The Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of languages. It was a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond the material of other languages; it was an instrument for a larger compass of modulations; and it happens that the peculiar theme of an orator imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose diction. One step further in passion, and the orator would become a poet. An orator can exhaust the capacities of a language--an historian, never. Moreover, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age of highest development for arts dependent upon social refinement. That generation had fixed and ascertained the use of words; whereas the previous generation of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c., was a transitional period: the language was still moving, and tending to a meridian not yet attained; and the public eye had been directed consciously upon language, as in and for itself an organ of intellectual delight, for too short a time to have mastered the whole art of managing its resources. All these were reasons for studying Demosthenes, as the one great model and standard of Attic prose; and studied him I _had_, more than any other prose writer whatever. _Pari passu_, I had become sensible that others had _not_ studied him. One monotonous song of applause I found raised on every side; something about being "like a torrent, that carries everything before it." This original image is all we get in the shape of criticism, and never any attempt even at illustrating what is greatest in him, or characterising what is most peculiar. The same persons who discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern Bacon have also complimented him with the title of the English Demosthenes. Upon this hint, Lord Brougham, in his address to the Glasgow students, has deluged the great Athenian with wordy admiration. There is an obvious prudence in lodging your praise upon an object from which you count upon a rebound to yourself. But here, as everywhere else, you look in vain for any marks or indications of a personal and _direct_ acquaintance with the original orations. The praise is built rather upon the popular idea of Demosthenes than upon the real Demosthenes. And not only so, but even upon style itself, and upon the art of composition _in abstracto_, Lord Brougham does not seem to have formed any clear conceptions,--principles he has none. Now, it is useless to judge of an artist until you have some principles on the art. The two capital secrets in the art of prose composition are these: 1st, The philosophy of transition and connection, or the art by which one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise out of another: all fluent and effective composition depends on the _connections_;--2dly, The way in which sentences are made to modify each other; for the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid