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ate the nervous susceptibility, which inspires courage while it seems like fear.

Nervousness, to give the susceptibility I speak of its familiar name, is perhaps the quality which great orators have the most in common. I doubt whether there has been any public speaker of the highest order of eloquence who has not felt an anxiety or apprehension, more or less actually painful, before rising to address an audience upon any very important subject on which he has meditated beforehand. This nervousness will, indeed, probably be proportioned to the amount of previous preparation, even though the necessities of reply or the changeful temperament which characterises public assemblies may compel the orator to modify, alter, perhaps wholly reject, what, in previous preparation, he had designed to say. The fact of preparation itself had impressed him with the dignity of the subject-with the responsibilities that devolve on an advocate from whom much is expected, on whose individual utterance results affecting the interests of many may depend. His imagination had been roused and warmed, and there is no imagination where there is no sensibility. Thus the orator had mentally surveyed, as it were, at a distance, the loftiest height of his argument; and now, when he is about to ascend to it, the awe of the altitude is felt.

According to traditions, despite the majestic self-possession Lord Macaulay truly ascribes to the tenor of his life, Mr Pitt was nervous before rising to speak; hence, perhaps, his recourse to stimulants. A surgeon, eminent in Brighton, some years ago told me that when he was a shopboy in London, he used to bring to Mr Pitt the dose of laudanum and sal-volatile which the great statesman habitually took before speaking. The laudanum perhaps hurt his constitution more than the port wine, which he drank by the bottle; the wine might be necessary to sustain the physical

spirits lowered by the laudanum. Mr Fox was nervous before speaking; so, I have heard, was Lord Plunket. A distinguished member of the Whig party, now no more, and who was himself one of the most sensitive of men and one of the most attractive of orators, told me that once in the House of Commons, he had crossed over to speak to Mr Canning on some question of public business, a little time before the latter delivered one of his most remarkable speeches ; and on taking the hand Mr Canning extended to him, he exclaimed, “I fear you are ill, your hand is so cold and damp." Is it?" answered Canning, smiling; "so much the better: that shows how nervous I am; I shall speak well to-night." Mr Stapylton remarks how perceptible to those familiar with Mr Canning was the difference in his aspect and manner before and after one of his great orations; and a very clever French writer upon the Art of Oratory compares the anguish (angoisse) which oppresses the mind of a public speaker while burdened with the sense of some great truth that he is charged to utter, with the joyous elation of spirit that follows the relief from the load.

The truth is, that nervousness is sympathetic. It imparts a strange magnetic affinity with the audience; it redoubles the orator's attention to the effect he is producing on his audience; it quickens his self-possession, it stimulates his genius, it impresses on those around him a fellow-feeling, for it evinces earnestness, and earnestness is the soul of oratory-the link between the lips of one and the hearts of many. Round an orb that is self-luminous the atmosphere always quivers. When a man does not feel nervous before rising, he may certainly make an excellent sensible speech, but let him not count on realising the higher success which belongs to great orators alone.

In speeches thoroughly impromptu, in which the mind of the

speaker has not had leisure to brood over what he is called upon suddenly to say, the nervousness either does not exist or is much less painfully felt; because then the speaker has not set before his imagination some ideal perfection to which he desires to attain, and of which he fears to fall short. And this I take to be the main reason why speakers who so value themselves on readiness that they never revolve beforehand what they can glibly utter, do not rise beyond mediocrity. To no such speaker has posterity accorded the name of orator. The extempore speaker is not an orator, though the orator must of necessity be, whenever occasion calls for it, an extempore speaker. Extemporaneous speaking is, indeed, the groundwork of the orator's art; preparation is the last finish, and the most difficult of all his accomplishments. To learn by heart as a schoolboy, or to prepare as an orator, are two things not only essentially different, but essentially antagonistic to each other; for the work most opposed to an effective oration is an elegant essay.

As with the orator, so, though in a less degree, it is with the writerindeed, with all intellectual aspirants. The author, whatever he attempts, from an epic to an epigram, should set before his ambition that "perfect excellency which is better known in a man's mind than followed in a man's dede." Aim at the highest, and at least you soar; but the moment you set before yourself an ideal of excellence, you are as subject to diffidence as, according to Roger Ascham, you are freed from despair. Emulation, even in the brutes, is sensitively "nervous." See the tremor of the thoroughbred racer before he starts. The dray-horse does not tremble, but he does not emulate. It is not his work to win a race. Says Marcus Antoninus, "It is all one to a stone whether it be thrown upwards or downwards." Yet the emulation of a man of genius is seldom with his contemporaries, that is, in

