Thus with Verse the written (or printed) word has pretty thoroughly ousted the speaking voice and its auxiliaries—­the pipe, the lute, the tabor, the chorus with its dance movements and swaying of the body; and in a quieter way much the same thing is happening to prose.  In the Drama, to be sure, we still write (or we should) for the actors, reckon upon their intonations, their gestures, lay account with the tears in the heroine’s eyes and her visible beauty:  though even in the Drama to-day you may detect a tendency to substitute dialectic for action and paragraphs for the [Greek:  Stichomuthia], the sharp outcries of passion in its give-and-take.  Again we still—­some of us—­deliver sermons from pulpits and orations in Parliament or upon public platforms.  Yet I am told that the vogue of the sermon is passing; and (by journalists) that the leading article has largely superseded it.  On that point I can offer you no personal evidence; but of civil oratory I am very sure that the whole pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day of Chatham, Burke, Sheridan; since the day of Brougham and Canning; nay, ever since the day of Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli.  Burke, as everyone knows, once brought down a Brummagem dagger and cast it on the floor of the House.  Lord Chancellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the assembled peers, ‘Here the noble lord inclined his knee to the Woolsack’ is, if I remember, the stage direction in Hansard.  Gentlemen, though in the course of destiny one or another of you may be called upon to speak daggers to the Treasury Bench, I feel sure you will use none; while, as for Lord Brougham’s genuflexions, we may agree that to emulate them would cost Lord Haldane an effort.  These and even far less flagrant or flamboyant tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of fashion.  You could hardly revive them to-day and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you a fortnight ago.  They would be out of tune; they would grate upon the nerves; they would offend against the whole style of modern oratory, which steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of quiet business-like exposition, to adopt more and more the style of written prose.

Let me help your sense of this change, by a further illustration.  Burke, as we know, was never shy of declaiming—­even of declaiming in a torrent—­when he stood up to speak:  but almost as little was he shy of it when he sat down to write.  If you turn to his “Letters on the Regicide Peace” —­no raw compositions, but penned in his latter days and closing, or almost closing, upon that tenderest of farewells to his country—­

     In this good old House, where everything at least is well aired, I
     shall be content to put up my fatigued horses and here take a bed
     for the long night that begins to darken upon me—­

if, I say, you turn to these “Letters on the Regicide Peace” and consult the title-page, you will find them ostensibly addressed to ’a Member of the present Parliament’; and the opening paragraphs assume that Burke and his correspondent are in general agreement.  But skim the pages and your eyes will be arrested again and again by sentences like these:—­