2.  What is the effect of the questions in the following?  Are the sentences varied?  If the occasion was momentous, what is the style?

“And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the house?  Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received?  Trust it not, Sir; it will prove a snare to your feet.  Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss.  Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our water and darken our land.  Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation?  Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love?”

    PATRICK HENRY:  Speech in the Virginia Convention,
    1775

3.  List the concrete details given below.  What effect have they?  What elements give the idea of the extent of the Colonies’ fisheries?  Are the sentences long or short?  Does their success justify them?

“Look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery.  Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recess of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’ Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the South.  Falkland Islands, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry.  Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both the poles.  We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil.  No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries; no climate that is not witness to their toil.  Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by, this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.”

    EDMUND BURKE:  Conciliation with America, 1775

4.  Is the following clear?  What kind of sentence is it?  What minor phrase?  Is this phrase important?  Why?  Why did Lincoln repeat this sentence, practically with no change, twelve times in a single speech?

“The sum of the whole is that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty-one—­a clear majority of the whole—­certainly understood that no proper division of local from Federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal Territories.”

    ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  Cooper Union Speech, 1860