V.

To begin with what is more external.  If we are so wholly Anglo-Saxon and Germanic as people say, how comes it that the habits and gait of the German language are so exceedingly unlike ours?  Why while the Times talks in this fashion:  ’At noon a long line of carriages extended from Pall Mall to the Peers’ entrance of the Palace of Westminster,’ does the Cologne Gazette talk in this other fashion:  ’Nachdem die Vorbereitungen zu dem auf dem GurzenichSaale zu Ebren der Abgeordneten Statt finden sollenden Bankette bereits vollstandig getroffen worden waren, fand heute vormittag auf polizeiliche Anordnung die Schliessung sammtlicher Zugange zum Gurzenich Statt’? {97} Surely the mental habit of people who express their thoughts in so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, cannot be essentially the same.  The English language, strange compound as it is, with its want of inflections, and with all the difficulties which this want of inflections brings upon it, has yet made itself capable of being, in good hands, a business-instrument as ready, direct, and clear, as French or Latin.  Again:  perhaps no nation, after the Greeks and Romans, has so clearly felt in what true rhetoric, rhetoric of the best kind, consists, and reached so high a pitch of excellence in this, as the English.  Our sense for rhetoric has in some ways done harm to us in our cultivation of literature, harm to us, still more, in our cultivation of science; but in the true sphere of rhetoric, in public speaking, this sense has given us orators whom I do think we may, without fear of being contradicted and accused of blind national vanity, assert to have inherited the great Greek and Roman oratorical tradition more than the orators of any other country.  Strafford, Bolingbroke, the two Pitts, Fox,—­to cite no other names,—­I imagine few will dispute that these call up the notion of an oratory, in kind, in extent, in power, coming nearer than any other body of modern oratory to the oratory of Greece and Rome.  And the affinity of spirit in our best public life and greatest public men to those of Rome, has often struck observers, foreign as well as English.  Now, not only have the Germans shown no eminent aptitude for rhetoric such as the English have shown,—­that was not to be expected, since our public life has done so much to develop an aptitude of this kind, and the public life of the Germans has done so little,—­but they seem in a singular degree devoid of any aptitude at all for rhetoric.  Take a speech from the throne in Prussia, and compare it with a speech from the throne in England.  Assuredly it is not in speeches from the throne that English rhetoric or any rhetoric shows its best side;—­they are often cavilled at, often justly cavilled at;—­no wonder, for this form of composition is beset with very trying difficulties.  But what is to be remarked is