wardly in his mind-although outwardly, in his acts, it would seem

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The competitors with whom his secret ambition seeks to vie are the dead. Before his vision rise all the masters of the past in the art to which he devotes his labour. If he forgets them to study his contemporaries, he is undone-he becomes a plagiarist. From that which time has made classical we cannot plagiarise. The spirit of our own age compels us to be original, even where we imitate the forms of an age gone by. Molière cannot plagiarise from Terence and Plautus, nor Racine from Euripides, nor Pope from Horace, nor Walter Scott from the old Border Minstrels. Where they imitate they reproduce. But we cannot reproduce what is actually living. We cannot reproduce our contemporaries; we can but copy them if we take them as our models. The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it. But we cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for -that task is left to others. the desire for excellence comes, therefore, the desire for approbation. And this distinguishes intellectual excellence from moral excellence; for the latter has no necessity of human tribunal; it is more inclined to shrink from the public than to invite the public to be its judge. To the aspirants to moral good the vox populi is not the vox Dei. The Capitol has no laurel crowns for their brows; enough for them if they pass over earth unobserved, silently educating themselves for heaven. There are natures so happily constituted that they are moved irresistibly to good by an inborn affinity to goodness; for some souls, like some forms, are born into the world, beautiful, and take as little apparent pains as do beautiful forms to increase or preserve beauty. They have but to maintain health by the way of life most in harmony with their organisation, and their beauty endures to

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the last; for old age has a beauty of its own, even in the physical form; and the Moral Beautiful gradually becomes venerable without even losing its bloom.

But these natures are exceptions to the ordinary law of our race, which proportions the moral worth of a man, as it does the worth of a work from his hand, to the degree of skilled labour by which he has transformed into new shapes the original raw material. And labour needs motive; and motive implies reward.

To moral excellence there are two rewards, neither of which is bestowed by the loud huzzas of the populace; one within the conscience-one far out of reach, beyond the stars.

But for intellectual excellence, man asks first a test, and next a reward, in the praise of his fellow

men.

Therefore the love of human approbation is at the root of all those sustained labours by which man works out his ideal of intellectual excellence; at least so generally, that we need not care to count the exceptions. During the later stages of a great career, that love of approbation, in a mind well disciplined, often ceases to be perceptible, chiefly because it has become too habitually familiar to retain distinctness. We are, then, as little acutely sensible of the pervading force of the motive, as, while in health, we are sensible of the beats of our pulse and the circulation of our blood. But there it still is, no less;-there, in the pulse, in the blood. A cynic or a misanthrope may disown it; but if he have genius, and the genius urge him to address men even in vindication of misanthropy and cynicism, he is inevitably courting the approbation which he pretends to scorn. As Cicero says with quiet irony, "The authors who affect contempt for a name in the world, put their names to the books which they invite the world to read." But to return to my starting-point-The desire of approbation will be accom

panied by that nervous susceptibility which, however well disguised, is inseparable from the vibrating oscillation between hope and fear. And this nervousness in things not made mechanically familiar by long practice, will be in proportion to the height of a man's own standard of excellence, and the care with which he measures the difficulties that interpose between a cherished conception and a worthy execution of design.

Out of this nervousness comes the Shyness common to all youth, where it aspires to excel and fears to fail.

It follows, from what I have said, that those races are the most active, have accomplished the greatest marvels of energy, and, on the whole, exhibit the highest standard of public honesty in administrative departments, to which the national character of Shyness is generally accorded, distinct from its false counterfeit Pride.

For the best guarantee for honesty is a constant sense of responsibility, and that sense is rendered lively and acute by a certain anxious diffidence of self-which is-Shy

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The Turk is proud, not shy; he walks the world, or rather lets the world walk by him, serene in his selfesteem. The Red Indian is proud, not shy; his dignity admits of no Dusopia-is never embarrassed nor taken by surprise. But the Turk and the Red Indian do not improve; and when civilisation approaches them, it is rather to corrupt than enlighten. The British race are shy, to a proverb. And what shore does not bear the stamp of their footstep? What boundary in the regions of intellect has yet satisfied their ardour of progress? Ascham's ideal of perfectness is in the mind of the whole nation.

To desire to do something, not only as well as it can be done, but

better than we can do it-to feel to exaggeration all our own natural deficiencies towards the doing of it -to resolve by redoubled energy and perseverance to extract from art whatever may supply those deficiencies in nature-this is the surest way to become great this is the character of the English race-this should be the character of an English genius.

