“Dad, do you think she was learning to be a gentleman?”
Occasionally my eyes light upon some jotting worthy of almost pigeon-hole dignity—too prized for the society of mere scraps, yet too small for the space of a chapter. Here is one concerning a famous lawyer.
Fate has often thrown me into the company of lawyers—the most excellent of people when you don’t meet them in a professional, or fee-paying sense. The really busy advocate is in most cases a delightful man, for the very qualities which make him a social favourite go no little way to establish his success at the Bar.
I once asked Sir Edward Clarke, K.C., what was his recipe for producing a good barrister, and was a little surprised at the importance he attached to the study of oratory.
“Every law student at the beginning of his work should study the art of speaking, the most valuable and the most highly rewarded of all the arts which can be acquired by man.
“The counsel needs the power of fluent and correct expression and of the rhetorical arrangement of his argument of speech. He should have an easy, clear, and well-modulated elocution which compels attention, makes it pleasant to listen to him, and so predisposes in his favour the judgment of his hearers.”
“Ah, but has everyone this gift?” I said.
“Perhaps not, but all these things must be acquired. Each one of them requires a special study. Some men are, no doubt, more highly gifted by nature than others in strength of intellect, tenacity of memory, and the graces of oratory, but no one was ever so highly gifted as to be able to dispense with the labour by which the natural powers are trained and strengthened. The best books for the young law student are Whately’s Logic and Whately’s Rhetoric. They should be read and re-read until he knows them from cover to cover.”
“You are a very warm advocate of speech,” I interposed. “Do you think it a lost art, or an improving one?”
“The ancients were the best teachers. Aristotle’s Rhetoric (the best of all), Cicero’s De Oratore, Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, are the books of study; Blair and Campbell should be read, but are of no great merit, while of Whately I have already spoken. But the study of good models—and when I speak of study I do not mean simply reading a speech, but the examination and analysis of it, applying the rules of the art which these treatises contain: the attentive hearing of great speeches in Parliament or the courts, or of great sermons, is the only way by which the capacity for really good speaking can be acquired.