article appears. We think not. A few sharp days, and the forts will fall, and with the forts the city. Still we must remember that Paris is now far stronger than in 1814; and instead of a few contemptible redoubts and 100 guns, has twelve leagues of wall and sixteen citadels. Instead of 30,000 men, she has at present, by the most trustworthy accounts, 60,000 soldiers, 100,000 Gardes Mobile, 190,000 National Guards, 9,000 volunteer Franc-Tireurs, and 10,000 auxiliaries from the municipal services. The reliable defenders of the city are computed by General Trochu, a cool and determined man, at 410,000 armed men, ready for instant service on the ramparts. This sounds well, and much may be expected from the rage and despair of such a multitude, even though two-thirds of them are young recruits. Still we do not think that Paris will rival even Sebastopol, much less Troy, Numantia, or Saragossa. Yet there are certainly elements of strength unknown in 1814. The population, then only 700,000, is now 1,696,000. The whole twenty-two miles of ramparts only require 150,000 men to man them; and if the total number of guns required, 3,640 (the Allies of 1814 only took 100), have really been mounted, and the thirty-six entrances hitherto left open have been well fortified-if there is no treason, internal insurrection, or panic-Paris may still make a bloody resistance, and many thousands of Prussians may perish before its bastions, even in the few days of storm that we expect. The rain of fire and iron must soon, we fear, descend upon the fair siren of cities. God grant her days of suffering may be short, and that the sunshine of peace may follow speedily the cruel tempest.

WALTER THORNBURY.

AFTER-DINNER SPEECHES.

HERE are three or four things that most people think they can do till they try; waltz, for instance, or throw off a Times leader, drive tandem or draw up a budget. Of the secrets of Printing House Square of course none of us know any more than we know of those of the Ecumenical Council or the Court of the Grand Llama. But if Mr. Delane ever takes it into his head to give us "The Autobiography of a Journalist," he will, I have no doubt, be able to illustrate one of these foibles as interestingly as Mr. Lowe exemplified another in his speech at Gloucester a couple of years ago. All the world knows how Sir William Jones used to upset the quadrilles at his friends' houses, when young ladies, anxious to trot out the lion, assumed as a matter of course that the man who could spell out an inscription on an Assyrian obelisk, must know all the figures of a quadrille; and you have only to keep your eyes open during a London season to meet with scores of instances of the superstition that a man has only to take his seat on a box, and flourish a whip, to distinguish himself as the driver of a four in hand. But after profound meditation, and a diversified observation of public dinners at the London Tavern, at the Freemason's Hall, and at Willis's Rooms, I have come to the conclusion that the most general, the most alluring, and I may add the most fatal, of all the known forms of temptation, is the temptation to stand up with a glass of wine in your hand, and propose a toast.

An Englishman, as Frere said, generally opens best, like the oyster, with a knife and fork, and it looks so easy to get on your legs after dinner, when your blood is five or ten degrees higher than usual, and when your intellects are as keen and as fertile, in your own estimation at least, as those of Barry Cornwall's happy Squires,

With brains made clear

By the irresistible strength of beer,

and set the table in a roar by a few happy flashes of wit, of satire, or of humour. The profusion of plate and flowers, the rattle of glass, the inspiration of the claret, the apparently thoughtless geniality of the guests, the anticipation of waking up next morning and finding yourself famous--your speech in all the papers, your bon mots in all

mouths-form together a combination of temptations that may well turn more heads than they do.

And yet what failures most after-dinner speeches are. How they associate themselves in one's recollection with mental nausea, with fits of indigestion, blue devils, Gorgons, hydras, and chimeras dire! Run over in your mind's eye all the after-dinner speeches you have heard in the course of your life, select the best, and if you are of a critical turn of mind analyse them, and what are they? You might as well attempt to analyse a butterfly's wings or the motes in a sunbeam. A single speech of Mr. Lowe's or of Mr. Disraeli's upon a question that stirs our passions or touches our imagination will, I venture to say, be worth all of them put together.

The traditions of eloquence,

How is this? In Parliamentary eloquence, the eloquence proper to business-like assemblies, we have no rivals. Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Disraeli, and Mr. Bright are not only the first of English orators, they stand at the head of all contemporary orators. of the English Church do not favour the growth especially the growth of extemporaneous eloquence. The churches of the Continent cultivate it as one of the fine arts, as one of the first of their professional accomplishments-cultivate it, that is, as we do Greek and Latin. And in the mass, these churches probably possess more fluent and striking preachers than are to be found in all our churches, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Nonconformist. Yet if we take the most distinguished lights of their pulpits and compare them with our Stanleys, our Liddons, our Wilberforces, and Cairds, we do not believe that we need blush for ourselves even on this score. In Sir Roundell Palmer, in Sir John Coleridge, in Sir John Karslake, and Mr. Henry James, we have, too, lawyers of the most distinguished powers of oratory. Here, however, our boasting must end. We do not possess the art of making after-dinner speeches. Public dinners are our forte. But after-dinner speeches are our foible. We have only two or three men out of our thirty millions who can talk a little agreeable and witty nonsense at the head of a dinner-table that will look as light and sparkling in the type of the Times the next morning as it sounds with the voice of the speaker still ringing in your ears. One of these is a popular divine, another a comic actor, and the third one of the most distinguished of Her Majesty's ministers. The mass of after-dinner speakers are intolerable, and not to be endured. They are vapid and pointless to a degree which is hardly conceivable by those who have not conscientiously gone through a course of the banquets by which, during May and June, the millionaires of the metropolis are hocussed out of

