The more we reflect upon this important subject, we shall find the more, that external circumstances have an influence upon intellect, increasing in an accumulating ratio; that the political institutions of various countries have their fluctuating and contradictory influences; that example controls in a great degree intellectual production, causing after-growths, as it were, of the first luxuriant crop of masterminds, and giving a character and individuality to habits of thought and modes of expression; in brief, that great occasions will have great instruments, and there never was yet a noted time that had not noted men.  Dull, jog-trot, money-making, commercial times will make, if they do not find, dull, jog-trot, money-making, commercial men:  in times when ostentation and expense are the measures of respect, when men live rather for the world’s opinion than their own, poverty becomes not only the evil but the shame, not only the curse but the disgrace, and will be shunned by every man as a pestilence; every one will fling away immortality, to avoid it; will sink, as far as he can, his art in his trade; and he will be the greatest genius who can turn most money.

It may be urged that true genius has the power not only to take opportunities, but to make them:  true, it may make such opportunities as the time in which it lives affords; but these opportunities will be great or small, noble or ignoble, as the time is eventful or otherwise.  All depends upon the time, and you might as well have expected a Low Dutch epic poet in the time of the great herring fishery, as a Napoleon, a Demosthenes, a Cicero in this, by some called the nineteenth, but which we take leave to designate the “dot-and-carry-one” century.  If a Napoleon were to arise at any corner of any London street, not five seconds would elapse until he would be “hooked” off to the station-house by Superintendent DOGSNOSE of the D division, with an exulting mob of men and boys hooting at his heels:  if Demosthenes or Cicero, disguised as Chartist orators, mounting a tub at Deptford, were to Philippicize, or entertain this motley auditory with speeches against Catiline or Verres, straightway the Superintendent of the X division, with a posse of constables at his heels, dismounts the patriot orator from his tub, and hands him over to a plain-spoken business-like justice of the peace, who regards an itinerant Cicero in the same unsympathizing point of view with any other vagabond.

What is become of the eloquence of the bar?  Why is it that flowery orators find no grist coming to their mills?  How came it that, at Westminster Hall, Charles Philips missed his market?  What is the reason, that if you step into the Queen’s Bench, or Common Pleas, or Exchequer, you will hear no such thing as a speech—­behold no such animal as an orator—­only a shrewd, plain, hard-working, steady man, called an attorney-general, or a sergeant, or a leading counsel, quietly talking over a matter of law with the judge, or a matter of fact with the jury, like men of business as they are, and shunning, as they would a rattlesnake, all clap-trap arguments, figures, flowers, and the obsolete embroidery of rhetoric?