WRITERS AS ORATORS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIII, Issue 79, 2 April 1878, Page 4

WRITERS AS ORATORS.

Here in America (says the Printer's Circular, it is a common thing for editors and literary men, generally, to speak in public with quite as much ease and confidence as they write in private.. There is no more finished, graceful, pleasing orator in the country to-day than George "William Curtis, the editor of Harper's Weekly, the fascinatingly gossipy " Easy Chair " of Harper's Monthly Magazine ; Horace Greely and Henry J. Raymond were ready and fluent speakers ; Watterson, of the Louisville Courier Journal, is a self-possessed orator ; and A. A. MClure, of the Times of this city, is an accomplished public speaker. It is altogether different with our English cousins ; few of them that can write for the Press can talk from the rostrum , as was made painfully apparent very recently at a public dinner given in London to the gifted war correspondent, Aacbibald Forbes, who made a miserable bungle of an attempt to acknowledge the marked compliment that bad been paid him. He only said a few words ; his utterances waa confused and tremulous ; he remarked, in a hesitating way, that he never was a good speaker; that he would sooner stand up and be shot at for half an hour than stand up and speak for the same length of time. He was not alone in his awkwardness; few of his brethren of the pen who were present at the festive board did any better. They all can point to the foremost of their predecessors in literature as incapable orators. Thackeray could not speak impromptu. When he took to lecturing, he read his matter in a hard, prosy way. Douglas Jerrold, witty in private conversation, was an idiot when he got on his feet for the purpose of making a speech. Once upon a time, Mark Lemon and his fellow-humorists of Punch, went, to Lincolnshire to help their friend, Ingram, in an election. Not one of the wits could make even an apology for a speech, to the surprise, if not disgust, of the people who had assembled to listen to something exceptionally rich from the acknowledged humorists of London, Why American » writers should excel as orators is an open question. There is a reason for it ; a profound one, no doubt, that a philosopher will some day find out, and, having found, give to the world.