Other toasts followed in honor of the great institutions and interests of the country, and speeches in response to each were made by individuals whom the Mayor designated or the company called for.  None of them impressed me with a very high idea of English postprandial oratory.  It is inconceivable, indeed, what ragged and shapeless utterances most Englishmen are satisfied to give vent to, without attempting anything like artistic shape, but clapping on a patch here and another there, and ultimately getting out what they want to say, and generally with a result of sufficiently good sense, but in some such disorganized mass as if they had thrown it up rather than spoken it.  It seemed to me that this was almost as much by choice as necessity.  An Englishman, ambitious of public favor, should not be too smooth.  If an orator is glib, his countrymen distrust him.  They dislike smartness.  The stronger and heavier his thoughts, the better, provided there be an element of commonplace running through them; and any rough, yet never vulgar force of expression, such as would knock an opponent down, if it hit him, only it must not be too personal, is altogether to their taste; but a studied neatness of language, or other such superficial graces, they cannot abide.  They do not often permit a man to make himself a fine orator of malice aforethought, that is, unless he be a nobleman, (as, for example, Lord Stanley, of the Derby family,) who, as an hereditary legislator and necessarily a public speaker, is bound to remedy a poor natural delivery in the best way he can.  On the whole, I partly agree with them, and, if I cared for any oratory whatever, should be as likely to applaud theirs as our own.  When an English speaker sits down, you feel that you have been listening to a real man, and not to an actor; his sentiments have a wholesome earth-smell in them, though, very likely, this apparent naturalness is as much an art as what we expend in rounding a sentence or elaborating a peroration.

It is one good effect of this inartificial style, that nobody in England seems to feel any shyness about shovelling the untrimmed and untrimmable ideas out of his mind for the benefit of an audience.  At least, nobody did on the occasion now in hand, except a poor little Major of Artillery, who responded for the Army in a thin, quavering voice, with a terribly hesitating trickle of fragmentary ideas, and, I question not, would rather have been bayoneted in front of his batteries than to have said a word.  Not his own mouth, but the cannon’s, was this poor Major’s proper organ of utterance.

While I was thus amiably occupied in criticizing my fellow-guests, the Mayor had got up to propose another toast; and listening rather inattentively to the first sentence or two, I soon became sensible of a drift in his Worship’s remarks that made me glance apprehensively towards Sergeant Wilkins.  “Yes,” grumbled that gruff personage, shoving a decanter of Port towards me, “it is your turn next”;