According to common opinion Americans are the nation most addicted to speechmaking. Laboulaye makes a good point by representing the son of a leading character in "Paris in America" discovered by his father before a large audience, in the full tide of political speech, and maintaining afterwards to the old gentleman that it is the common practice among all the boys to make a speech on every possible occasion, that they may thus fit themselves for public life.

In New York, which tends rapidly to become the center of activity for most of the important influences of our country, there are every year many dinners, anniversaries, and assemblies, at which oratory of an ephemeral nature finds expression and attention. All the nationalities, all the religious and literary societies, all the clubs, all the distinguished foreigners, and all the leading and following colleges, must have a dinner, and every dinner must have at least a dozen speeches. Most of these speeches are more eloquent to the opinion of their authors than to the minds of their hearers.

It certainly is one of the best moral illustrations of the first law of motion that in spite of all the heroism necessary to endure such a volume of speech, the patient public seems (if we may judge from the increase in volume) every year more and more willing to sit at the tables and listen to this flow of sound. Perhaps this patience is only apparent, for competition for an opportunity to speak is said to be lively. Possibly every one of the thousands who listen is secretly comparing the eloquence of the speaker with his own skilful ability, and not quite calmly biding the time when he shall enrapture, where the present speaker wearies and annoys.

Yet not every speech made on those occasions is dull. Now and then the happy mingling of fun and sense really lifts the company out of the tiresome monotony. Were it not for these addresses beautiful and rare, we can believe that dinner speeches would be abandoned, or exchanged for a single oration from one competent to delight.

For the distinguishing mark of the dinner speech should be that it amuse not in the rough, coarse way of the demagogue, but in the subtle, fine way of the man of culture.

The dinner speeches with which the readers of this paper are perhaps most familiar, those made when the alumni of a noble college gather around the table of their alma mater, ought to be characterized by the broad sympathy, the quick insight, the flexible grace and the genial humor of the thoroughly educated man. Although to make fine dinner speeches can never be an aim worthy of an earnest man, yet to have the power and culture from which such a speech usually comes, is the highest aim in a literary regard that any man can have. It is a short-sighted and one-sighted earnestness that despises the wit and banter of society, and affects the isolation and grandeur of pure thought. The mountain summit is too far removed from the walks of men to make it possible for the recluse to wield all the influence that his powers may entitle him to exert. The metaphysician less than the poet, the country minister less than the successful lawyer, is the autocrat of the dinner-table.

Because Williams and Yale have produced great and useful men, it does not follow that their commencement dinners are always marked by the finest flow of wit and wisdom, nor that pioneers in civilization who bring great honor to their alma mater should always and everywhere speak for her. Dinner-speaking is a fine art, not one for which men need absolutely European travel and study, but one which is never mastered except by those who love and perhaps know how to reach all the beautiful thoughts of every age and clime. It is the cultured gentleman of social experience, who may or may not be a man of great ability, but who knows how to weave the poetic and humorous and commonplace into beautiful or grotesque forms, that delights and surprises a dinner company. Social experience and good abilities will not alone make the successful speaker. Underneath and back of all must be the gentleman. A lawyer, though of splendid position, can ill afford to say at the festal table of his alma mater, "Harvard takes great poets and historians to fill her vacant professorships; my college takes boys, who have proved their qualifications by getting their windows broken." Those who go deeper than the surface will perhaps surmise that Harvard has had better material to work upon than some colleges; not perhaps material of finer abilities, but material that has been more under the influence of sweetness and light. Possibly her graduates are as superior at making dinner speeches as are her trustees in choosing professors.

A gentleman must make the happy dinner-speech, for only he can perceive the proprieties of the situation. He will neither improve the occasion to give the corporation advice as to the management of the college, nor try to point out to a company of Unitarians the superior advantages of the orthodox faith, nor exhibit to invited guests the rags of his alma mater's poverty. He may, perhaps, avoid the commonplace by so doing, but he will certainly transgress the rules of propriety. The commonplace at a dinner, repeated every year under so nearly similar conditions, cannot be avoided, but can be transformed by the art of the master.

What could be more difficult than the duty of presiding at the dinner of the New England Society and rehearsing the threadbare story of the landing of the Pilgrims and dilating upon it in such a way as to entertain New Englanders, who ever since their childhood have heard the declamations of Webster, Everett, Winthrop, and the rest, about that heroic band? Yet by a mixture of shrewd wit and eloquence Mr. Choate, a Harvard graduate, went over again, last year, at the sixty-fourth anniversary of the society, the main facts of the history, and dwelt upon the relations of New Englanders to New York, making a speech that, printed, fills ten octavo pages but which the audience found charming from beginning to end.

This, like every other fine art, has something cosmopolitan in it. It eschews the local and narrow, refuses to belong to any sect or party, and appeals by the widest culture to men of culture. The dinner speeches of our own Bryant are thus liberal and catholic. So were those of Mr. Everett in the main, though one discovered the superb actor now and then arranging his robe or making use of his splendid presence and reputation to draw attention to himself. Of course, when such a man comes as a guest into a company somewhat foreign in thought and life to his own belongings, he can neglect the rules that good breeding imposes on those who compose the homogeneous circles and become narrow. But he must be narrow by praising not his own methods but the unexpected excellence of life found among his hosts—thus, while apparently dwarfing himself, he throws the dignity of his own reputation and history over that which he eulogizes and really exhibits the truest catholicity of spirit. To do this and perfectly conceal the satisfaction that one has, because he can do it, was perhaps difficult for Everett. Most men who heard him pardoned the failure. It was easier for Dickens. His life was in some sense less splendid but more real.

The amusement and good feeling which it is always the aim of the dinner speaker to create, were largely the aim of Dickens' life. The humor, the knowledge of human nature, that he always had at command, were employed in his writings and daily thoughts to enliven and cheer men. No wonder then that his speeches are models of breadth and sweetness and appositeness, and that good judges regarded him when living as in this department of expression unrivalled.

He who is so guided by the love of letters engrafted on the love of man as to give constant and ample expression to these motives, will be neither a reformer without grace nor a scholar without manliness. Give to such a man a flow of animal spirits and a dash of wit, and he should be not unapt to entertain even when poised on the dangerous wing of an after-dinner speech.

Review, 1870.