measures to any one that chose to impeach them, lived in perpetual war with one another, denouncing, prosecuting, defying each other face to face before the people, struggling desperately, per fas et nefas, not merely for victory and preeminence, but for life and for death. And yet, amidst such fierce and unsparing conflicts, with everything in the shape of public and private interest to excite their zeal to the highest pitch, and to stimulate them to the intensest exertions, Lord Brougham would have us believe that these combats à outrance, (if there ever were such,) were mere Eglinton tournaments, where mimic knights tilted upon a field strown with saw-dust, and lances not made to kill were shivered for the amusement of fine ladies! That nothing can be farther from the truth, any one that opens the Philippics of Demosthenes will be convinced before he has read a page. He will find the orator everywhere engaged in mortal combat -literally breathing threatenings and slaughter. As to the assertion that the Greek orators took less pains to inform their audiences than modern speakers, it is quite as gross a fallacy as the one we have been discussing, and springs, undoubtedly, from the same source. We refer to what we have already said in regard to the orations against Leptines, Aristocrates, etc. Not only are they as full of information as any speech in the four volumes before us and Lord Brougham, we suspect, will hardly deny that they are pretty fair specimens of the best English speaking-but to say nothing of vices of style of all sorts that abound in these volumes, we should be glad to have a single oration in this whole collection pointed out, that, if England were no more than a tale of the past, would attract, by its contents alone, as much attention as either of the above mentioned productions of Demosthenes. Which of them will better deserve to be edited by some future Wolf, with learned prolegomena, upon the fiscal system of Great Britain, or to be made a subject for the commentaries of the Petits and Heralduses yet unborn? The fact is the very reverse of what the learned Lord alleges it to be. The orators of Athens filled the places not only of the Parliament and the Ministers, as we have just seen, but of the modern Press, the "Fourth Estate," as well. They were all in all for the people. They were expected to be thoroughly versed in public affairs in the constitution and the laws, the history, the policy, foreign and domestic, of the State. This was the province, the profession, the authority, the very existence of a public man. If he did not possess this information, who should? What was he doing on the Bema? What pretension had he to lead the Demus? We do not now refer to the puerile notion which Cicero ascribes to Crassus, in his dialogue De Oratore, that the orator should be a living encyclopedia of science-Eschines and Demades, the latter especially, who made it a boast that he knew no school but the popular assembly, are enough-if any example were needed to explode that. But, for politics and law, and especially everything fitted to illustrate the subjects embraced within either, his whole strength lay in his knowledge of such things, and his skill in turning it to account. Rhetoric and Statesmanship, indeed, were considered as synonymous terms. Lord Brougham could not possibly have fallen into so gross an error, had he not confined his views entirely to the Philippics, and the two great orations against Eschines; though even with regard to these, his remarks are quite groundless. He seems not to have considered what was the peculiar character and objects of these famous harangues. The Philippics are not "chains of reasoning," to establish principles of science; they are rapid developments of practical truths, with a view to immediate action - they are vehement exhortations to the performance of duty, pressing every topic that can make it be felt as sacred and imperative. They fall within the class of deliberative eloquence, as it was understood by the Greeks, who regarded it, as we have seen, as more simple and direct than the judicial. It belonged, in the ancient democracies especially, rather to the category of action, than to that of science and speculation. It was, so to speak, a branch of the Executive Power. It aimed at influencing the conduct of men; it aimed at stirring them up to mighty exertions and high undertakings by whatever motives are best fitted to inspire masses with the enthusiasm called for by such efforts. The genius which distinguished the orator on such occasions, was that of the statesman and the captain. What he needed was a rapid sagacity, a sure coup d'œil to seize every occasion and turn it to the best account, a clear perception of the relation be * See Wachsmuth, Greek Antiq. v. 2. p. 196, (transl.) Pollux, 4. 16, for the ῥητοροι πολιτευομενοι, Hermann Manual. tween the means and the ends proposed, and the talent of inspiring others with his own confidence in the results. His eloquence is concerned with the future, rather than the past; it deals in prophecy and conjecture; it encounters danger with courage; it is sanguine of success in spite of difficulties. But mere conviction will not do; he must persuade, for his policy needs the sanction of others, and the success of an enterprise depends upon the spirit in which it is undertaken: possunt quia posse videntur. He must make his followers, if possible, as fanatical as the armies of conquerors the Hannibals and the Bonapartes. He must make his people act like one man, and that man a hero — he must oppose a factitious Philip to the real Philip. But this is not to be done by long trains or chains of reasoning; how absurd and pedantic would such things be, were they even possible, under the circumstances in question! He must address himself to the motives of human conduct. He must show that his measures are practicable, are politic, are fit, are morally necessary. To this end sentiment is one of his surest resources-the sense of honor, the sense of duty, the example of an illustrious ancestry, the pride of long established superiority, the sacred obligations