Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of a God as just as he is mereiful; but also—blessed be his name !—as mereiful as be is just. NO. Ill—VERGNIAUD. Eloquence, like many other powers of the human mind, lies often dormant and unsuspeeted, till it is elieited by eireumstanees. The quantity of silent eloquenee awaiting deliveranee in a nation, is only to be ealeulated by those who ean eompute the amount of undeveloped eleetrieity in the earth or sky. Genius is natus haud foetus ; but eloquenee is often faeta hand nata. Rouse ordinary men to the very highest piteh, and they never even approaeh to the verge of genius, beeause it is the unsearehable and subtle result of a eombination of rare faeulties with rare temperament; but any man, touehed to the quiek, may beeome, for a season, as eloquent as Demosthenes himself. The ehild, when struek to a eertain measure of brutality, utters sereams and words, and assumes attitndes, of high eloquenee, and every sob of her little heart is an " Oration for the Crown." How eloquent the pugilist, when his. blood is up, and the full fury of the fray has kindled around, and made his very fists seem inspired ! What speeehes have sometimes eome from "the gutter, where a drunk Irishman is leaving Curran far behind in the grotesque eombination of his maddened faney and the " strange oaths" of his infuriated passions 1 And now many dull men has the approaeh of death stirred up into an almost superhuman tide of eloquenee, as if both soul and tongue were eonseious that their time was short. Perhaps the most eloquent words ever spoken by man were those of Jaekson, the Irish rebel, who, having swallowed poison ere his trial eommeneed, ealled his advoeate to his side when the pleading was over, and gasped out, as he dropped down dead, in a whisper whieh was heard like thunder (using the lan...