=Speech given to Conceal Thought.= _La parole a été donnée a l’homme pour déguiser la pensée or pour l’aider à cacher sa pensée._ Talleyrand is usually credited with this sentence, but Captain Gronow, in his _Recollections and Anecdotes_, asserts that the words were those of Count Montrond, a wit and poet, called “the most agreeable scoundrel and most pleasant reprobate in the court of Marie Antoinette.” Voltaire, in _Le Chapon et la Poularde_, says: “Ils n’employent les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées.” Goldsmith, in _The Bee_, iii. (October 20, 1759), has borrowed the same thought: “the true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them.” =Speech-Makers= (_Bad_). ADDISON could not make a speech. He attempted one in the House of Commons, and said, “Mr. Speaker, I conceive--I conceive, sir--sir, I conceive----” Whereupon a member exclaimed, “The right honorable secretary of state has conceived thrice, and brought forth nothing.” CAMPBELL (_Thomas_), once tried to make a speech, but so stuttered and stammered, that the whole table was convulsed with laughter. CICERO, the great orator, never got over his nervous terror till he warmed to his subject. IRVING (_Washington_), even with a speech written out, and laid before him, could not deliver it without a breakdown. In fact, he could hardly utter a word in public without trembling. MOORE (_Thomas_) could never make a speech. (Dickens and Prince Albert always spoke well and fluently.) =Speed=, an inveterate punster, and the clownish servant of Valentine, one of the two “gentlemen of Verona.”--Shakespeare, _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ (1594). =Speed the Plough=, a comedy by Thomas Morton (1798). Farmer Ashfield brings up a boy named Henry, greatly beloved by every one. This Henry is in reality the son of “Morrington,” younger brother of Sir Philip Blandford. The two brothers fixed their love on the same lady, but the younger married her, whereupon Sir Philip stabbed him to the heart, and fully thought him to be dead, but after twenty years, the wounded man reappeared, and claimed his son. Henry marries his cousin, Emma Blandford; and the farmer’s daughter, Susan, marries Robert, only son of Sir Abel Handy. =Spenlow= (_Mr._), father of Dora (_q.v._). He was a proctor, to whom David Copperfield was articled. Mr. Spenlow was killed in a carriage accident. _Misses Lavinia_ and _Clarissa Spenlow_, two spinster aunts of Dora Spenlow, with whom she lived at the death of her father. They were not unlike birds altogether, having a sharp, brisk, sudden manner, and a little, short, spruce way of adjusting themselves, like canaries.--C. Dickens, _David Copperfield_, xli. (1849). =Spens= (_Sir Patrick_), a Scotch hero, sent, in the winter-time, on a mission to Norway. His ship, in its home passage, was wrecked off the coast of Aberdeen, and every one on board was lost. The incident has furnished the subject of a spirited Scotch ballad by Lady Lindsay.