THE ILLUSTRATED PUBLIC SCHOOL SPEAKER AND READER Based on Grammatical Analysis : comprising a Choice Selection of Pieces for Reading and Recitation, annotated for Expression to which is added A Selection of Greek, Latin, French, and German Extracts suitable for BY A. K. ISBISTER, M.A., LL.B. LONDON: 1870. 260. g. 72 'MANY persons speak well who read badly, and good reading is not necessarily allied with good speaking; but I confidently assert that the two arts are so nearly connected, that the easiest way to learn to speak, is to learn to read. But it is not alone as a pathway to speaking that I earnestly exhort you to the study of reading: it is an accomplishment to be sought for its own sake. It has incalculable uses and advantages apart from its introduction to oratory. Tolerable readers are few: good readers are extremely rare. Not one educated man in ten can read a paragraph in a newspaper with so much propriety, that to listen to him is a pleasure, and not a pain. Why should this be? Why should correct reading be rare, pleasant reading be rarer still, and good reading found only in one man in ten thousand?'-EDWARD W. Cox, Letters to a Law Student. 'ELOQUENCE, in this empire, is power. Give a man nerve, a presence, sway over language, and above all, enthusiasm; start him in the public arena with these requisites, and ere many years, perhaps many months, have passed, you will either see him in high station, or in a fair way of rising to it. Party politics, social grievances, and the like, are to him so many newly discovered worlds, wherein he may, with the orator's swordhis tongue-carve out his fortune and his fame.'-FRASER'S MAGAZINE. |