In the July No. of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, published at Halle, we have the number of students in the several Universities. At Berlin there were 1607; at Bonn, 600; Breslau, 629; Giessen, 404; Göttingen, 693; Halle, 606; Heidelberg, 701; Jena, 484; Köningsberg, 392; Leipsic, 287; Marburg, 941; München, 1545; Würzburg, 442.

In the same No. of the same journal, we find the following statement of the attendance at the Prussian Universities, in 1829 and 1838. The reason of the decrease is not given.

The University at Athens is prosperous. It has 10 students in theology, 137 in law, 30 in medicine and 55 in philosophy; whole number 232. Its professors are arranged as follows:In Theology the prof. ord. is Apostolides; extraord., Kontogonis.-Law, ord., Rallis, Herzog, Maurokordatus; honor., Argyropoulos, Pellikas, Feder, Soutzos.-Medicine, ord., Leokias, Vouros, Kostis, Olympios, Damianos; hon., Lebadios, A. Rallis, Treiber.-Philosophy, ord., Schinas, Domnandos, Gennadios, Venthylos, Ross, Bambas, Philippos, Ulrich, Negris, Vouris, Landerer; hon., Manonsis; extraord., Fraas.

United States.

The long expected work of Dr. Robinson and Rev. E. Smith, on Palestine and the Countries on the South, is in the press. It is drawn up from the original diaries, and is copiously illustrated by Dr. Robinson. It will be published in the spring, in three volumes; and will previously make its appearance in England. The second volume of Dr. Nordheimer's Hebrew Grammar will be ready for delivery the first week in January. From a cursory perusal of some of the sheets, we are persuaded that it will be an important addition to Hebrew LiteOur readers may expect a review of the work in the next No. of the Repository.-Prof. Turner, of the Episc. Theol. Sem., New-York, has a Commentary on Genesis in the press.Prof. Bush's Commentary on Exodus, in two volumes, may be looked for in March.

rature.

THE

AMERICAN

BIBLICAL REPOSITORY.

APRIL, 1841.

SECOND SERIES, NO X.-WHOLE NO. XLII.

ARTICLE I.

THE STUDIES OF AN ORATOR.

By Samuel Gilman Brown, Evans Professor of Oratory and Belles-Lettres, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H.

ELOQUENCE has ever been honored. Men have admired and praised him who, by argument or persuasion, has been able to excite and guide the minds of great masses of people. The orator has stood side by side with the poet. Rhetoric, unfortunately, has held a more precarious position,-a position alternately of undeserved fame, and of unmerited neglect. At one period it embraced, within its dubious limits, all science, all literature, all that was necessary for the complete education of the scholar. At another, it paid, for a too ambitious empire, the heavy penalty of degradation and entire neglect. Some remnants of dishonor have clung to the art, even until the present time. Where criticism begins, eloquence has been thought to end. Rhetoric,-its opponents have said,―is adverse to the highest eloquence, or at least, not exactly congenial with it. It is a lifeless art; it does not teach us to contemplate beauty in a supple, living body, but, with scalpel and forceps, to examine the mechanism of the dead. In the midst of thrilling music and graceful motion, it tells us that the music and the motion were made by contracting or dilating the glottis, by swelling or expanding a muscle. The name is significant; and while elo

SECOND SERIES, VOL. V. NO. II.

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quence is a synonym for all that can persuade and excite, rhetoric is a synonym for mechanical rules; and the rhetorician is one, who, forgetting the subject, is intent only on the form and drapery of the subject: one who would construct a perfect man, wanting only a heart and vitality.

Perhaps we owe it to the practical disposition of our countrymen, who can devote little time to matters which even border upon speculation, that these ideas have not obtained much notice with us. Let us hope that another reason is, that we have a clearer insight into the nature and objects of rhetoric, and a more correct definition of its boundaries.

Doubtless the mere rhetorician is seldom an orator; still more, the age of rhetoricians has seldom been the age of orators. Rhetoric loses its beauty and fitness, advances beyond its limits, when it aspires to command, not to assist the speaker. Depending upon analysis, it must, of course, succeed the oratory which it analyzes. It clearly has no legitimate authority which it does not derive from the spoken or written word. Not till after orators and poets had moved and persuaded men, did rhetoricians inquire how they did it: and if ever the art pretends to reproduce, by mechanical means, the effects which originally came from vital powers, it becomes empirical and worthless. "The power by which poetry is poetry," and must we not also believe that the power by which eloquence is eloquence ?—“ is beyond the reach of analysis." Life is always incomprehensible. I know that I raise my arm; I know that the blood circulates; but the principle of life eludes my subtlest researches. I can make an automaton that shall raise his arm, and pump a crimson fluid through his leathern veins, but he will remain an automaton still. Rhetoric, like every critical art, will rather guide one in the old track than mark out for him a new one; correct his faults, rather than inspire virtues; teach the speaker to avoid bombast or obscurity; polish his rough and ungainly angles, and render him an interesting and attractive speaker: but if he have not the spirit within him, it never can make him eloquent.

