in their proper order! We are dissatisfied to see them turn their eyes from us to their darling notebooks or folios: these teachers would wish heartily hea to avoid annoying, in this uncivil manner, their audience, but they cannot help it; they have a treacherous memory. This is one of the numerous insurmountable stepping-stones towards the height of a republican tribune erected amidst the capricious waves of a people polluted in every direction by a mud of corrupt senators, jealous patriots, foreign pensionaries, and a host of shallow-pated leaders. And what is the talisman that wings Demosthenes from one rock to another, until he sits upon a height which all the giants of twenty-one centuries, put upon the shoulders of one another, cannot reach? Some have cut short the question, stating, that that talisman was a peculiar favour of nature, a something out of the common order, a genius, perhaps a devil. We say simply thus: injured by nature in his organs of speech, he happens to hit upon the expedient of putting under his tongue pebbles, with which his toes come into collision while he is walking and declaiming on the shore of the sounding main, and thus nature is vanquished. This first success suggests naturally to his mind the possibility of other difficulties-crushing contrivances: he is, besides, goaded by the news of an infernal machine, a mnemonicon, at the disposal of his antagonists, the Macedonian court; and he neither sleeps nor rests until he finds out the "how" of that machine, or something akin to it. Farther, compelled by the extraordinary circumstances of the times, he makes constant use of it, and thus the stammerer becomes a Demosthenes. A loquacious elocutionist may kill, pleasantly, a couple of hours of a frivolous audience by a portion of those
