But though a foreign philosopher may venture to give us the clue to it, perhaps, in the first instance, a little more roundly, it is not necessary that we should go the Mayor of Bordeaux, in order to ascertain on the highest possible authority, what kind of an art of communication, what kind of an art of delivery and tradition, men, in such circumstances, find themselves compelled to invent;--that is, if they would not be utterly foiled for the want of it, in their noblest purposes;--we need not go across the channel to find the men themselves, to whom this art is a necessity,--men so convinced that they have a mission of instruction to their kind, that they will permit no temporary disabilities to divert them from their end,--men who must needs open their school, no matter what oppositions there may be, to be encountered, no matter what imposing exhibitions of military weapons may be going on just then, in their vicinity; and though they should find themselves straitened in time, and not able to fit their words to their mouths as they have a mind to, though they should be obliged to accept the hint from the master in the Greek school, and take their tone _from the ear of those to whom they speak_, though many speeches which would spend their use among the men then living would have to be inserted in their most enduring works with a private hint concerning that necessity, and a private reading of them for those whom it concerned; though _the audience_ they are prepared to address _should be deferred_, though the benches of the inner school should stand empty for ages. We need not go abroad at all to discover men of this stamp, and their works and pastimes, and their arts of tradition;--men so filled with that which impels men to speak, that speak they must, and speak they will, in one form or another, by word or gesture, by word or deed, though they speak to the void waste, though they must speak till they reach old ocean in his unsunned caves, and bring him up with the music of their complainings, though the marble Themis fling back their last appeal, though they speak to the tempest in his wrath, to the wind and the rain, and the fire and the thunder,--men so impregnated with that which makes the human speech, that speak they will, though they have but a rusty nail, wherewith to etch their story, on their dungeon wall; though they dig in the earth and bury their secret, as one buried his of old--that same secret still; for it is still those EARS--those 'ears' that 'Midas hath' which makes the mystery.