Among his pupils were two boys, brothers, who were thought highly gifted in elocution.  The master, who was evidently of that opinion, had a habit of parading them on all occasions before visitors and strangers; though one bad lost his upper front teeth and lisped badly, and the other had the voice of a penny trumpet.  Week after week these boys went through the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius, for the benefit of myself and others, to see if their example would not provoke us to a generous competition for all the honors.

How it operated on the other boys in after life I can not say; but the effect on me was decidedly unwholesome—­discouraging, indeed,—­until I was old enough to judge for myself, and to carry into operation a system of my own.

On coming to the passage,—­

  “Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts;
   Dash him to pieces!”—­

the elder of the boys gave it after the following fashion:  “Be ready, godths, with all your thunderbolths,—­dath him in pietheth!”—­bringing his right fist down into his left palm with all his strength, and his lifted foot upon the platform, which was built like a sounding-board, so that the master himself, who had suggested the action and obliged the poor boy to rehearse it over and over again, appeared to be utterly carried away by the magnificent demonstration; while to me—­so deficient was I in rhetorical taste—­it sounded like a crash of broken crockery, intermingled with chicken peeps.

I never got over it; and to this day can not endure stamping, nor even tapping of the foot, nor clapping the hands together, nor thumping the table for illustration; having an idea that such noises are not oratory, and that untranslatable sounds are not language.

My next essay was of a somewhat different kind.  I took the field in person, being in my nineteenth year, well proportioned, and already beginning to have a sincere relish for poetry, if not for declamation.  I had always been a great reader; and in the course of my foraging depredations I had met with “The Mariner’s Dream” and “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” both of which I had committed to memory before I knew it.

And one day, happening to be alone with my sister, and newly rigged out in a student’s gown, such as the lads at Brunswick sported when they came to show off among their old companions, I proposed to astonish her by rehearsing these two poems in appropriate costume.  Being very proud of her brother, and very obliging, she consented at once,—­upon condition that our dear mother, who had never seen anything of the sort, should be invited to make one of the audience.

On the whole, I rather think that I succeeded in astonishing both.  I well remember their looks of amazement—­for they had never seen anything better or worse in all their lives, and were no judges of acting—­as I swept to and fro in that magnificent robe, with outstretched arms and uplifted eyes, when I came to passages like the following, where an apostrophe was called for: