[Footnote 1:  Our speakers certainly fall into the other extreme.  The British orator’s style of gesticulation may still be recognised, mutatis mutandis, in Addison’s humorous sketch of a century ago:  “You may see many a smart rhetorician turning his hat in his hands, moulding it into several different cocks, examining sometimes the lining and sometimes the button, during the whole course of his harangue.  A deaf man would think that he was cheapening a beaver, when he is talking perhaps of the fate of the British nation".]

He has put on record his own ideas of the qualifications and the duties of the public speaker, whether in the Senate or at the bar, in three continuous treatises on the subject, entitled respectively, ‘On Oratory’, ‘Brutus’, and ‘The Orator’, as well as in some other works of which we have only fragments remaining.  With the first of these works, which he inscribed to his brother, he was himself exceedingly well satisfied, and it perhaps remains still the ablest, as it was the first, attempt to reduce eloquence to a science.  The second is a critical sketch of the great orators of Rome:  and in the third we have Cicero’s view of what the perfect orator should be.  His ideal is a high one, and a true one; that he should not be the mere rhetorician, any more than the mere technical lawyer or keen partisan, but the man of perfect education and perfect taste, who can speak on all subjects, out of the fulness of his mind, “with variety and copiousness”.

Although, as has been already said, he appears to have attached but little value to a knowledge of the technicalities of law, in other respects his preparation for his work was of the most careful kind; if we may assume, as we probably may, that it is his own experience which, in his treatise on Oratory, he puts into the mouth of Marcus Antonius, one of his greatest predecessors at the Roman bar.

“It is my habit to have every client explain to me personally his own case; to allow no one else to be present, that so he may speak more freely.  Then I take the opponent’s side, while I make him plead his own cause, and bring forward whatever arguments he can think of.  Then, when he is gone, I take upon myself, with as much impartiality as I can, three different characters—­my own, my opponent’s, and that of the jury.  Whatever point seems likely to help the case rather than injure it, this I decide must be brought forward; when I see that anything is likely to do more harm than good, I reject and throw it aside altogether.  So I gain this,—­that I think over first what I mean to say, and speak afterwards; while a good many pleaders, relying on their abilities, try to do both at once".[1]

[Footnote 1:  De Oratore, II. 24, 72.]

He reads a useful lesson to young and zealous advocates in the same treatise—­that sometimes it may be wise not to touch at all in reply upon a point which makes against your client, and to which you have no real answer; and that it is even more important to say nothing which may injure your case, than to omit something which might possibly serve it.  A maxim which some modern barristers (and some preachers also) might do well to bear in mind.