what under control, soon comes to be used unconsciously and habitually, and rapidly usurps the place of all expression, showing itself in many varieties of sound, from drawl and sing-song to the nasal twang that formerly distinguished the conventicle. Few readers shake off the infection when once it is acquired, because it ceases to be perceptible by themselves. The voice will swell and fall at regular intervals, the reader all the while supposing that he is speaking quite naturally, while he is really on the verge of a chant; yet if immediately afterwards he were asked to read a narrative in a newspaper, he would do so in his own proper voice and ordinary manner."

Now I am sure there is very great truth in the foregoing remarks, as I think most persons also will admit. How then can these stereotyped and traditional faults be best got rid of? Well, then, get rid, in the first place, of this conventional "sanctimonious" tone. Read the Bible, in fact, as you would read any other book, that is, in accordance truly with all the ideas, feelings and emotions expressed by the words; where the thoughts are grand, sublime, or reverential, let the voice and all its various attributes be made to convey all such characteristics, but where any narrative passage occurs in which the incidents mentioned are purely of a simple and ordinary character, read such passage as you would read any narrative of similar character in any other book.

I think one very common cause of the Bible being read badly is its arbitrary division into verses in our English version, so that the same pause is made by the reader at the end of every verse, no matter whether the sense requires it or not. Try, if possible, at once to forget that there is any division into verses, and read with exactly such pauses as the grammatical and rhetorical sense alone require. Duly mark by the appropriate change in the modulation of the voice the difference between narrative dialogue and speech. To all these give just the same tone, inflection, and general expression, that you would give to the very same ideas so expressed anywhere else. "Persons who are accustomed to the drone or drawl, which they imagine to be reverential, will very likely object," says Mr. Serjeant Cox, in his treatise "On the arts of Writing, Reading, and Speaking," that you read the Bible like any other book, but they will soon get over this when they find how much more effectively it is heard and remembered.

"Another set of hearers," he remarks, "who eschew the beautiful and the pleasing, until they banish with them the good and the true, will raise a louder outcry against the right reading of the narrative and dialogue, that it is "dramatic," or "theatrical," a vague term of reproach, more formidable formerly than it now is, and which you must learn to despise, if you aspire to be a good reader; because a really good actor being a really good reader and something more, you cannot read well unless you at least read as correctly as the good actor reads. You cannot hope to conciliate this class of critics, for they will be satisfied with nothing but a monotonous drawl, and will give the sneering epithet to anything that escapes. from their bathos; so you may as well set them at defiance from the beginning, and follow the dictates of your own good taste, regardless of the protests of the tasteless.

And so with the reading of prayers. Mannerism is more frequent inthis than even in the reading of the Bible. The groaning style is the favourite one. Why, asks the learned Serjeant, should it be deemed necessary to address the Divinity as if you suffered severe bodily discomfort? Yet thus do ninety-nine out of every hundred, in public or in family prayer. There is a tone of profound reverence most proper to be assumed in prayer, and which, indeed, if the prayer be really felt at the time of utterance, it is almost impossible not to assume, but this is very different from the sepulchral and stomachic sounds usually emitted. So much then for the complaints of the mode in which the Bible and prayers are so very frequently mis-read, as set forth by the learned Serjeant, whose experience, I think, will be supported by that of many others. For my own part, the best book I know on the subject of devotional reading, is that entitled "On Reading the Liturgy," by the late Rev. John Henry Howlett, M.A., formerly Chaplain at the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. It is a most useful, sensibly written, and thoroughly practical work. I make it my manual with all my clerical pupils, to whom I strongly recommend it, moreover, as a very valuable work of reference.*

I pass on now to secular reading, and I take as the most difficult of all, that which may be comprehensively termed dramatic reading. I do not mean by this merely the reading of plays, but reading in the true sense of the word, dramatically, whatever is dramatic, no matter whether the form of composition be that of a play or not. Do not let me here be at all misunderstood. I use the term dramatically in its best and loftiest sense whenever I may have occasion to employ it, for no one repudiates more emphatically than I do any kind of mere theatrical exaggeration, or what is conventionally called stagyness. I may here most advantageously borrow from Mr. Sergeant Cox's recent work again. "There is scarcely any kind of composition that does not contain," he says, "something dramatic, for there are few writings so dull as to be unenlivened by an anecdote, an episode or apologue, a simile, or an illustration, and these are for the most part more or less dramatic. Wherever there is dialogue there is drama, no matter what the subject of the discourse, whether it be grave or gay, or its object be to teach or only amuse, if it assume to speak through any agency, other than the writer in his own proper person, there is drama. As in music, we have heard Mendelssohn's exquisite 'songs without words,' wherein the airs by their own expressiveness suggest the thoughts and feelings which the poet would have embodied in choicest language, and desired to marry to such music, so in literature there is to be found drama without the ostensible shape of drama; as in a narrative whose incidents are so graphically described that we see in the mind's eye the actions of all the characters, and from those actions learn the words they must have spoken when so acting and feeling. Moreover, drama belongs exclusively to humanity. It attaches to the quicquid agunt homines. It is difficult to conceive, and almost impossible to describe, any doings of

* Howlett "On Reading the Liturgy." Price 3s. 6d. Batty, Fleet Street.

