Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

Brougham trained himself for extemporaneous speaking in the Speculative Society, the great theatre of debate for the University of Edinburgh. He also improved his English style by translations from the Greek, among which is his well-known version of the "Oration on the Crown."

Canning's attention, while at Eton, was strongly turned to extemporaneous speaking. They had a debating society, in which the Marquis of Wellesley and Charles Earl Grey had been trained before him, in which they had all the forms of the House of Commons—Speaker, Treasury benches, and an Opposition. Canning also was disciplined by the habit of translation.

Curran practised declamation daily before a glass, reciting passages from Shakespeare and the best English orators. He frequented the debating societies which then abounded in London. He failed at first, and was ridiculed as "Orator Mum." But at last he surmounted every difficulty. It was said of him by a contemporary: "He turned his shrill and stumbling brogue into a flexible, sustained, and finely modulated voice; his action become free and forcible; he acquired perfect readiness in thinking on his legs; he put down every opponent by the mingled force of his argument and wit; and was at last crowned with the universal applause of the society and invited by the president to an entertainment in their behalf." I am not sure that I have seen, on any good authority, that he was in the habit of writing translations from Latin or Greek, but he studied them with great ardor and undoubtedly adopted, among the methods of perfecting his English style, the custom of students of his day of translation from these languages.

Jeffrey joined the Speculative Society, in Edinburgh, in his youth. His biographer says that it did more for him than any other event in the whole course of his education.

Chatham, the greatest of English orators, if we may judge by the reports of his contemporaries, trained himself for public speaking by constant translations from Latin and Greek. The education of his son, the younger Pitt, is well known. His father compelled him to read Thucydides into English at sight, and to go over it again and again, until he had got the best possible rendering of the Greek into English.

Macaulay belonged to the Cambridge Union, where, as in the society of the same name at Oxford, the great topics of the day were discussed by men, many of whom afterward became famous statesmen and debaters in the Commons.

Young Murray, afterward Lord Mansfield, translated Sallust and Horace with ease; learned great part of them by heart; could converse fluently in Latin; wrote Latin prose correctly and idiomatically, and was specially distinguished at Westminster for his declamations. He translated every oration of Cicero into English and back again into Latin.

Fox can hardly have been supposed to have practised much in debating societies, as he entered the House of Commons when he was nineteen years old. But it is quite probably that he was drilled by translations from Latin and Greek into English; and in the House of Commons he had in early youth the advantage of the best debating society in the world. It is said that he read Latin and Greek as easily as he read English. He himself said that he gained his skill at the expense of the House, for he had sometimes tasked himself during the entire session to speak on every question that came up, whether he was interested in it or not, as a means of exercising and training his faculties. This is what made him, according to Burke, "rise by slow degrees to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever saw."

Sir Henry Bulwer's "Life of Palmerston" does not tell us whether he was trained by the habit of writing translations or in debating societies. But he was a very eager reader of the classics. There is little doubt, however, considering the habit of his contemporaries at Cambridge, and that he was ambitious for public life, and represented the University of Cambridge in Parliament just after he became twenty-one, that he belonged to a debating society and that he was drilled in English composition by translation from the classics.

Gladstone was a famous debater in the Oxford Union, as is well known, and was undoubtedly in the habit of writing translations from Greek and Latin, of which he was always so passionately fond. He says in his paper on Arthur Hallam that the Eton debating club known as the Society supplied the British Empire with four Prime Ministers in fourscore years.