The audience is a constant metre of the orator.  There are many audiences in every public assembly, each one of which rules in turn.  If anything comic and coarse is spoken, you shall see the emergence of the boys and rowdies, so loud and vivacious, that you might think the house was filled with them.  If new topics are started, graver and higher, these roisters recede; a more chaste and wise attention takes place.  You would think the boys slept, and that the men have any degree of profoundness.  If the speaker utter a noble sentiment, the attention deepens, a new and highest audience now listens, and the audiences of the fun and of facts and of the understanding are all silenced and awed.  There is also something excellent in every audience,—­the capacity of virtue.  They are ready to be beatified.  They know so much more than the orator,—­and are so just!  There is a tablet there for every line he can inscribe, though he should mount to the highest levels.  Humble persons are conscious of new illumination; narrow brows expand with enlarged affections:  delicate spirits, long unknown to themselves, masked and muffled in coarsest fortunes, who now hear their own native language for the first time, and leap to hear it.  But all these several audiences, each above each, which successively appear to greet the variety of style and topic, are really composed out of the same persons; nay, sometimes the same individual will take active part in them all, in turn.

This range of many powers in the consummate speaker and of many audiences in one assembly leads us to consider the successive stages of oratory.

Perhaps it is the lowest of the qualities of an orator, but it is, on so many occasions, of chief importance,—­a certain robust and radiant physical health,—­or, shall I say? great volumes of animal heat.  When each auditor feels himself to make too large a part of the assembly, and shudders with cold at the thinness of the morning audience, and with fear lest all will heavily fail through one bad speech, mere energy and mellowness are then inestimable.  Wisdom and learning would be harsh and unwelcome, compared with a substantial cordial man, made of milk, as we say, who is a house-warmer, with his obvious honesty and good meaning, and a hue-and-cry style of harangue, which inundates the assembly with a flood of animal spirits, and makes all safe and secure, so that any and every sort of good speaking becomes at once practicable.  I do not rate this animal eloquence very highly, and yet, as we must be fed and warmed before we can do any work well, even the best, so is this semi-animal exuberance, like a good stove, of the first necessity in a cold house.