men that are not dramatic. All the external world might be accurately painted in words, without a particle of drama, though with plenty of poetry, but certainly two human beings cannot be brought into communication without a drama being enacted. Their intercourse could only be described dramatically, and that which is so described requires to be read dramatically. Of this art the foundation is an accurate conception of the various characters, the perfection of the art is to express their characteristics truly, each one as such a person would have spoken, had he really existed at such a time, and in such circumstances. The dramatist and the novelist conceive certain ideal personages, they place them in certain imaginary conditions, then they are enabled by a mental process which is not an act of reasoning, but a special faculty, to throw their own minds into the state that would be the condition of such persons so situated, and forthwith there arises within them the train of feelings and thoughts natural to that situation. It is difficult to describe this mental process clearly in unscientific language, but it will be at once admitted that something very like it must take place before Genius sitting in a lonely room could give probable speech and emotion to creatures of the imagination. That is the dramatic art of the author, and because it is so difficult and rare, it is perhaps the most highly esteemed of all the accomplishments of authorship. For the right reading of dialogue very nearly the same process is required. You must in the first place distinctly comprehend the characters supposed to be speaking in the drama. You must have in your mind's eye a vivid picture of them as suggested by the author's sketch in outline. Next you must thoroughly understand the full meaning of the words the author has put into their mouths-that is to say what thoughts those words were designed to express. As the great author having conceived a character and invented situations for it, by force of his genius makes him act and talk precisely as such a person would have acted and talked in real life; so the great actor, mastering the author's design, rightly and clearly comprehending the character he assumes, and learning the words that character is supposed to speak, is enabled to give to those words the correct expression, not as the result of a process of reasoning, but instinctively, by throwing his mind into the position of the characters he is personating. So does the good reader become for the time the personages of whom he is reading, and utters their thoughts as themselves would have uttered them. In a word, a good reader of such composition must be an actor without the action."

I think to a certain extent the last line quoted from the learned Serjeant's work may be a little modified. In most dramatic reading there occurs fitting opportunity for the introduction of referential gesture, as it is termed. For instance, in reading the well-known poem of "The Execution of Montrose," there occurs a passage where the great Marquis swears—

Now if in reading this, neither the hand nor eye of the reader should

be raised, I think a very useful adjunct in giving effect to the hero's invocation to St. Andrew's banner would be missed. In almost all dramatic reading continual opportunity occurs, where what is called referential or descriptive gesture may judiciously be introduced. But of course good taste and judgment are to be consulted here, and the amount of action that would be quite fit and appropriate to the actor's part when performed on the stage, would in my opinion be unbecoming the position of the public reader on the platform.

I think nothing more tends to free a person from monotony, tameness, or mannerism, than the practice of studying, and afterwards reading aloud dialogue or dramatic selections, especially where the characters are strongly contrasted and each marked by its own particular individuality. The best test of a reader's having successfully studied the art of dramatic reading, is that the audience should know perfectly well what character he is representing without there being any necessity for his prefixing the name of the character each time he has to utter the words put by the author into the mouths of the various dramatis persona. In public reading, and more especially in what are called "Penny Readings," where your audiences, as regards the majority, at any rate, are not very highly educated, refined, or critical, experience has shown that in order to secure the attention of the hearers, the selections read must vary in character, the grave must be followed by the gay, and wit and humour must alternate with sentiment and pathos. As a general rule the earlier portion of the evening should be devoted to the graver selections, and the latter part to those which partake more of the gay and humorous elements.

LECTURE XI.

Public Speaking. Principal requisites of Extempore Speaking. The art of Composition. Arrangement of thoughts and language. Process of Analysis. Attention and Association. Dangers of delivering written speeches memoriter. Suggestions in reference to the art of Extempore Speaking. The Exordium, or introduction of a speech. The principal Subject-matter of a speech. Varieties of modes of treatment. Purity of language. Perspicuity. The Peroration, or conclusion of a speech. The time when to close a speech, and how best to end it.

former.

HAVE now to call your attention to the subject of public speaking, to which public reading serves as an excellent introduction, and all that I have said already in previous lectures as applicable to the latter, bears with equal propriety on the But there is much more to be considered. In public reading we have the thoughts and language already provided for us, whether they be our own, or the composition of another; but in public, or extempore speaking, the thoughts of our own minds are expected to be given, and we have to clothe those thoughts in our own language. To be furnished with appropriate ideas on the subject about to be discussed; to express those ideas aloud in perspicuous phraseology, and to deliver it with ease, freedom, and self-possession on your part, and with the result of producing the effect desired on your audience, are the grand requisites of all public speaking. To enlarge upon the advantages of acquiring an art so important as this in a country enjoying such freedom of speech as our own, would be quite superfluous. As the Archbishop of York said last year at the annual meeting of the King's College Evening Classes, when his Grace presided at the distribution of the prizes to the students :

"In this country, and in this age, almost every great religious, political, and social movement was effected by the agency of public speaking, and the advantages of being well versed in this art, as well as in that of public reading, were becoming every day more apparent."

Now the first requisite on the part of any one aiming to be a public speaker, is that he should have certain definite ideas on a given topic, and have them aptly and logically arranged. No man can speak well, unless he knows well what are his thoughts on the subject; in a word, what it is he wishes to say. To those who are entire novices in this branch of our subject, I would recommend, as a very good mode of training the mind in the development of thought, and the arrangement of ideas, to take at first any question of importance in which the student feels a special interest, and think well and calmly over it. Let him