of transmitting to our children the heritage of liberty and glory handed down to us from our fathers. He resorts continually to topics like these, not because he has no better ones, but because in fact no others can possibly supply their place. In such cases, the end of all reasoning is to show that what we do, or will that others. shall do, is reasonable, and this he does by showing that, being what they are, it is proper, it is becoming, it is right, it is indispensable that his hearers should pursue the course pointed out. He deals, therefore, not in syllogism and dissertation, but in maxims, in statements, in example and enthymeme. He lifts them up to the height of his argument, by working in them a moral regeneration. How else can he persuade them? How is he to prove to cowards that they ought to rush into the midst of dangers to the slothful, that they should be incessantly vigilant and active to the luxurious and corrupt, that they should prefer "hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp ?" He not only presses with the greatest force all the topics called for by the subject and the occasion, but what is a far more difficult Arist. Rhet. II. 20. task, he breathes into his audience a soul to appreciate them. Is he not a reasoner on that account? And if that is not reasoning, which urges with the greatest force the best reasons that can be imagined to produce conviction under the given circumstances, what is? And is it not, at all events, absurd, to speak de haut en bas, as Lord Brougham does, of such a prodigious triumph of mind, warmed and elevated by the most heroical spirit, as if it were a mere theatrical pomp of words? To put an analogous case; suppose Lord Chatham, during his immortal quinquennium, instead of displaying his genius in action, by a prompt, peremptory and absolute exercise of a gigantic executive power, wielded by his will and turned in the twinkling of an eye, wherever he saw a vulnerable spot in the body of the enemy's empire, had been compelled, as Demosthenes was, to go into a popular assembly and obtain its previous consent; does anybody suppose that the occasional inspirations of that great and ruling practical mind would have been uttered in long "chains of reasoning," in the House of Commons, or in pregnant harangues after the fashion of Demosthenes? If we are right in this view of the subject, the Philippics of Demosthenes are precisely what we should à priori expect them to be under the circumstances. They are still more -they are, like everything else he has left, perfect in their kind-the ideal of deliberative eloquence in a simple democracy, attacked, threatened, beset on all sides by a new and formidable foe. We shall presently, when we come to speak of Demosthenes as a statesman, have occasion to remark more particularly on that prophetic sagacity which enabled him to discern in Philip-long before others saw any serious danger on that side-the future destroyer of Greece. But it was difficult for some time to convince the people of Athens that a "man of Macedon" could possibly entertain so audacious a project, or, if he did, that without a navy, and without the coöperation of some of the leading Greek states, he had the least chance of accomplishing it. The orator had, therefore, a double task to perform. He had to show that Philip really was formidable, but that if met at once with powerful and systematic resistance, his ascendency in the north, founded as it was on fraud, injustice and violence, would be effectually overthrown. This task he performs as no other man who ever addressed a popular assembly could aspire to perform it. His portraiture of Philip shows how clearly he had conceived his character and designs, and how worthy he was to be the selected champion of Greece against that great man. He saw all the bearings of his policy - he felt the impression of his strong will and his ambitious, persevering, and indomitable spirit-he exposes the arts of corruption by which he makes himself a party in every state, and undermines cities otherwise unconquerable-he paints him in his campaigns exposed to hardship, to danger, arrested by no obstacle, discouraged by no difficulty, patiently waiting where he could not speedily execute, persevering always to the end; though a voluptuary, a free liver, a boon companion, loving to pass his evenings over the bottle with actors and gleewomen, yet sacrificing every comfort without hesitation, when he had an object to carry, exposing his life as if he had nothing to live for, giving up to fortune any part of his body she asked for, now an eye, then some other member, asking no compensation of her but success, and obtaining that always and everywhere, until a few more steps in his progress would bring his batteringrams up to the very gates of Athens. Let any man versed in the history of those times read over these orations of Demosthenes, and he will acknowledge that every view that could be presented by a statesman, that every topic which a man thinking and feeling on the subject of Athenian rights and power as the orator thought and felt, could imagine, for the purpose of awaking a degenerate people to a sense of their dangers and a determination to resist them, is pressed with the most evident reason, as with unrivalled power. What would Lord Brougham have had him do more? What would he-master of all modern science-have done in his place? He has given us specimens of his skill at translations, which are truly Demosthenes done into Brougham. Suppose he furnish us with a substitute better than the original, and show us what "chains of reasoning" would have kept out the conqueror so long? Voltaire scoffs at somebody for attempting to demonstrate the existence of a God by "X plus Y equal to Z." Would Lord Brougham defend a city in the same way? or instead of Demosthenes, play Duns? The strictures of the learned lord on the speech for the Crown strike us as not less erroneous than what he says of the Philippics. We concede that such a harangue would have been out of place as an argument in the Exchequer Chamber: and had the debate been confined to the issue in |