this invaluable work, so long as there remain among us any characters worthy to be perpetuated.

Our readers who are not familiar with this work may form some general opinion of its character from the following list of the lives, with their authors, contained in the first series:

Life of John Stark, by Edward Everett; of Charles Brockden Brown, by William H. Prescott; of Richard Montgomery, by John Armstrong; of Ethan Allen, by Jared Sparks; of Alexander Wilson, by William B. O. Peabody; of Captain John Smith, by George S. Hiliard; of Benedict Arnold, by Jared Sparks; of Anthony Wayne, by John Armstrong; of Sir Henry Vane, by Charles W. Upham; of John Eliot, by Convers Francis; of William Pinckney, by Henry Wheaton; of William Ellery, by Edward T. Channing; of Cotton Mather, by William B. O. Peabody; of Sir William Phipps, by Francis Bowen; of Israel Putnam, by Oliver N. B. Peabody; of L. M. Davidson, by Miss Sedgwick; of David Rittenhouse, by James Renwick; of Jonathan Edwards, by Samuel Miller; of David Brainerd, by William B. O. Peabody; of Baron Steuben, by Francis Bowen; of Sebastian Cabot, by Charles Hayward, jr.; of William Eaton, by Cornelius C. Fellon; of Robert Fulton, by James Renwick; of Joseph Warren, by A. H. Everett; of Henry Hudson, by Henry R. Cleaveland; of Father Marquette, by Jared, Sparks.

It will be seen, from the above list, that the characters which this work thus far embraces are generally of great interest, and are among the most prominent of the men of by-gone days. And then they are taken from various spheres of public action, so that the work thereby becomes possessed of a general character. The authors are all men of high name in the world of letters, and no one of them has here made an effort unworthy of himself. In general, there is evidently great congruity between the taste of the author and the character of his subject; and if we were to mention any cases that seem to us to form exceptions to this remark, they would be those in which Unitarian clergymen have delineated the characters of some of the mighty veterans of orthodoxy, who lived a century or a century and a half ago. We do not mean to impute to these highly respectable gentlemen who have employed their pens so gracefully and so ably, any want of good-will to do full justice to their respective subjects: we only mean that it could hardly be expected that they should have that full appreciation of the character, and that sympathy with its most impressive peculiarities, which would be necessary to enable them to proceed in their work altogether con amore; and though we would trust Dr.

Priestly or Dr. Channing in their hands without the least misgiving, we should rather that John Eliot, and Cotton Mather, and David Brainerd, and Jonathan Edwards, were turned over to some more orthodox, though they could hardly be to more accomplished, biographers.

ART. III.-Livre des Orateurs, par Timon, (M. de Cormenin,) 15 edition, Paris, 1847.

THE subject of eloquence is prominent among the studies to which the startling revolutions of our day seem destined to bring freshened interest and unprecedented importance. Under the new democracy now opening upon Europe-the democracy of interests and ideas, not of illusory "rights" and effete forms-eloquence, with the grand armory of science to supply it arguments, will replace the wiles of diplomacy and the juggleries of pragmatical statesmanship; the oratorical art will become again, more effectually than of old, perhaps, synonymous with the art of government. Already, but the other day, have we witnessed the young republic of France-or, if the reader pleases, her hope of a republic-trembling to its fate on the lips of Lamartine. By eloquence was the frail existence of this hope preserved, from day to day, in the arms of the provisional dictature. By eloquence, too, must be achieved its successful establishment into a permanent system of government. Nay, the regular working of this government must, thereafter, much depend upon the same moral agency of eloquence. In this final sphere, however, it will have less of the rhetoric of Lamartine and more of the reasoning of Guizot-when Guizot's oratory was not employed unworthily.

It may be objected to this piece of prediction that we find oratory wield no such power, enjoy no such prerogative, in this country; where, however, democracy has been long in operation, at least in its political conditions. The answer is, that here, as in most other things, political forms are not the whole-very far from it. So far, indeed, that they are only conditions of the negative kind; and of course are null without their positive complement, without a corresponding development of the national mind. There are stages in the mental growth of a people when the rhetoric in repute seems to reduce itself to the two topics of Meum and Tuum, and the only figures of any force to move are the figures of arithmetic. This is that period of civilization when the freeborn emotions of the soul which inspired the imaginative eloquence of an

tiquity, after having been trampled, and then kept down by the hoof of force and the torpor of habit, lie buried beneath the thick incrustation of the material interests, while these interests are as yet conceived but in the gross symbols of good and lawful dollars, doubloons, or pounds sterling. It is otherwise when a people, having outgrown this second form of idol worship, more debasing still than the first, attain to the conception, or even to the sentiment, of the eternal reality in the natural laws of the social system. Now, such is the actual position of the national mind of France; at least in a far higher degree than that of any other people. This has given the new republic its originality of character. To the new oratory, likewise, it will give the conjectured eminence of governmental power.

In view, then, of this high destiny of eloquence-dependent upon a maturity of social science to which the march of our own country, too, will be henceforth vastly accelerated the following remarks on the subject will, we trust, be found seasonable. They may serve to suggest the cause, if not also a remedy, of the state of disorder and degradation into which the art has fallen in English literature, as conceived whether in its systems of education or in its theories of criticism.

