A contemporary journalist[98] has well observed of the oratory of the present day: “With all its great defects, which are perceptible enough to any cultivated hearer, Public Speaking is one of the greatest treats you can provide for the middle and higher population of one of our towns. The extempore oration is of course often a rough production; it does not at all come up to our ideas of the perfection of language, but it fascinates and fetters attention as being extempore,—as displaying the energy of an actual creation on the spot. Lord Derby’s is perhaps the best oratorical language we have,—we mean when he speaks his best; it is properly different from book-language, and yet does not run into the technical inflation, and conventional bombast, and professional phraseology, which are the dangers of oratory. Mr. Gladstone’s is Parliamentary English—a very surprising and brilliant creation, but one that has gone through a medium of technicality or conventionalism, and does not come straight from the fount of language. The Bishop of Oxford’s oratory is open to the criticism that it is overstrained, and produces vivid pictorial effects at the cost of simplicity. This is no very severe or invidious criticism, because in nine cases out of ten an orator who selects an exaggerated phrase selects it because a simpler one does not come to hand. A ready and inexhaustible command of the simplest and truest words is, of course, the very triumph of oratory, and a most rare triumph. Still, with all its defects, oratory is oratory: it is an uncommon exhibition of power; it creates interest, and sustains attention as such; and we are not sorry that our provincial towns have now the opportunity of hearing most of our leading public speakers.” Akin to the present subject is the art of presiding over a festive company, for which Sir Walter Scott has left these few simple practical rules: 1st. Always hurry the bottle round for five or six rounds, without prosing yourself, or permitting others to prose. A slight fillip of wine inclines people to be pleased, and removes the nervousness which prevents men from speaking—disposes them, in short, to be amusing, and to be amused.