The subject is remote from truth, and even probability, unlike any thing that ever happened in human life:  and no wonder if the superstructure perfectly agrees with the foundation.  It is to these scenic exercises that we owe a number of frivolous topics, such as the reward due to the slayer of a tyrant; the election to be made by [c] violated virgins; the rites and ceremonies proper to be used during a raging pestilence; the loose behaviour of married women; with other fictitious subjects, hackneyed in the schools, and seldom or never heard of in our courts of justice.  These imaginary questions are treated with gaudy flourishes, and all the tumor of unnatural language.  But after all this mighty parade, call these striplings from their schools of rhetoric, into the presence of the judges, and to the real business of the bar [d]: 

1.  What figure will they make before that solemn judicature?  Trained up in chimerical exercises, strangers to the municipal laws, unacquainted with the principles of natural justice and the rights of nations, they will bring with them that false taste which they have been for years acquiring, but nothing worthy of the public ear, nothing useful to their clients.  They have succeeded in nothing but the art of making themselves ridiculous.  The peculiar quality of the teacher [a], whatever it be, is sure to transfuse itself into the performance of the pupil.  Is the master haughty, fierce, and arrogant; the scholar swells with confidence; his eye threatens prodigious things, and his harangue is an ostentatious display of the common-places of school oratory, dressed up with dazzling splendour, and thundered forth with emphasis.  On the other hand, does the master value himself for the delicacy of his taste, for the foppery of glittering conceits and tinsel ornament; the youth who has been educated under him, sets out with the same artificial prettiness, the same foppery of style and manner.  A simper plays on his countenance; his elocution is soft and delicate; his action pathetic; his sentences entangled in a maze of sweet perplexity; he plays off the whole of his theatrical skill, and hopes to elevate and surprise.

2.  This love of finery, this ambition to shine and glitter, has destroyed all true eloquence.  Oratory is not the child of hireling teachers; it springs from another source, from a love of liberty, from a mind replete with moral science, and a thorough knowledge of the laws; from a due respect for the best examples, from profound meditation [a], and a style formed by constant practice.  While these were thought essential requisites, eloquence flourished.  But the true beauties of language fell into disuse, and oratory went to ruin.  The spirit evaporated; I fear, to revive no more.  I wish I may prove a false prophet, but we know the progress of art in every age and country.  Rude at first, it rises from low beginnings, and goes on improving, till it reaches the highest perfection in the kind.  But at that point it is never stationary:  it soon declines, and from the corruption of what is good, it is not in the nature of man, nor in the power of human faculties, to rise again to the same degree of excellence.