The Welsh Triads say, “Many are the friends of the golden tongue.”  Who can wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress, or the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?  He has his audience at his devotion.  All other fames must hush before his.  He is the true potentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they who know how to govern.  The definitions of eloquence describe its attraction for young men.  Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s ten orators, advertised in Athens, “that he would cure distempers of the mind with words.”  No man has a prosperity so high or firm, but two or three words can dishearten it.  There is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress.  Isocrates described his art, as “the power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great";—­an acute, but partial definition.  Among the Spartans, the art assumed a Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon.  Socrates says, “If any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedaemonians, he will at first find him despicable in conversation; but, when a proper opportunity offers, this same person, like a skilful jaculator, will hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short and contorted, so that he who converses with him will appear to be in no respect superior to a boy.”  Plato’s definition of rhetoric is, “the art of ruling the minds of men.”  The Koran says, “A mountain may change its place, but a man will not change his disposition";—­yet the end of eloquence is,—­is it not?—­to alter in a pair of hours, perhaps in a half-hour’s discourse, the convictions and habits of years.  Young men, too, are eager to enjoy this sense of added power and enlarged sympathetic existence.  The orator sees himself the organ of a multitude, and concentrating their valors and powers: 

  “But now the blood of twenty thousand men
  Blushed in my face.”

That which he wishes, that which eloquence ought to reach, is, not a particular skill in telling a story, or neatly summing up evidence, or arguing logically, or dexterously addressing the prejudice of the company; no, but a taking sovereign possession of the audience.  Him we call an artist, who shall play on an assembly of men as a master on the keys of the piano,—­who, seeing the people furious, shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears.  Bring him to his audience, and, be they who they may, coarse or refined, pleased or displeased, sulky or savage, with their opinions in the keeping of a confessor, or with their opinions in their bank-safes,—­he will have them pleased and humored as he chooses; and they shall carry and execute that which he bids them.

This is that despotism which poets have celebrated in the “Pied Piper of Hamelin,” whose music drew like the power of gravitation,—­drew soldiers and priests, traders and feasters, women and boys, rats and mice; or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pallbearers dance around the bier.  This is a power of many degrees, and requiring in the orator a great range of faculty and experience, requiring a large composite man, such as Nature rarely organizes, so that, in our experience, we are forced to gather up the figure in fragments, here one talent, and there another.