{230} Who believes that such oratory as Sheridan's or Curran's, aye, or even as Burke's, would have produced a tithe of the influence upon the sturdy old roundheads which the cant of the day exercised over them. These effusions would have been treated with scorn, or would perhaps have called down punishment upon the heads of their authors as holding out temptations to the carnal man. Any attempt, in the temper of those times, to deliver orations fitted for the taste of posterity, would have been as ridiculous and misplaced as Petit Jean's apostrophes to the sun, moon and stars, in his defence of the dog. Indeed, it is the prevailing sin of modern taste to suppose that the making of a "fine speech," can be a sufficient inducement for speaking. Plato has defined rhetoric to be "the art of ruling men's minds," and the moment it ceases to look to that end, it is vain and ridiculous. This is the besetting sin of American oratory. Adams, Everett, or even Webster, will seize any occasion, the death of Lafayette, the erection of a monument, or any thing which may serve as a text for a speech, to deliver orations which can have no possible influence except to convince the few who read them, that their authors have not only read, but learned to round a period. Polished sentences, brilliant imagery, and even the ancient forms of attestation are profusely displayed, and all the orator's most showy wares are studiously arrayed, for effect, so as to tempt the public to what?--to any useful end which they have in view? No, simply to an admiration of their authors. It was the practice of antiquity, it is true, to deliver funeral orations--but they are miserably mistaken if they expect to shelter themselves under those usages in their unmeaning and personal displays. They pursue the form, but neglect the substance. Do they suppose that when Pericles delivered his funeral oration over his countrymen who had fallen in the expedition to Samos, he had no other object than that of making a speech? Do they believe for a moment that he whose rhetoric procured him the surname of Olympius, that the master orator of antiquity, (if we may judge his oratory by its effects,) that he who never addressed an assembly without first praying the Gods "that no _word_ might fall from him unawares which was _unsuitable to the occasion_," would have spoken from such a motive as that only? Could they have supposed that such was the motive of Demosthenes in his funeral oration over those who fell at Cheronea?