But he who thus feels, thus desires, and thus resolves, will keep free from rust those mainsprings of action-the sensibility to shame, and the yearning towards perfection. It is the elasticity of the watch spring that renders it the essential principle to the mechanism of the watch; but elasticity is only the property of solid bodies to recover, after yielding to pressure, their former shape. The mind which retains to the last youth's quick sus

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ceptibility to disgrace and to glory, retains to the last the power to resume the shape that it wore in youth. Cynicism is old at twenty. Impudence has no elasticity. you care no more than the grasshopper for the favour of gods and the reverence of men, your heart has the age of Tithonus, though your cheek have the bloom of Achilles. But if, even alone in your room or a desert, you could still blush or turn pale at the thought of a stain on your honour-if your crest still could rise, your pulse quicken, at the flash of some noble thought or brave deed-then you have the heart of Achilles, though at the age of Tithonus. There is a certain august shamefacedness the Romans called it PUDOR-which, under hairs white as snow, preserves the aspect of youth to all personations of honour, of valour, of genius.

THE LIVES OF TWO LADIES.

FEW questions, incapable of direct demonstration, have given the world so much trouble, or, at least, have occasioned so much discussion and expenditure of words, as that most evident, yet most subtle difference between men and women, which most rational people are thoroughly conscious of, but which very few, on either side, have managed to define without rising into arbitrary judgment or falling into misty vagueness. To discriminate the real difference which lies between them, yet to acknowledge and allow for the broader human identity which often temporarily confounds that difference, is matter apparently too difficult for ordinary observers. distinction so delicate, so important, so apparent, yet so indescribable, is precisely such as tempts the superficial philosopher into making sharp lines of division which have no existence in nature. All of us know very well by actual experience that

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there are women whose hard lot lies in the heat of the life-battle, and whose hands are burdened with the heaviest labours and responsibilities proper to a man's career in the world-all of us know that there are men almost more tender, charitable, and beneficent than it is a woman's vocation to prove herself. The line of separation is confused by many an anomaly, and often lost, not only in the contradictoriness of life, but in the sweeping tide of universal human nature which by times floods over all distinctions. Nevertheless, there it remains, always reasserting itself. We are aware of a different atmosphere when we step out of that world of men where popular admiration finds its heroes, into the smaller and daintier hemisphere where altogether independent of act and deed, possessors of a more ethereal reputation-are congregated those women who have

outlived contemporary applauses, and received enfeoffment into the homage of the world.

Of such, yet of the very opposite extremities of such, as different from each other as it is possible to imagine two human creatures living at the same time to be, are the two women, Mrs Delany and Mrs Thrale, who have lately been represented to the public. Whether we are ever likely to come to an end of the domestic and personal records of their long-winded century, it seems impossible to predict; but here, out of that age, so short a way removed from us in reality, but so utterly far offfurther off than the Gothic distances of medieval times-have just arisen, in a clearer personality than before, these two recognisable figures, already by name and character as well known to us as if they had been country-neighbours or fellowtownsfolk of our immediate sphere. Many an English family which lives in contented and total ignorance of its neighbour family next door, knows Mrs Delany almost as well as if she had been gossip at its christenings, and lent her authority to its social ambitions; and scores of persons, ignorant enough of their own kith and kin, would blush to be supposed unacquainted with the lady of Streatham, the afflicted wife and gay widow, whose second marriage still awakens among us almost as keen a discussion as though we had all entered personally into the squabble, and warned and denounced the culprit. If this intimate acquaintance with posterity is in any sense to be called fame, it has come to these two ladies without any special effort on their part. They were not women of genius; they were not "working" women; they neither wrote books nor organised public movements. On the face of things they had no personal claim whatever to the recognition of any, even the contemporary age which enjoyed their sprightly conversations, admired their good looks, and criti

cised their follies. It is not even enough to say that it was their association with distinguished men which brought them out so clearly before the eyes of the world, for others of the same circle have passed out of human ken, and even Fanny Burney, whose history helps to throw light upon theirs, has not been able to interest the world in her own personal chronicle, and becomes unrecognisable under the name of her marriage, to know the particulars of which no human creature cares two straws. But we were all born into acquaintance with those two other women who were not authoresses. We have all known from our cradle the benign old lady at Windsor with whom old King George and his virtuous Queen drank tea, and heard the echoes of that hubbub through which the brewer's widow hastened to her second nuptials: It would be difficult to tell upon what grounds this permanent reputation has been built. But the fact is undeniable; and it forms a remarkable illustration of the nature of female fame. Nobody will deny that women have now and then, especially within the last hundred years, snatched scanty bays out of the hands of time. But it is not greatness of intellect, nor power of production, nor genius in any demonstration, which raises such a star as that of Mrs Delany into the historical firmament. She did nothing but pretty efforts of female ingenuity-said nothing very distinctly brilliant-yet there she shines calmly over the heads of the Carters, Rowes, and Montagus, in tender, individual celebrity. Is it that some natural instinct of humanity points out as the perfection of her sex, the appreciative sympathetic woman, whose business it is to comprehend, to perceive, to quicken the eye and ear of society with that bright and sweet intelligence which, in the most subtle, imperceptible way, leads, and forms, and refines public opinion, and brings genius and excellence into fashion? or is it, as

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