There was a depth of tone in it, a volume, a compass, a rich and tender harmony, which invested all he said with majesty.  We heard it last when he was an old man past seventy; and all he said was a few words of acknowledgment to a group of ladies in the largest hall in Philadelphia.  He spoke only in the ordinary tone of conversation; but his voice filled the room as the organ fills a great cathedral, and the ladies stood spellbound as the swelling cadences rolled about the vast apartment.  We have heard much of Whitefield’s piercing voice and Patrick Henry’s silvery tones, but we cannot believe that either of those natural orators possessed an organ superior to Clay’s majestic bass.  No one who ever heard him speak will find it difficult to believe what tradition reports, that he was the peerless star of the Richmond Debating Society in 1795.

Oratory was then in the highest vogue.  Young Virginians did not need to look beyond the sea in order to learn that the orator was the man most in request in the dawn of freedom.  Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Pitt were inconceivably imposing names at that day; but was not Patrick Henry the foremost man in Virginia, only because he could speak and entertain an audience?  And what made John Adams President but his fiery utterances in favor of the Declaration of Independence?  There were other speakers then in Virginia who would have had to this day a world-wide fame if they had spoken where the world could hear them.  The tendency now is to undervalue oratory, and we regret it.  We believe that, in a free country, every citizen should be able to stand undaunted before his fellow-citizens, and give an account of the faith that is in him.  It is no argument against oratory to point to the Disraelis of both countries, and say that a gift possessed by such men cannot be a valuable one.  It is the unmanly timidity and shamefacedness of the rest of us that give to such men their preposterous importance.  It were a calamity to America if, in the present rage for ball-playing and boat-rowing, which we heartily rejoice in, the debating society should be forgotten.  Let us rather end the sway of oratory by all becoming orators.  Most men who can talk well seated in a chair can learn to talk well standing on their legs; and a man who can move or instruct five persons in a small room can learn to move or instruct two thousand in a large one.

That Henry Clay cultivated his oratorical talent in Richmond, we have his own explicit testimony.  He told a class of law students once that he owed his success in life to a habit early formed, and for some years continued, of reading daily in a book of history or science, and declaiming the substance of what he had read in some solitary place,—­a cornfield, the forest, a barn, with only oxen and horses for auditors.  “It is,” said he,