Yet, to affirm that the study of the art is incompatible with its exercise, is to deny the existence of an orator since the days of Aristotle and Quinctilian, to invade the hitherto inviolate pre-eminence of the Grecian and the Roman, to uncrown and depose the kings and priests of eloquence in ever age. If obedience to rules be an evil, the evil might, we hope, be lim

ited to those upon whom, unfortunately, the mantle of the rhetorician has fallen. Let them, if need be, restrain themselves by technicalities and formulas, cramp their limbs with fetters, and mince their steps according to mathematical admeasurements, while the scholar, leaving the schools, as no longer needful for him, forgetting the rules, but not the spirit of the rules, shall walk forth among living men, and do, with a free heart and a strong hand, such work as he may find to do.

Eloquence, though, like poetry, gushing out from the fountains within, owes more than its sister art to study, to earnest, protracted effort, with which mediocrity may rise to honorable estimation, and without which, even genius may remain unno、 ticed. Rather, however, than assert the value of an art which, I hope, needs no formal defence, I would suggest, as briefly as may be, some of the studies most important to an orator.

The orator can attain to no very high eminence without a mastery of the resources of language. His speech must be "obedient, dexterous, exact, like a promptly ministering genius." His words must not only be appropriate, but the best. They must "trip like nimble servitors to do his bidding." His style must be pliant. He needs a majesty of diction which shall not dishonor the loftiest thought, a plain sobriety, suited to vulgar narration, a playfulness which may gracefully dance about the gayest subject, a power of indignant rebuke or of elegant jesting. It is not enough that thought be clear and precise. The masters of language do not protrude the idea, meager and bald, but introduce it, vigorous in itself, surrounded by a company of kindred thoughts. Every word has a power to evoke, from the shadows where they have slumbered, a host of images and dim recollections; and, by all this host attended, the main idea moves on. A thousand chords of the human heart are attuned in unison; and if one be struck the others vibrate. Nothing in the use of language more decidedly marks the power of genius, than the ability to bring out the hidden harmony of the instrument. It is not difficult to detect, according to this suggestion, a prominent cause of the different degrees of vividness, which two men shall give to apparently, I cannot say really the same thought; and while some have a surprising facility in attenuating every idea which they chance to fall upon, others,--and they are the models of the writer,--have as marvellous a power of expanding and enlivening the most ordinary thought. Strip the thought of its graceful robe, and you wonder where

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its virtue lay. Truly, it lay not in that bare frame-work which the skeleton-seeker developed, but in the life and motion which he overlooked; not in the plain obvious meaning, but in its rich suggestions. The magnificent prose of Milton is deprived of its glory if it be translated into other words. Milton is gone, and another is come. A faultless prose style is held to be the last attainment in language, more difficult than a facility in metrical composition, where the jingle of the rhyme assists in a favorable choice of words, and excuses an imperfect phrase. By common consent, the number of great writers may be included in a short catalogue. Genius will not insure a power over words. The thoughts of the writer may be great, but who will be the better, if he cannot give them a ready and forcible utterance? Were it demanded, it might be shown how those, in every age, whose musical, vigorous speech we most admire, have labored to obtain the desired excellence; with how much toil Milton gained a mastery of the "artifice of language;” with what critical care 'he built up the lofty rhyme;' how Petrarch returned to his sonnets, day after day, to alter a single word, or make a trifling change in the arrangement of a line; how Virgil revised, corrected, remodelled his verses, like a "she-bear" -to use his own comparison-licking her ill-formed offspring. into shape; how relentlessly Demosthenes disciplined his words, how carefully he chose his figures, how diligently he moulded them. But these things are on record.

Of all the studies which affect the style, common consent seems to place the ancient languages in the first rank. The ancients elaborated their composition with a care to which the moderns are strangers. One cause of this among the Greeks, may be found in that peculiar love of the beautiful, which, as a redeeming virtue, pre-eminently characterized this inquisitive, artful and restless people.

It did more than almost any other virtue to elevate the character of the nation. Like a kind genius, it hovered over every philosopher, poet, orator, historian. It imparted amenity to a character, which, without it, would have been brutalized by war; guided the pen which wrote the Edipus Tyrannus, the Prometheus Bound, the Symposium and the Anabasis; gave birth to temples, such as no other people ever reared; to statues, the fragments of which are the wonder of the world. If, in another country than their own, the traveller lights upon a structure of singular elegance, a statue of faultless symmetry, he is told that