The Sun.
London, England, 1861-10-07 00:00:00

k; MONDAY E VENING, OCTOBER 7, 1861.

Temple, Barrister-at-Law, took the matter up for
the first time in genuine earnest at the University
of Oxford. Almost immediately afterwards a
similar enterprize was adventured upon at the
sister University of Cambridge by the Rev. ALFRED
D'ORSEY—to whose efforts in the advancement of
the good cause we took occasion to allude in these
columns as recently as last Friday. We have
already more than once directed attention before
this to the labours of Mr. PLUMPTRE at Oxford, and
of Mr. D'ORSEY at Cambridge. We have done so
in months past the more readily because of our cor-
dial recognition at once of their novelty and
of their importance. But now that those
labours of theirs may be said to have re-
ceived not merely the indirect and collateral
approval of the Bishop of ROCHESTER, as already
indicated, but the timbre of the approbation
of the whole Episcopal bench headed by their
Archbishops, we may refer to the position assumed
by Mr. PLUMPTRE at Oxford, and by Mr. D'ORK-ir
at Cambridge, as to a position at once &DIV secured
and very generally recognised. At the two -great
sister Universities, the rev. gentleman on the one
hand, and the learned gentleman on the other, have
received, each respectively, the support of the local
Vice-Chancellor. Their appearance has been hailed
with every evidence of satisfaction, here at Oxford,
there at Cambridge, alike by students and profes-
sors. For they came to supply an undeniable want.
They came to remind the alumni that an adequate
knowledge of their own tongue is, in more ways
than one, far more essential than any familiarity
with the dead and foreign languages. A considera-
tion--obvious though it is in itself—really, until
now, in a very great, measure overlooked in the
scheme of University education.

DOGBIRRY has been laughed at by successive gene-
rations of Englishmen during the last three hun-
dred years, for saying with his delectable air of
crass stupidity, " Reading and writing come by
nature !" And yet all the while these generations
of Englishmen, so far as their own vernacular is
concerned, have been acting absolutely upon that
notion. The prosody at least of every other lan-
guage but their own they have striven to master
systematically. But as for the cultivation of Eng-
lish Elocution ;—well, that, without a question, they
have regarded as superfluous. They have seemed to
think with. DOGBERRY that Reachng, at any
rate, " comes by nature." So that young men have
left the universities to enter the House of Commons,
to be called to the "utter " bar, to clamber into
pulpits, to ascend platforms, to approach vestry
boards, to rise (in Public) after Dinner, without
the faintest notion in the wide world, as to how
their voices even ought to be used, as to what, in
the name of fortune, should be done with their
hands, as to the arrangement of their ideas, or the
selection of their language. " Speak the speech I
gave you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on
the tongue "—says HAMLET to the Players. But,
alas ! the Players only, hitherto, have had their
turn in occasionally tutoring the youth of England
at the eleventh hour, just before their ascent of the
pulpit, their approach to the bar, or their entrance
into Parliament. How the system, or rather the
want of any system at all, in this way, has worked,
we all know. The orators, the real undoubted
orators amongst us, whether Pulpit, Forensic, or
Parliamentary, are always—who shall deny it ?
the very rare exceptions. Even a merely Respect-
able Reader is somewhat of a curiosity in his way.
Going back even to the grand old times of the
House of Commons, when PITT, BURKE, Fox,
WYNDHAM, SHERIDAN, WHITBREAD were con-
temporaries—and selecting one of the most rarely
gifted in that group of resplendant rhetoricians--
CHARLES JAMES Fox—what are the anecdotes we
read of him ? Why, that whenever he
rose to address the House it was pain-
ful to listen to the stammerings and
spluttering of that great master of oratory until he
had fairly warmed to his work, and poured forth
the full hls. elnrilumn.
„c read of him that at the end of a labo-
rious session he seriously lamented that—although
he had taken care to speak upon every other
night's debate—upon two or three occasions he had
somehow missed the opportunity of speaking at all.
Mr. Fox deeming constant and unremitting prac-
tise to be the one great essential for the acquisition
of anything like skill by the debater or the elocu-
tionist. Practise—observe—in public! Why, just
as reasonably might the actors upon the stage
argue in favour of public rehearsals, as essential by
way of preliminary to their public performances.
It was remarked of PAGANINI that when he made
the tour of England, astonishing the world by his
all but miraculous achievements as a Violinist, as
the paragon of all past and future Violinists, he
was never once known to take up an instrument and
tune it. Any violin that came into his hands was
—for him—already in tune. So subtle was his
every sense, whether of touch or hearing. He had
mastered all the mechanical preliminaries of his
art by laborious and methodical preparation before
ever he appeared before the world, violin in hand,
to astound mankind by his musical performances.
For when PAGANINI was a young man—the world
knew nothing whatever of his existence. He
was secretly studying—preparing—practising.
He was already far advanced in middle-life
when he first stepped forth from obscurity,
the perfected mast©r of his wonderful in-
strument. Perhaps none may ever hope,
no matter how marvellously gifted or how sedu-
lously the natural gifts be cultivated, to attain the
same rank as an Orator that PAGININI won as a
Violinist. But—assuredly, the Human Voice is in
every respect a more extraordinary organ than that
described by EPHRAIM SMOOTII so very ludicrously
as compounded of " the tail of the horse and the
bowels of the cat !" And it is the preliminary cul-
tivation of the Human Voice, to say nothing of the
ideas and words it may have to articulate, that is at
length being cared for as a portion of our Univer-
sity curriculum at Cambridge, thanks to the Rev.
A. J. D'OP.SEY, and at Oxford, thanks to Mr. C. J.
PLUMPTRE. May prosperity attend the enterprise
of each !