that he held it to be a duty to bestow upon a composition to be used in God's service not less, but more labour than upon any ordinary literary production. He showed but little sympathy with those preachers who, eschewing all ornaments of style, indulged in a laboured simplicity or offensive familiarity; and though at times he has himself been charged with going to the opposite extreme, and offending by his turgidity of expression, yet from the excellence of the motive it may well be regarded as a fault on the right side.* We do not, indeed, question the sincerity of those who hold a different opinion, yet we cannot but regard the fact of their so doing as a very curious and contradictory phenomenon of religious experience, and one which we can no more account for than we can for the somewhat kindred inconsistency of those persons, who, while content themselves to dwell in houses of cedar, would begrudge the smallest expense incurred for the beautifying the house of God.

Lest the marvellous power to which some men have attained should seem to place them beyond our reach as examples, we must remember that we necessarily hear more of the successes than the failures of great orators; and many of those who at times have produced the profoundest impression have been on other occasions powerless even to keep the attention of an audience.

* St. Augustine's remarks on the style of St. Cyprian would exactly apply to that of Dr. Chalmers, and may be read with advantage by all.-Conf. " De Doct. Christ." IV. 14.

Burke, for instance, in spite of his rich imagination, commanding intellect, and matchless eloquence, spoke oftener to empty benches or slumbering hearers than any of his contemporaries. And we are told that on one occasion a member hurrying to the House, and finding it rapidly emptying, asked with the greatest naïveté, "Is the House broken up, or is Burke on his legs?" If such, therefore, has been the manner in which some of the greatest orators which the world ever knew have been appreciated, we conclude that, in spite of all their study, it would be the height of presumption in any, but especially in the young and inexperienced, to expect to obtain a uniformly attentive hearing.

I must apologise to the reader for the fragmentary nature of the above chapter, and the length and frequency of the quotations; both faults are in a measure incidental to the subject. My original plan was to give a sketch of what Mr. Emerson would term "representative men amongst the world's orators; but it proved impossible to do this adequately without departing too far from the main object of the present work, and making this part of it out of all proportion with the rest. As to the quotations, it seemed better to acknowledge their parentage than to "disfigure them, as gipsies do stolen children," in order to prevent their being recognised.

CHAPTER XV.

"And how did Garrick speak the soliloquy last night?' 'Oh! against all rule, my Lord; most ungrammatically! betwixt the substantive and the adjective, which should agree together in number, case, and gender, he made a breach thus-stopping as if the point wanted settling; and betwixt the nominative case, which your Lordship knows should govern the verb, he suspended his voice in the epilogue a dozen times, three seconds and three fifths, by a stop-watch, my Lord, each time. Admirable grammarian!' 'But in suspending his voice, was the sense suspended likewise? did no expression of attitude or countenance fill up the chasm? was the eye silent? did you narrowly look?' 'I looked only at the stop-watch, my Lord.' 'Excellent observer!"" STERNE.

OME years ago a man was being tried for stealing-what, for the sake of euphony, we will call a Jerusalem pony.

The name of the counsel for the pro

secution was "Missing;" the defendant's counsel finding matters going against him, after making an elaborate appeal to the jury, wound up somewhat in the following manner:-" I think, therefore, gentlemen of the jury, you will all readily agree with me that the only fact which has been proved for

the prosecution is one which we never for a moment ventured to doubt, namely, that in this case 'the ass is missing.'

999

Now the whole force of the joke evidently depends upon the manner in which the last four words are uttered. To give them expression they are naturally divided into subject and predicate, and the voice suspended, though, from the shortness of the sentence, almost imperceptibly, after the first clause: thus, "the ass' is missing;" but pronounce them without this suspension, and, the whole stress coming upon the word missing, the joke would seem at best to be but an accidental one. This, I think, is one of the first principles of reading, to distinguish intuitively where the main division of a sentence occurs, and to let the chief suspension of the voice occur there. "The ass which has given us so much trouble in this case" is missing"-the main suspension here occuring after the word case, and the words preceding that being pronounced in a running continuous tone; so we may go on and lengthen the subject or predicate indefinitely, and yet the same principle must regulate the reading of the whole. The fault we are all apt to commit in reading is to ignore the suspensions of the voice natural in speaking, and attend only to the grammatical pauses. (By a suspension of the voice I mean any one of those various tones, all indicating incompleteness, into which a person will find himself surprised on coming unexpectedly to the conclusion of

a sentence. By a pause I mean the conclusive tones of voice naturally adopted when the sense is more or less complete.) Thus :

""Tis sorrow" builds the shining ladder up,
Whose golden rounds" are our calamities."

You cannot injure the sense here however long the
" and
voice is suspended at the words " sorrow
"rounds," because the sense is manifestly incom-
plete, and is shown to be so by the tone of voice;
but neglect this suspension altogether, and the lines
go for nothing; they are badly read, and the mind
cannot without an effort catch their full meaning.

Whereas, then, the first principle of accurate punctuation is, that the subject and predicate should not be separated by a grammatical pause; the first principle of good reading is, that they should be separated by a marked suspension of the voice. So much value may we attach to punctuation as a guide to the reader! It is not, however, only at the chief grammatical divisions of a sentence, but necessarily at every few words, that the suspension takes place; and the art of reading greatly depends upon the discrimination with which it is used, and the variety of tone with which, according to the context, it is accompanied. Each subordinate member of a sentence is as distinct from that which follows or precedes it as are the separate syllables of a word. The duration of the suspension which marks this distinctness must be regulated by the length of the