"_Cujus vita fulgur,
ejus verba tonitrua_"--"if a man's life be lightning, his words will be
thunders." But the kind of oratory to be obtained by a constant practice
of declamation such as that which occupied the schools of the Rhetors
will be a very artificial lightning and a very imitated thunder--not the
artillery of heaven, but the Chinese fire and rolled bladders of the
stage. Nothing could be more false, more hollow, more pernicious than
the perpetual attempt to drill numerous classes of youths into a
reproduction of the mere manner of the ancient orators. An age of
unlimited declamation, an age of incessant talk, is a hotbed in which
real depth and nobility of feeling runs miserably to seed. Style is
never worse than it is in ages which employ themselves in teaching
little else. Such teaching produces an emptiness of thought concealed
under a plethora of words. This age of countless oratorical masters was
emphatically the period of decadence and decay. There is a hollow ring
about it, a falsetto tone in its voice; a fatiguing literary grimace in
the manner of its authors.
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