Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, BY D. T. STILES, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Northern District of New York. N. B. Be it remembered, that each dramatic production which appears in The Orator is copyrighted, which includes acting as well as printing the same; and any violation of the copy-right will incur a fine of $100 for each representation, Permission to represent them must be obtained of D. T. Stiles, Buffalo, N. Y. They are free to be used in school exhibitions. THE ORATOR. OUR INTRODUCTION. THE field of Periodical Publication, as far as relates to that which we have chosen, is entirely new, having never been explored; which fact enables us to make one prophetic sentence in favor of the ground we have taken: we shall not be looked upon in the light Our plan is without a model. of an imitator, at least. It would tax the most skillful surveyor of literature to find another department of science or art so neglected in periodical publication, as the one we have selected; and, at the same time, so forcibly demanding periodical representation. The few oratorical productions, collected in one volume, monthly scattered through such a variety of new publications, would be an acquisition that every teacher as well as student of oratory would not fail to possess; while the reader of choice literature surely could spend an hour agreeably with those productions worthy the name of oratorical selections, scientific, declamatory, tragical, or comical. Our profession made us fully acquainted with the scarcity of proper selections for judicious examples in reading and recitation. Volume after volume of literature must be turned over, to select, we might almost say, a single productions proper for oratorical exercises. There are, we freely acknowledge, no small number of books purporting to be selections for the student in reading and oratorical delivery; but if we examine those volumes, we will be compelled to admit that they contain few selections truly useful for the object which they were compiled. And if we examine them after they have passed through the hands of the student, we will then find that some one-half to a dozen selections have received all the attention; and those selections the very same which have been handed down through every work of the kind for the last ten, fifteen, and many of them twenty or thirty years. The study of these few, to the exclusion of the many, we attribute to the scarcity of productions possessing true oratorical merit, as exercises for the student; and the greater part of our text-books upon this subject are filled up with selections of little or no merit for what they were compiled. This scarcity of proper material, if nothing else, would limit our pages to their present number; as the first rule of our judgment will be to admit nothing in this magazine which is not admirably adapted to oratorical reading and recitation. Our judgment will not be satisfied with merely rhetorical beauties alone. Each selection must, at least, possess a field for gesture, posture, or expression, as well as modulation; for we consider them the heart and soul of oratory; no matter whether the speaker stands in the scientific hall, the public assembly, the pulpit, at the bar, or treads the dramatic boards. They are those innate beauties of composition which the merely reader of literature rarely ever finds vividly reflected upon the vision of his mind beauties of which most literary productions are entirely void, but which are of the greatest value to the orator. Our original productions will be composed of dissertations upon the principles of oratory as well as those for reading and recitation. Our selections will, mainly, be those not to be found in other works on elocution and oratory; and we here invite those friendly to our enterprise, to lend us a hand, always, however, keeping in their "mind's eye," our object-oratorical delivery. We shall occasionally give some of those old choice selections which have been honored by every lover of oratory; all of which we hope to accompany with such remarks as will be useful to the student, and interesting to the reader. EXTRACT FROM THE SPEECH OF WILLIAM H. Seward, addressed to THE REPUBLICANS OF BUFFALO, Oct. 19, 1855. WHATEVER may be the political principles of the reader, the point will be acknowledged, that the following extract possesses oratorial beauties which entitle it a place on these pages, intended as they are for specimens of oratory alone: |