Word: one
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...Save one, which low down in the gloaming lies...
...According to our author, "a man must have a vast number of well-arranged facts and settled opinions before he can speak off-hand with ease." In other words, after years of cloister student-life, in which his learning is being augmented and his opinions digested, the man will one day blossom into a full-grown orator. Now on this point we are decidedly sceptical. We have always held, and still hold, to the idea that oratory is an art that grows by what it feeds on; that, while no amount of "well-arranged facts and settled opinions" will enable...
...spared the blunders and failures of the young orator in his eager and oft-times futile efforts for success; that crude-ness which, in the young orator as in the budding writer, may be called, by a metaphor as true as it is homely, "veal." But this is one of the things impossible. The little bird, seeing its parent flying from bough to bough, thinks it can do the same. Having found itself strong enough for the slight use of its limbs required within the narrow bounds of the nest, it confidently makes trial of its strength...
...There is one more point upon which we must animadvert, and this is the miserable delivery of the Harvard graduates. After each inevitable expectatur of the President, a youth was seen to mount the rostrum with all the awkwardness of persons who feel themselves in a false position, heightened by the uncouthness of a barbarous habillement, which he had evidently never proved. After more or less unsystematic bowing, each gave his proof of memory for bad prose with all the systematic regularity of cadence exhibited by a machine." - The Round Table, August...
More glorious even than the one on high...