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The British and Foreign Review; Or, European Quarterly Journal
The British and Foreign Review Or European Quarterly Journal Author:Unknown Author 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: them, it behoves us, at least, to show that there exist in England, men who are not unmindful of the hospitality they have there enjoyed ; who are as alive t... more »o a sense of public as of private integrity -- of national as of personal interest; who have brought home a grateful remembrance of her primitive manners and simple institutions ; who seek, it is true, to preserve Turkey for the sake of England, but who have learnt to respect her for her own. Article II. Speeches of the Right Honourable George Canning, with a Memoir of his Life. Third Edition. London: 1836. Why is it that there are so few authentic and unmaimed remains of English parliamentary eloquence ? Whence the curious anomaly that in England, with her free constitution and popular assemblies, and amid the redundant eloquence of English poetry and prose, the national literature has been barren of oratory ? Freedom is not alone its grandest object, but its true source. To be an orator, according to Longinus, is denied to the slave. The same opinion is expressed in a tone of compromise by the author of the dialogue De Oratoribus, under the benign despotism of Vespasian. It is fully borne out by the experience of ages and of nations. In Greece, the race of orators perished with the race of freemen, to be succeeded by rhetoricians and sophists. Cicero, the first orator of Rome, was the friend of Brutus. Roman eloquence would have expired with the republic, if it had not found refuge with the genius of Roman freedom in the cabinets and writings of Livy and Tacitus. Modern experience is equally conclusive. If the French have cultivated pulpit oratory, and produced some chefs- (famvre in that kind, under the iron yoke of Louis XIV., it is because the church of France arrogated a spiritual authority co-ordinate wi...« less