George F. Hoar

What did the Englishman know of the Fourth of July emotion which stirred all Americans in the days when the country had just escaped destruction, and was entering upon its new career of freedom and of glory?

The most fastidious critic is by no means the best judge, seldom even a fairly good judge, of the public speaker.

It is impossible to overrate the importance to his purpose of that matchless instrument, the human voice.

When every other faculty of the orator is acquired, it sometimes almost seems as if the voice were nine-tenths, and everything else but one-tenth, of the consummate orator.

He must master the subject with which he has to deal, and he must have knowledge adequate to illustrate and adorn it.

He can use to great advantage the most varied learning, the profoundest philosophy, the most compelling logic.

As I have said, his object is to excite the emotions which, being excited, will be most likely to impel his audience to think or act as he desires.

The orator will get the affluence and abundance which characterize the great Italian artists of the Middle Ages, who astonish us as much by the amount and variety of their work as by its excellence.

The best word and phrase will come to him spontaneously when he speaks and thinks.

This practice will soon give him ready command of the great riches of his own noble English tongue.

He must not give you pewter for silver, or pinchbeck for gold, or mica for diamond.

He must get an English expression if the resources of the language will furnish it, which will equal as near as may be the dignity and beauty of the original.

The extemporary speaker never gets, or easily loses, the power of precise and accurate thinking or statement, and rarely attains a literary excellence which gives him immortality.

If the phrase that occurs to you does not exactly fit the thought, you are almost certain, especially in speaking or rapid composition, to modify the thought to fit the phrase.

Having got the idea into your mind with the precision, accuracy, and beauty of the Latin expression, you are to get its equivalent in English.

You get the thought into your mind with the accuracy and precision of the words that express numbers in the multiplication table.

The Latin prose of Tacitus and Cicero, the verse of Virgil and Horace, are like a Greek statue, or an Italian cameo--you have not only exquisite beauty, but also exquisite precision.

You have in these two languages and especially in Latin, the best instrument for the most precise and most perfect expression of thought.

The value of the practice of translation from Latin or Greek into English, in getting command of good English style, in my judgment, can hardly be stated too strongly.

He himself said that he gained his skill at the expense of the House, for he had sometimes tasked himself during the entire session to speak on every question that came up, whether he was interested in it or not, as a means of exercising…

But it is quite probably that he was drilled by translations from Latin and Greek into English; and in the House of Commons he had in early youth the advantage of the best debating society in the world.

Young Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield, translated Sallust and Horace with ease; learned great part of them by heart; could converse fluently in Latin; wrote Latin prose correctly and idiomatically, and was specially distinguished at…

Chatham, the greatest of English orators, if we may judge by the reports of his contemporaries, trained himself for public speaking by constant translations from Latin and Greek.

It is as respectable, as lofty, and as indispensably necessary as that of the judge himself.

The function of the advocate in the court of justice, as thus defined and limited, is tainted by no insincerity or hypocrisy.