occupied too much of your time, I will but add a closing remark. Common education, a scion planted by our fathers, now that it has become a tree, is found to be deeply rooted in the hearts and affections of the whole community. It is nourished by our dearest privileges, our most sacred rights. Herein it hath a conservative principle of perpetual improvement, to compare with which the private school system has nothing. Under the shadow of this tree the friends of education will rally. The future advances of the science are the fruits, for which it is already in blossom. Common schools are its vigorous branches. Private schools, its fanciful, and oftentimes beautiful excrescences. [A few sentences in the following lecture have been before published in an article in one of the Quarterly Journals. It was impossible, without affectation, to avoid a slight repetition, when the subject of the article and the lecture came in contact.] ON ELOCUTION. THE different orders of beings in our world are distinguished from each other as strongly in their respective powers of communication, as in the extent of their understanding, or the variety, delicacy, and dignity of their feelings. The great Author of existence has beneficently instituted a general correspondence in degree between the capacity of thought and emotion, which he has bestowed upon living creatures and their accompanying capacity of expression. Accordingly, as man stands preeminent above all other inhabitants of the earth in point of intellect and susceptibility, so he greatly excels them all in the diversity of mode, the ease, and the precision with which he can impart the operations of his nature. Most of the brutes utter inarticulate sounds, expressive of pain, pleasure, alarm, &c., which are intelligible to others of the same species; many communicate by signs properly falling under the general term gesture; and we are sometimes influenced by certain appearances to believe that they are able to exchange ideas in a manner beyond our knowledge. But how much more exalted is the capacity of expressing conceptions and feelings which is possessed by the human race. Man is radiant with expression. Every feature, every limb, nay, a muscle, a vein, may tell something of the energy within. The brow, smooth or contracted, the eye, placid, dilated, tearful, flashing, the lip, calm, quivering, smiling, curled, the whole countenance, serene, distorted, pale, flushed, the hand, with its thousand motions, the chest, still or heaving, the attitude, relaxed or firm, cowering or lofty, in short, the visible characteristics of the hole out |