This disorder, in fact, is avowed as it is extreme. It is attested, while it is propagated by the host of "Rhetorics," "Readers," "Elocutions," &c., which invade us almost daily, and which-being mere variations, or rather mutilations, of the ancient treatises whose defects they pretend to supply-only serve to multiply the mischief, and to feed one of the most pernicious broods of vermin ever generated in a decaying carcass, namely, the modern manufacturers of "school-books." The difficulty proceeds from a fundamental misconception of the whole subject, an inadvertence to its relative and progressive character. There is also a correlative misapprehension as to the method of investigation; which is still conducted on the primitive plan of deduction from certain absolute and assumed principles, instead of proceeding by observation, by induction, upon what might be called the natural history of the art. For the rest, this double error is not confined to the rhetorical treatises of English literature alone; it is imputable universally. The writer, at least, is aware of but a single exception in any other literature. This is furnished, of course, by France, and in the Livre des Orateurs of the celebrated TIMON, (de Cormenin,) the president of the French Council of State, and author of the proposed constitution of the new republic. In placing, therefore, this unique work in our rubric, the purpose is not to

review it critically; but rather, by an example, to illustrate more compendiously our conception of the proper method of reducing eloquence to a science. Of this method the book in question offers a remarkable sketch in both its character and plan.

This plan is distinguished by the application, for the first time to the art of eloquence, of a process of investigation which, however, is now recognized as the means, indispensable and final, of perfecting all the liberal arts; because it is the mode, indispensable and final, of constituting all the sciences, the moral as well as natural, upon which the arts referred to are immediately dependent. The present attempt is, indeed, but an outline, like most beginnings in matters so immense. And the consciousness of this may have been the author's modest motive for omitting to signalize so original a feature of his work. But in such cases the important is not the completeness of the application, but the fact of the applicability. The clue once furnished, the perfective progression is prompt, because a thing of very general competence. Many may follow where few can find. It is the moot distinction between genius and practical talent. We admire at the almost magical advancement of the arts and sciences within the period of the last half century. But there is not one of them which, in default of the invention, or, as in the case before us, of the simple extension, of the requisite method, has not been retarded for ages, either straying from error to error, or stagnant at last from the very exhaustion of conjecture. The latter would seem to have been the condition of the art oratorical since the days of Quinctilian.

The method we speak of—and which as yet is most familiar to naturalists, since the scientific triumphs of the great Cuvier-is denominated the "Comparative." Some explanation of its nature, before proceeding to the application, will be not only proper to the present object, but important especially to the subject of logic, so essentially connected with that of rhetoric, and no less confused.

The Comparative method is commonly regarded as peculiar to the physical, or what are sometimes termed the classificatory, sciences. It is not seen to be a universal process of reasoning: it is not imagined to be the sole process. Even Mill, who well explains it, has failed or has feared to recognize it as an integral part of the science of logic. Much less does he appear to have understood it as, in principle, identical with the other and accredited forms. In truth, however, all the methods consist in comparison. When we argue we compare; when we experiment we compare; when we observe we compare, just the same essentially as when we syllogize or classify. We go further, and affirm that

it is by comparison we come to the knowledge of our simplest feelings. For with but a single feeling, or even with a single kind of feelings; in other words, with only one of the senses, sensation never could have been distinguished from self-existence. The sensation, and even the object exciting it, would then seem one with the sentient being. But enable this being, by a second sense, to experience a different impression simultaneously, and there will arise the consciousness of sensation as something distinct from self-it being impossible, of course, to even our latest refinement in abstraction, to conceive of identity as plural. Our primordial cognizance of simple feeling is, then, the result of this instinctive or mechanical comparison of the two sensations; or rather of the second with personal consciousness. The feelings will grow more distinct as well as diverse, according as the senses are multiplied; until from the small number of their five or six elements we see evolved all the wondrous variety of sentiments, objects, and their relations, which composes man's universe, external and internal.

But evolved how? Not, assuredly, by the plurality of his senses. merely; of which a thousand, operating isolatedly, could carry no further than might each possessed alone; that is to say, to the recognition of the corresponding kinds of sensation simply. The magical effect is wrought by the mutuality of co-operation and correction, and the process can be no other than comparison.

This process we have intimated to be the universal principle of reasoning. We might add, that it is perhaps the sole energy strictly proper, or innate, to the human intellect. Whence, then, it may be asked, the still prevailing notion of a diversity of methods different not merely, but some of them contradictory; as implied in the notable strife (which, with others still more puerile, is maintained, it seems, in England up to this day) between what are termed the syllogistic and the inductive methods? The oversight, continued in part by the diversity of the specific terms, had its origin in the difference of the things compared. In the primitive stage, where the operation, being as we have seen mechanical, has not been accounted a method, but merely as the faculty of perception, the comparison is of sensations with self-consciousness, and then with each other-resulting in the conception of objects. In the next method, named observation, the comparison is of objects with their phenomena-resulting in facts. In experimentation, it

* See the late controversy between De Morgan and Sir William Hamilton: -a pair of pedants to remind one of the philosophy of the middle ages; but not out of place in England in the noon of the nineteenth century, it seems, to judge by the consideration they enjoy.

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