignity and strength; but what is produced is a painful and unnatural exasper

ation of tone, more in keeping with our conception of the cries of a witch in the agonies of torture, than of a thinker and a scholar giving weight and emphasis to the utterance of the passions of his heart or the thoughts of his brain. The end of such speaking must, of course, naturally ensue -a breaking down through hoarseness, and a want of saliva and breath. It is a subject of deep regret that this is too often an error of those who really do think, and whose thoughts are valuable. We may see this verbal abortion illustrated every day in the pulpit and elsewhere ; and the defect cannot be cancelled by the ripest scholarship, the most powerful intellect, and the most splendid literary talents. Such are the effects of a bad elocutionary example or training in early life. And perhaps no habit which it is possible for youth to contract is more difficult to remove by the efforts of maturer years. Hence the urgent necessity of a competent elocutionary training in youth the force of habit is strong, and the cartilages of the larynx gradually become more unimpressionable and unyielding, till, finally, certain of them assume the consistency of bone.

In the orator, the laryngial muscles ought to be developed by exercise, like those of the blacksmith's arm; and not only to the exercise of vigorous strength, but to the most rapid delicacy and versatility of action. Nothing more emphatically stamps the power of the orator or actor than the infinite resources of inflection he may have at his command; and in the most special manner the deep, full, and richly sonorous tone which we rarely find, except among the acknowledged masters of elocutionary art. We not infrequently hear, in disputations at stair-heads in third-class streets, tones as high, though without the