their guineas under the genial and exhilarating influence of cheap Champagne and pathetic statistics. Is it that the genius of our language does not lend itself to the persiflage that forms the staple of the happiest specimens of after-dinner oratory? That it is not sufficiently plastic? That it is not sufficiently precise and picturesque to reproduce the fleeting fancies of the moment with the piquancy and delicacy of the French or the Italian? Or is it a sort of constitutional defect? Is it a superstition of our own that we open best like the oyster, with knife and fork? Or what is it? for we are at our wits' end to suggest any plausible hypothesis in the form of a universal fact.

Many of our failures arise, probably, from the want of preparation. People go to dinners anticipating to be called upon to make a speech, and yet go without a single sentence upon their lips, without a single thought in their heads. They trust, like Telemachus, at the Spartan Court, to the inspiration of the moment, and, like that interesting youth, when the moment comes they are as mute as rats who have just crossed the floor of the House of Commons. They rise in a fluster, acknowledge the cheers which greet them with a ghastly smile, stammer out a few words, pause, hesitate, stop, quote poetry, or get on the stilts and talk hyperbole or nonsense, according to the turn of their minds, repeat themselves two or three times, and sit down in a cold sweat, possibly thanking Heaven that they are not under the table in a fit of apoplexy, or perhaps consoling themselves with the reflection that after all they have not made greater asses of themselves than the rest of the guests, and that they can atone for their failure by adding five guineas extra to their subscription. We are thinking now only of the more favourable cases. Now and then you meet a man who is perverse and stupid, who does not sit down when his head is gone, who treats a cough with contempt, and resents conversation as an impertinence; a man who simply stands still when his ideas have all vanished, and who, although conscious that his mind is an utter blank, nevertheless persists in keeping on his legs and firing off odd little sentences that mean nothing, like riflemen firing off blank cartridge, after their shot is all gone. Most after-dinner speakers are simply bores. These are a nuisance. All our failures, however, are not to be explained on this hypothesis. More men break down, perhaps, from want of preparation than from anything else. But this is not the only cause. There are many

men who possess every gift by which the most brilliant after-dinner speakers are distinguished-imagination, wit, keen powers of ridicule, a polished style-all except one: sufficient strength of nerve to stand VOL. VI., N.S. 1870.

C

upon their legs for ten minutes in the presence of two or three hundred pair of eyes. At their desk, with a pen in their hands, these men are perhaps among the most thoughtful and suggestive of writers; and over a glass of wine, with half a dozen friends, the liveliest and most sparkling of talkers; but the instant they feel themselves on their feet, asking permission to propose a toast, or acknowledge their own health, they sink to the level of the ordinary stutterers of common-place. Thackeray belonged to this class. It was a positive torture to him to be called upon to make an after-dinner speech. "Why don't they get Dickens to take the chair?" he used to say peevishly when a deputation had just pestered him into attending their anniversary at the London Tavern. "He can make a speech, and a good one. I'm of no use. They little think how nervous I am; and Dickens does not know the meaning of the word." And this was the fact. Thackeray scribbled out a draft of all his speeches, and revised, and altered, and polished them as he did a chapter in "Pendennis 66 or a Round About Paper," and then learnt them by heart. But it was a thousand chances to one whether he got through half of what he had thus prepared; and whether he did or not, he was like a toad under a harrow all the evening, and very seldom made the slightest play with his eloquence.

And this is generally the case with men of Thackeray's type. It was the case with Theodore Hook. In a Club smoking room the witty editor of John Bull would mount the table and keep a select circle of boon companions laughing for a couple of hours, by mimicking the style of most of our Parliamentary orators, Peel, Palmerston, Croker, Althorp,. "the brilliant Baron," Lyndhurst, Brougham and Follett, reproducing their style, their thoughts, all their little affectations and tricks, with astonishing fidelity. Yet when called upon to put a few sentences together at a Lord Mayor's dinner, the keenest wit in London was brought to the stand-still at his third sentence for a thought or a phrase, and never, I believe, in his life got beyond a dozen sentences. Pen in hand Jeffrey was the most fluent of men. He threw off page after page of a slashing criticism for the Edinburgh Review in the course of the evening, without a single erasure or interlineation, without even a pause for a word. But at a dinner table it was a mere chance of hit or miss whether his speeches were brilliant successes or contemptible failures; and in the most important after-dinner speech that he was called upon to make, that of proposing the health of Charles Kemble when presenting him with a testimonial in the name of the City of Edinburgh, he broke down at the very outset of his speech, and had to sit in confu