"Hither, as to a fountain,
Other suns repair, and in their urns
Draw golden light."
Lord Chatham read and reread Dr. Barrows' sermons until he knew many of them by heart, "for the purpose," as he himself said, "of acquiring copiousness of diction and an exact choice of words." William Pitt, his son, obtained his remarkable command of the English tongue from the same source, in connection with Shakespeare and the Bible; the latter he studied not only as a guide of life, but as the true "well of English undefiled." No wonder that his contemporary, Fox, should have said of him, "He always has the right word in the right place."
William Pinckney has himself unlocked the secret of his intellectual affluence and elegant diction. He says that he made it a rule from his youth never to see a fine idea without committing it to memory. Rufus Choate, in speaking of this fact, said "the result was the most splendid and powerful English spoken style I ever heard." Choate pursued a plan equally commendable. During the greater portion of his life he made it a practise to read aloud every day a page or more from some fine English author. This he did for the improvement of his expression. He was a most indefatigable student of words, and made the whole round of literature tributary to his vocabulary.
The following extract from the address of Lord Brougham to the University of Glasgow will be a sufficient guide, with what has been already said, to the selection of those authors that will tend most to improve the style and diction: "The English writers who really unlock the rich sources of the language are those who flourish from the end of Elizabeth's to the end of Queen Anne's reign; who used a good Saxon dialect with ease, but correctness and perspicuity—learned in the ancient classics, but only enriching their mother tongue where the Attic could supply its defects—not overlaying it with a profuse pedantic coinage of words."
The great masters of oratory should be studied most carefully and diligently; Erskine, Burke, Pinckney, Webster, and, above all, the legal orations of Cicero are the best models for a young lawyer. Read Bolingbroke for specimens of the splendid and ornate; Fox and Pitt for the classical and argumentative; advantage may likewise be derived from the letters of Junius.
In pursuing these studies, the motto must be multum haud multa—much, not many. No real advantage and improvement will be gained from a rambling, desultory course of reading. There is a whole sermon in that saying of Hobbes, of Malmesbury, "If I had read as many books as other persons, I should probably know as little." The wisest and best informed teach us, both by counsel and example, to read a little and that well; to count not by the books we have read, but by the subjects we have exhausted. Swift said that the reason a certain university was a learned place was that most persons took some learning there and few brought any away with them, so it accumulated. Such is the effect of a proper course of reading—everything adds and nothing takes away.
We are not counseling an imitation of the men of one book, but the pursuit of one system. Choose those authors most suited to the object in view and know them.
The advocate should make choice of his book, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Burke, Erskine, Bolingbroke, and make that his chief study. One sterling author to call my own, ever most conspicuous and most at hand, read, reread, "marked and quoted," will do much to form the mind, to teach one to think, to give precision of expression, purity of taste, loftiness of views and fervency of spirit. No better selection can be made by the advocate than the works of Edmund Burke. "Among the characteristics of Lord Erskine's eloquence," observes one of his recent biographers, "the perpetual illustrations derived from the writings of Burke is very remarkable. In every one of the great state trials in which he was engaged, he referred to the productions of that extraordinary person as to a text-book of political wisdom—expounding, enforcing and justifying all the great and noble principles of freedom and of justice." "When I look," says Lord Erskine himself, "into my own mind and find its best lights and principles fed from that immense magazine of moral and political wisdom which he has left an inheritance to mankind for their instruction, I feel myself repelled by an awful and grateful sensibility from perpetually approaching him." Take, then, the words of this sublime philosopher and orator, bind them up in one thick volume, on which write wisdom in gold letters, and begin to read it through every New-year's day.
Another means of acquiring a command of language is translation, and it is commended alike by the precepts and example of the great masters. Two thousand years ago Cicero stocked his vocabulary by this plan, translating from the Greek into Latin. Chatham translated the orations of Demosthenes again and again into English. Mansfield declared that there was not one of the orations of Cicero that he had not translated more than once. Pitt pursued the same plan for ten years, and to this he ascribed his extraordinary command of language, which enabled him to give every idea its most felicitous expression, and to pour out an unbroken stream of thought hour after hour without once hesitating for a word or recalling a phrase, or sinking for a moment into looseness or inaccuracy in the structure of a sentence. Choate was a most indefatigable translator. This exercise he persevered in daily, even in the midst of the most arduous business. Five minutes a day, if no more, he would seize in the morning for this task. Tacitus was his favorite author. He attended chiefly to the multiplication of synonyms. For every word he translated, he would rack his brain and search his books till he got five or six corresponding English words. This is the true way to translate when style and diction is the object. Turn the passage read into regular English sentences, aiming to give the idea with great exactness and to express it with idiomatic accuracy and ease. This plan of translating is infinitely better than the plan sometimes advised of taking some passage of classic English, getting the ideas from it and then expressing them in the best manner possible. In this latter method, the author has already selected the most appropriate words, and if the student use the same words he will receive no profit, or if other words, it is prejudicial, as it accustoms one to use such as are less eligible.
The student of advocacy can not give too much attention to the culture of expression. Orators in every age have made it a specific study. Cicero says, "The proper concern of an orator, as I have already often said, is language of power and eloquence accommodated to the feelings and understanding of mankind." Language and its elements, words, are to be mastered by direct, earnest labor. A speaker ought daily to exercise and air his vocabulary and add to and enrich it. The advocate does not want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but one whose every word is full freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power. It is a rich and rare English that one ought to command, who is aiming to control a jury's ear.