Similarly with oratory and authorship. Both these arts are distinct from that of reading; as each of these again is distinct from the other. It is curious, indeed, how few among great authors are great orators; or, among great orators, great authors. The gifts which tell in writing--condensation, terseness, finish--are not the gifts which tell most in speaking. In speaking, the essentials are clearness of enunciation, sympathy with the audience, copiousness of illustration, directness of statement, uninvolved reasoning. The merits which impart value to a book--wealth of fact, niceness in balancing opposing considerations, delicacy of assertion, depth and sweep of argument--may easily become ineffective in the delivery of a speech. Hence, therefore, whereas a good speaker is occasionally a good writer, owing to his rare combination of different orders of talent, it more frequently happens that the one set of talents is given to one man to enrich them in seclusion, and the other to another man to use them with publicity. In like manner with reading; it is an art by itself. It is natural to suppose that no one could possibly read an author's works so well as the author's self, because no one can understand them so intimately as their own creator. Yet experience proves this to be not the case; and for a reason which at first sight is not wholly apparent. It is just because they are his own that, as a rule, he cannot read them well. He may have a richly cultivated voice, clear enunciation, a varied power of modulation; he may even be able to read the works of others well, yet be a failure in reading what he himself has written. Why is this? Partly, perhaps, it is due to an unavoidable self-consciousness in reading his own works; and self-consciousness is the ruin of good reading. "Forget thyself" is a necessary condition of good reading. Partly, perhaps, it is due to over-absorption in the memory of sensations and sentiments which overpowered him when he wrote in the solitude of his chamber, but which are somewhat unnatural and overstrained for exhibition before a concourse of auditors. But probably the principal reason is that one of the greatest charms of good reading arises from the co-operation of two spirits toward one end--the spirit of the author and the spirit of the reader. The reader of another's works seeks actively to express the spirit of his author, yet unintentionally he is expressing his own spirit also. The author enters into him and he throws himself into the author; his reading, therefore, is the union, the marriage, the interpenetration and expression of two spirits--the author's and his own. However interesting, therefore, and delightful it may be to hear an author read his own works, yet is there always lacking the dash and force and suggestiveness produced when a great author is interpreted by a great reader. The author merely reproduces his original meaning in what he wrote;