Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual stir that preceded and accompanied the Revolutionary movement were the speeches of political orators like Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy, in Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry in Virginia.  Oratory is the art of a free people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome and in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions and congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and flourished naturally.  The age, moreover, was an eloquent, not to say a rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson’s orotund prose, of the declamatory Letters of Junius, and of the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is perceptible in the debates of our early Congresses.  The fame of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is largely traditionary.  The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses the glow which resided in the man and the moment.  A speech is good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to the end which is sought.  But the fact that this end is often temporary and occasional, rather than universal and permanent, explains why so few speeches are really literature.  If this is true, even where the words of an orator are preserved exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we have only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which the oration produced.  The fiery utterances of Adams, Otis, and Quincy were either not reported at all or very imperfectly reported, so that posterity can judge of them only at second-hand.  Patrick Henry has fared better, many of his orations being preserved in substance, if not in the letter, in Wirt’s biography.  Of these the most famous was the defiant speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, throwing down the gauge of battle to the British ministry.  The ringing sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by school-boys, and many of them remain as familiar as household words.  “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.  I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. . . .  Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. . . .  Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?  Forbid it, Almighty God!  I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!” The eloquence of Patrick Henry was fervid rather than weighty or rich.  But if such specimens of the oratory of the American patriots as have come down to us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their words are said to have produced upon their fellow-countrymen, we should remember that they are at a disadvantage when read instead of heard.  The imagination should supply all those accessories which gave them vitality when first pronounced—­the living presence and voice of the speaker; the listening Senate; the grave excitement of the hour and of the impending conflict.  The wordiness and exaggeration; the highly Latinized diction; the rhapsodies about freedom which hundreds of Fourth-of-July addresses have since turned into platitudes—­all these coming hot from the lips of men whose actions in the field confirmed the earnestness of their speech—­were effective in the crisis and for the purpose to which they were addressed.