Excerpt from Oratory Sacred and Secular: Or, the Extemporaneous Speaker, With Sketches of the Most Eminent Speakers of All Ages The premeditated discourse comes nearest to the word method. It was the medium of the wonderful eloquence of the late Bishop Bascom. In it the ideas are first arranged, and then each thought pondered until it resolves itself into words, which are mostly recalled in the moment of speech. Men who speak thus usually have great command of lan guage and much fixity of impression. Those who receive ideas readily, and lose them again as easily, could not adopt this method, for words previously arranged could not be recalled in the same order, unless they had been fixed by the pen. There is little objection to this mode of prepara tion in the case of those who are adapted to it, provided they do not carry it so far as to feel burdened or confused. N 0 words should be left in charge of the memory, and no conscious effort made to recall particular expressions. Stephens, in his admirable book called Preaching Re quired by the Times, advises ministers, when revolving and arranging their ideas, not to let them run into words. We can see no ill effect in this, provided the result is a natural one. All the words must be retained easily in the memory, and not sought for if they do not spontaneously present them selves in the act of speech. President Lincoln, who was a most effective off-hand speaker, said, that he owed his skill in this art to the early practice of reducing every thought be entertained to the plainest and simplest words. Then when he desired to enunciate an idea he had no difficulty in giving it a form that even a child could understand. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.