scope of this art is, to support truth and virtue, to maintain the rights and liberties of mankind, to alleviate the miseries and distresses of life, or to defend the innocent and accuse the guilty. The masters of rhetoric among the Greeks and Romans have considered an oration as consisting of three or four parts, called the exordium, or mere beginning; the narration and confirmation, extending from thence to the peroration, or recapitulation and conclusion of what has been said. Now, as these parts of an oration differ widely in nature from each other, so they require a difference of style. A discourse may open in a variety of ways, bespeaking the favour and attention of the audience, as by an address to those who preside in chief; with an apology; with setting forth the design of the point in debate; or with any other form, arising from the speaker's consideration of his own situation, or the person of his hearers. But, from whatever occasion the exordium may take its rise, in general it should be short, plain, and modest. Swelling introductions to plain subjects are ridiculous, and to great actions unnecessary, because they sufficiently show and magnify themselves; not but, on some occasions, it may be proper to begin with spirit and fire. Examples of this kind are found in Cicero. The language, too, must be plain, simple, and concise in the narration, which is the part for stating the subject, and setting forth its consideration under one or more propositions; the fewer and clearer the better. Neither must the speaker rise much in the confirmation, where he is to prove the point under consideration, by proper illustrations, apt, short, and plain examples, by expressive similitudes, cogent arguments, and just observations, backed and supported by authorities divine and human. Here the speaker must make his way to the judgment and conviction of his audience, by words and matter weighty and significant; in sentences grave and unaffected ;-in short, rather by strong good sense in familiar language, than by trifling observations in hard words and studied ornaments. The subject being opened, explained, and confirmed, in the three first parts; that is to say, the speaker, having gained the attention and judgment of his audience, must proceed in the peroration to complete his conquest over the passions, such as imagination, admiration, surprise, hope, joy, love, fear, grief, anger. To these some application may be made in the exordium; but now the court must be paid wholly to them, in managing which is

required no small skill and address. Now, therefore, the speaker must begin to exert himself. Here it is that a fine genius may display itself in the use of amplification, enume-ration, interrogation, metaphor, and every ornament that can render a discourse entertaining, winning, striking, and enforcing. Thus the orator may gain the ascendant over his audience, can turn the current of their minds his own way, either like the rapid Severn, with uplifted head rushing on impetuous, or like the smooth-gliding Thames, gently rising by almost imperceptible advances.

It is only necessary, in fact, for the orator to keep one man in view amidst the multitude that surrounds him; and, excepting those enumerations which require some variety in order to paint the passions, conditions, and characters, he ought merely, whilst composing, to address himself to that one man whose mistakes he laments, and whose foibles he discovers. This man is to him as the genius of Socrates, standing continually at his side, and by turns interrogating him, or answering his questions. This is he whom the orator ought never to lose sight of in writing, till he obtain a conquest over his prepossessions. The arguments which will be sufficiently persuasive to overcome his opposition, will equally control a large assembly.

The orator will derive still farther advantages from a numerous concourse of people, where all the impressions made at the time will convey the finest triumphs of the art, by forming a species of action and reaction between the auditory and the speaker. It is in this sense that Cicero is right in saying, "That no man can be eloquent without a multitude to hear him." The auditor came to hear a discourse; the orator attacks him, accuses him, makes him abashed; addresses him at one time as his confidant, at another as his mediator or his judge. See with what address he unveils his most concealed passions; with what penetration he shows him his most intimate thoughts; with what energy he annihilates his best framed excuses! The culprit repents. Profound attention, consternation, confusion, remorse, all announce that the orator has penetrated, in his retired meditations, into the recesses of the heart. Then, provided no ill-timed sally of wit follow to blunt the strokes of Christian eloquence, there may be in the church two thousand auditors, yet there will be but one thought, but one

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opinion; and all those individuals united, form that ideal man whom the orator had in view while composing his discourse.

But, you may ask, where is this ideal man, composed of so many different traits, to be found, unless we describe some chimerical being? Where shall we find a phantom like this, singular but not outré, in which every individual may recognise himself, although it resembles not any one? Where shall we find him? In your own heart. Often retire there. Survey all its recesses. There you will trace both the pleas for those passions which you will have to combat, and the source of those false reasonings which you must point out. To be eloquent we must enter within ourselves. The first productions of a young orator are generally too far-fetched. His mind, always on the stretch, is making continual efforts, without his ever venturing to commit himself to the simplicity of nature, until experience teach him that, to arrive at the sublime, it is, in fact, less necessary to elevate his imagination, than to be deeply impressed with his subject.

