In the most brilliant period of antiquity there were two styles of eloquence cultivated by the different orators. One, calm, subtle and elegant, addressed almost exclusively to the understanding. In the time of Cicero this was called the Attic style, and those who belonged to this school assumed no little credit on the supposed purity of their Attic taste. The other affected a style of greater warmth and brilliancy, and intermingled with the scrupulous dialectics of the former, frequent appeals to the passions, and adorned their discourses with all the beauties which could captivate the imagination. What was then denominated the Attic style, forms the prevailing characteristic of modern oratory. It is cool and didactic. It relies almost wholly on the powers of a cultivated logic and seldom attempts to reach the understanding through the medium of the heart. It requires little reflection to determine which of these styles would bear away the palm before a popular audience. The former leaves one half the faculties of the hearer dormant, while the latter addresses itself to all the powers of man, the moral as well as the intellectual, instructs the reason while it agitates the passions, and gives at the same time one powerful and impetuous movement to the whole man. But if any one doubts upon this matter let him go to the pages of Demosthenes and especially to that most perfect of all his orations, in which he was contending with his great rival for the glory of a whole life in the presence of all that was most illustrious in Greece,--his oration for the crown. He will find from the beginning to the end, a clear and exact logic. But it is logic raised into enthusiasm by the dignity and elevation of sentiment by which it is surrounded. He will not find a metaphor or an observation introduced merely for the purposes of ornament. It is a continued stream of clear, rapid and convincing argument. But it is argument enveloped in a torrent of earnestness and exaggeration, environed with a blaze of anger and disdain and passion--it is argument clothed in thunder, which could no more be listened to with a composed and tranquil mind than the flashes of lightning could be viewed with an unblinking eye. Strip Demosthenes of these accompaniments, of these accessories, if you please to call them so, and you will leave enough perhaps to satisfy our modern Attics, but this residue will be no more like the living Demosthenes who "fulmined over Greece," than the unformed block of marble is like the Belvidere Apollo, or a naked skeleton like a living man.