‘That seems to me,’ I said, ’very difficult.  It is like swimming with corks.  One would be always tempted to look down on the paper.’

‘It is almost equally difficult,’ said Tocqueville, ’to make a speech of which the words are prepared.  There is a struggle between the invention and the memory.  You trust thoroughly to neither, and therefore are not served thoroughly by either.’

‘Yet that,’ said Marcet, ’is what our Swiss pastors are required to do.  They are forbidden to read, and forbidden to extemporise, and by practice they speak from memory—­some well, all tolerably.’

‘Brougham,’ said Lord Granville, ’used to introduce his most elaborately prepared passages by a slight hesitation.  When he seemed to pause in search of thoughts, or of words, we knew that he had a sentence ready cut and dried.’

‘Who,’ I asked Sumner, ‘are your best speakers in America?’

‘The best,’ he said, ‘is Seward; after him perhaps comes Winthrop.’

‘I should have thought it difficult,’ I said, ’to speak well in the Senate, to only fifty or at most sixty members.’

‘You do not speak,’ answered Sumner, ’to the Senators.  You do not think of them.  You know that their minds are made up.  Except as to mere executive questions, such as the approval of a public functionary, or the acceptance or modification of a treaty, every senator comes in pledged to a given, or to an assumed, set of opinions and measures.  You speak to the public.  You speak in order that 500,000 copies of what you say, as was the case with my last speech, may be scattered over the whole Union.’

‘That,’ I said, ’must much affect the character of your oratory.  A speech meant to be read must be a different thing from one meant to be heard.  Your speeches must in fact be pamphlets, and that I suppose accounts for their length.’

‘That is true,’ replied Sumner.  ’But when you hear that we speak for a day, or for two days, or, as I have sometimes done, for three days, you must remember that our days are days of only three hours each.’

‘How long,’ I asked, ‘was your last speech?’

‘About five hours,’ he answered.  ’Three hours the first day and two hours the second.’

‘That,’ I said, ’is not beyond our remotest limit.  Brougham indeed, on the amendment of the law, spoke for six hours, during the greater part of the time to an audience of three.  The House was filled with fog, and there is an H.B. which represents him gesticulating in the obscurity and the solitude.’

‘He,’ said Lord Granville, ’put his speech on the Reform Bill at the top.’

‘The speech,’ I said, ’at the end of which he knelt to implore the Peers to pass the bill, and found it difficult to rise.’

[Footnote 1:  Barthelemy de St-Hilaire is now Thiers’ private secretary and right hand.—­ED.]

Tuesday, April 14.—­Z., Sumner, Lord Granville, Tocqueville, M. Circourt, St.-Hilaire, and Corcelle breakfasted with us.