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DISTRICT OF CONNECTICUT, SS.

BE IT REMEMBERED, That on the ninth day of L.S. December, in the fifty-fourth year of the independence of the United States of America, JONATHAN BARBER, of the said District hath deposited in this Office the title of a Book, the right whereof he claims as Author in the words following-to wit: "A Grammar ef Elocution, containing the principles of the Arts of Speaking and Reading, illustrated by appropriate exercises and examples, adapted to colleges, schools, and private instruction, the whole arranged in the order in which it is taught in Yale College. By Jonathan Barber."

In conformity to the Act of Congress of the United States, entitled "an act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the Authors and Proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned, and also to the act, entitled "an act supplementary to an act, entitled an act for the encouragement of learning by securing the copies of Maps, charts, and books, to the Authors and Proprietors of such copies during the times therein mentioned, and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving and etching historical and other prints."

CHARLES A. INGERSOLL,

Clerk of the District of Connecticut.

A true copy of Record examined and sealed by me,

CHARLES A. INGERSOLL,

Clerk of the District of Connecticu

BALDWIN AND TREADWAY, PRINTERS.

019714,83

TO JAMES RUSH, M. D.

PHILADELPHIA.

66

DEAR SIR,

THE treatise which you published in 1827, entitled the Philosophy of the Human Voice," was the first work that ever presented a true and comprehensive record of the vocal functions. Physiology is a science, the details of which, are discoverable only by observation and experiment. The history of the functions of the voice, is a legitimate department of that science, and you have investigated it in the only true method. Your work is strictly inductive: its philosophical principle is therefore correct. It combines, at the same time, such fullness of detail, with such an orderly classification of the vocal functions, as to entitle your views of the subject, on the ground both of the comprehensiveness of the particulars, and the felicity of the arrangement, to the denomination of A SCIENCE. Much less originality, depth, and accuracy of investigation, devoted to some art which mankind in general have been taught to consider profitable, would have brought you a more immediate recompense of fame; not however, perhaps, a larger portion of ultimate glory. As to the practical tendency

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of your treatise, I would observe that it satisfied my curiosity, as to the elements of the art which I teach, and enlarged to so great an extent my resources as a teacher, that the advantages I am constantly deriving from it, of themselves prompt me to a full and grateful acknowledgement of its merits. It naturally led to a friendly intercourse between us: for what is more powerful, when good moral qualities are not deficient, to attract and bind one man to another, than fellowship in elevating intellectual pursuits.

The method of investigation adopted in your work, shows the reason why the ancients did not reduce elocution to a science. Recent times first disclosed the true mode of investigating nature; and your treatise will be admitted by all competent judges, to be a triumphant exhibition of its efficacy.

This "Grammar of Elocution," is fruit gathered from the vine which you planted; it is adapted to special purposes, which will be set forth in the preface, but is by no means intended as a substitute for your valuable work.

In what I have said of that work, I have only discharged a debt of public justice, and told what I believe to be the truth; I confess it has been with pleasure, because I can subscribe myself

Your sincere Friend and Servant,

JONATHAN BARBER

NEW-HAVEN, Jan. 1830.

PREFACE.

THE value of the following work must be estimated, I. by the importance of the subject of which it treats, and II. by the manner in which that subject is treated.

I. As respects the importance of delivery, I shall offer an argument, which I consider as conclusive. It is founded on the opinion and practice of the Greek and Roman orators. Their evidence to the importance of the art of Elocution, and to the care with which it was cultivated among them, is full and clear. I see no reason to believe, that the ancients had any record of the functions of the voice any science of Elocution, in the sense in which we possess it in the works of Steele and Rush, or in which I have endeavored to display it in this Grammar. The discourse of Quinctilian on the voice, may be considered as revealing to us the Ultima Thule of their researches. But they endeavored to compensate by practice, for their deficiency in principles. The Greeks, especially, entertained very high conceptions of the end and objects of the fine arts generally, and of the art of speaking, among the rest. They were not satisfied, unless their efforts surprised, moved, delighted. They considered the true end of a fine art, was, to communicate a high degree of satisfaction to a cultivated taste; and they continued to labor, till they attained that end. Hence the long and painful preparatory exercises in speaking, to which they submitted, in the presence of their rhetorical masters. These, however, were, as regards elocution, rather an appeal to the taste of those masters, than to any general standard of science; and the corrections must

have been, for the most part, the result of individual feeling and judgment. But though thus destitute of what Cicero calls the "Fontes philosophiæ e quibus illa manant,"* their sense of the importance of delivery, is strongly disclosed in their history. I will not dwell on the case of Demosthenes, with his half shaven head, his cave, and his practice on the sea shore, though they are an emphatic record of his opinions on elocution, and of his sublime devotion to the pursuit of his art: but I will mention a fact, perhaps not so generally known. It is, that this distinguished orator expended a sum, amounting to several thousand dollars, in the payment of a master of elocution. Cicero, after having completed his education in other respects, (and what an education!) devoted two years to recitation, under the most accomplished tragedian of antiquity. Caius Gracchus, who arrayed one half of Rome against the other, was so solicitous about the management of his voice in addressing public assemblies, that a slave used to stand behind. him with a small pitch-pipe, to set the prelusive note. The science of music was habitually cultivated among the Greeks and Romans, as subservient to the art of elocution. Statues were sometimes erected to distinguished Rhetoricians. In some instances, the public money was coined in their name : and their salaries frequently exceeded those of a Minister of State in modern Europe. By these facts, we are made acquainted with the opinions of nations who carried the art of speaking to perfection; and with the practices of the youthful declaimers, who became subsequently conspicuous on the theatre of public affairs.

The oratory of the best Greek and Roman speakers, was, withal, eminently practical. They did not employ it for me

* Fountains of Philosophy, from which these things are derived.