If you have studied the sacred books; if you have observed men; if you have attended to writers on morals, who serve you instead of historians; if you have become familiar with the language of orators, make trial of your eloquence upon yourself, become, so to speak, the auditor of your own discourses; and thus, by anticipating the effect which they ought to produce, you will easily delineate true characters; you will perceive that, notwithstanding the shades of difference which distinguish them, all men bear an interior resemblance to one another, and that their vices have a uniformity, because they always proceed either from weakness or interest. In a word, your descriptions will not be indeterminate; and the more thoroughly you shall have examined what passes within your own breast, with more ability will you unfold the hearts of others.

When Christian orators begin their career, the zeal for the salvation of souls which animates them doth not render them always unmindful of the glory which follows great success. Å blind desire to shine and to please is often at the expense of that substantial honour which might be obtained, were they to give themselves up to the pure emotions of piety, which so well agree with the sensibility necessary to eloquence.

It is unquestionably to be wished, that he who devotes himself to the arduous labour which preaching requires, should be wholly ambitious to render himself useful to the cause of religion. To such, reputation can never be a sufficient recompense. But if motives so pure have not sufficient sway in your breast, calculate, at least, the advantages of self-love, and you may perceive how inseparably connected these are with the success of your ministry.

Is it on your own account that you preach? Is it for you that religion assembles her votaries in a temple? You ought never to indulge so presumptuous a thought. However, I only consider you as an orator. Tell me, then, what is this you call eloquence? Is it the wretched trade of imitating that criminal, mentioned by a poet in his satires, who "balanced his crimes before his judges with antithesis?" Is it the puerile secret of forming jejune quibbles? of rounding periods? of tormenting one's self by tedious studies, in order to reduce sacred instruction into a vain amusement? Is this, then, the idea which you have conceived of that divine art which disdains frivolous ornaments-which sways the most numerous assemblies, and which bestows on a single man the most personal and majestic of all sovereignties? Are you in quest of glory? You fly from it. Wit alone is never sublime; and it is only by the vehemence of the passions that you can become eloquent.

Reckon up all the illustrious orators. Will you find among them conceited, subtle, or epigrammatic writers? No; these immortal men confined their attempts to affect and persuade; and their having been always simple, is that which will always render them great. How is this? You wish to proceed in their footsteps, and you stoop to the degrading pretensions of a rhetorician! And you appear in the form of a mendicant, soliciting commendations from those very men who ought to tremble at your feet. Recover from this ignominy. Be eloquent by zeal, instead of being a mere declaimer through vanity. And be assured, that the most certain method of preaching well for yourself, is to preach usefully to others.-MAURY.

THE STUDY OF NATURE.

In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments. Such a result can, however, only be reaped as the fruit of observation and intellect, combined with the spirit of the age, in which are reflected all the varied phases of thought. He who can trace, through bygone times, the stream of our knowledge to its primitive source, will learn from history how, for thousands of years, man has laboured, amid the ever-recurring changes of form, to recognise the invariability of natural laws, and has thus by the force of mind gradually subdued a great portion of the physical world to his dominion. In interrogating the history of the past, we trace the mysterious course of ideas yielding the first glimmering perception of the same image of a Cosmos, or harmoniously ordered whole, which, dimly shadowed forth to the human mind in the primitive ages of the world, is now fully revealed to the maturer intellect of mankind as the result of long and laborious observation.

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Each of these epochs of the contemplation of the external world—the earliest dawn of thought, and the advanced stage of civilization has its own source of enjoyment. the former, this enjoyment, in accordance with the simplicity of the primitive ages, flowed from an intuitive feeling of the order that was proclaimed by the invariable and successive reappearance of the heavenly bodies, and by the progressive development of organised beings; whilst in the latter, this sense of enjoyment springs from a definite knowledge of the phenomena of nature. When man began to interrogate nature, and, not content with observing, learnt to evoke phenomena under definite conditions; when once he sought to collect and record facts, in order that the fruit of his labours might aid investigation after his own brief existence had passed away, the philosophy of Nature cast aside the vague and poetic garb in which she had been