[31]
The duty of stooping to expend that power of
speaking which has been acquired at the cost of such
effort upon an audience of one gives rise to a silent
[p. 55]
feeling of disdain, and the teacher is ashamed to
raise his voice above the ordinary conversational
level. Imagine the air of a declaimer, or the voice
of an orator, his gait, his delivery, the movements of
his body, the emotions of his mind, and, to go no
further, the fatigue of his exertions, all for the sake
of one listener! Would he not seem little less than
a lunatic? No, there would be no such thing as
eloquence, if we spoke only with one person at
a time.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
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