Let us apply this now to the particular object of this letter; I mean, speaking in, and influencing public assemblies.  The nature of our constitution makes eloquence more useful, and more necessary, in this country than in any other in Europe.  A certain degree of good sense and knowledge is requisite for that, as well as for everything else; but beyond that, the purity of diction, the elegance of style, the harmony of periods, a pleasing elocution, and a graceful action, are the things which a public speaker should attend to the most; because his audience certainly does, and understands them the best; or rather indeed understands little else.  The late Lord Chancellor Cowper’s strength as an orator lay by no means in his reasonings, for he often hazarded very weak ones.  But such was the purity and elegance of his style, such the propriety and charms of his elocution, and such the gracefulness of his action, that he never spoke without universal applause; the ears and the eyes gave him up the hearts and the understandings of the audience.  On the contrary, the late Lord Townshend always spoke materially, with argument and knowledge, but never pleased.  Why?  His diction was not only inelegant, but frequently ungrammatical, always vulgar; his cadences false, his voice unharmonious, and his action ungraceful.  Nobody heard him with patience; and the young fellows used to joke upon him, and repeat his inaccuracies.  The late Duke of Argyle, though the weakest reasoner, was the most pleasing speaker I ever knew in my life.  He charmed, he warmed, he forcibly ravished the audience; not by his matter certainly, but by his manner of delivering it.  A most genteel figure, a graceful, noble air, an harmonious voice, an elegance of style, and a strength of emphasis, conspired to make him the most affecting, persuasive, and applauded speaker I ever saw.  I was captivated like others; but when I came home, and coolly considered what he had said, stripped of all those ornaments in which he had dressed it, I often found the matter flimsy, the arguments weak, and I was convinced of the power of those adventitious concurring circumstances, which ignorance of mankind only calls trifling ones.  Cicero, in his book ‘De Oratore’, in order to raise the dignity of that profession which he well knew himself to be at the head of, asserts that a complete orator must be a complete everything, lawyer, philosopher, divine, etc.  That would be extremely well, if it were possible:  but man’s life is not long enough; and I hold him to be the completest orator, who speaks the best upon that subject which occurs; whose happy choice of words, whose lively imagination, whose elocution and action adorn and grace his matter, at the same time that they excite the attention and engage the passions of his audience.