Perorations.It almost goes without saying from what has passed that the peroration, in the sense of the rhetorical summing-up of a speech, with peculiar attention to thought, diction, and form, is dying also. Or rather—for speakers must end somehow, and it is well to round off a speech with a sentence that has some regard both to euphony and grammar—the short staccato peroration is taking the place of the long and rolling periods of our ancestors which followed each other to the finale, like Atlantic breakers breaking in foam and thunder on the beach. In those days the audience looked eagerly for the premonitory signs of the peroration, because there the orator would crystallise his argument, allow his fancy to take final wing, and appeal to the spiritual part of his hearers. Now it is to be feared that they are, as a rule, awaited as a timely signal of the approaching end. I do not know a single living speaker, with the possible exception of Lord Hugh Cecil, who perorates in Parliament as did Gladstone and Bright. The platform peroration of a sort still lingers in the mouths of those who conclude by adjuring their hearers to hand down undiminished to posterity this great Empire, etc., etc. But with this exception, which is purely conventional, the peroration is almost obsolete, and as it is, or was, the last part of a speech to be delivered, so does it appear to be the last feature of the art of rhetoric that is likely to be revived. Dr. Hornby, Headmaster of Eton in my day, who was one of the most finished after-dinner speakers that I ever heard, and who always left his audience in doubt as to how far his art was impromptu or prepared, said to a friend of mine, "Above all things, take special pains about your peroration—you never know how soon you may require it." But I suspect that in this witty remark he was providing a prescription for sitting down with dignity rather than for finishing with eloquence.
Phrase-making.In common with perorations, and other literary graces, I cannot help thinking that phrase-making—the art in which Disraeli excelled—and the faculty of repartee, have also declined. The former, which is rarely spontaneous, is no doubt dis-
