The reading of the speech as a whole could hardly be attempted with any profit until the class has mastered its technicalities and its logic. The oration differs in this from more imaginative literature. Here it is not only proper but necessary to make analysis part of the first reading.
The class should for itself make a summary of the speech as it goes forward. For each paragraph should be devised a single sentence which gives clearly and concisely the thought, so that at the conclusion a complete skeleton shall have been made. Each student should make these sentences for himself as part of his preparation of a lesson, and from a comparison in the class the final form may be selected. Some of the school editions do this admirably, but one of two things seems to me indisputable: either the "Speech" is too difficult for students to handle or they should make their own summaries. To do this part of the work for them is to deprive the study of its most valuable element. The best justification such a selection
can have for its inclusion in the list of required books is that it may fairly be used for this careful analytical work without prejudice to the effect of the piece as a whole. In other words, no objection exists to treating this especial selection first from the purely intellectual point of view. To consider a play of Shakespeare first intellectually would seem to me utterly wrong; but this argument of Burke is intentionally addressed to the reason rather than to the imagination, and would therefore logically be so read.
Beside the mere interpretation of difficult passages, the pupil should be made to discern and to weigh the value and effect of the admirable sentences in which the orator has condensed whole trains of logic.
The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
A wise and salutary neglect.
The power of refusal, the first of all revenues.
The voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty.
All government—indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act—is founded on compromise and barter.
The study of phrases of this sort is admirable training for the reasoning faculties of the scholar, it educates the powers of reading, and it may be made a continuous lesson in the nature and value of literary technique. Of this study of literary workmanship I shall speak later; here it is sufficient to point the necessity at once and the advantage