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INTRODUCTION.

ELOCUTION, by which we mean the appropriate use of the voice in reading and speaking, is both a science and an art. As a science, it resolves speech into its elementary constituents, and examines their sonant properties. As an art, it insists on the correspondence of these properties with the meaning of the language uttered; and elocution may be described as true or false in so far as this correspondence is, or is not, complete.

The student will be assisted by referring from time to time during his perusal of the work to the following synopsis :

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PART I.

THE VERBAL MECHANISM.

SECTION I.

ARTICULATION.

There is a perfection in the pronunciation of the best speakers (which was remarkable in the late Mrs. Cibber, and is the same in Mr. Garrick): they are distinctly heard even in the softest sounds of their voices; when others are scarcely intelligible, though offensively loud.-STEELE, Prosodia Rationalis, 1779.

1. Elementary Sounds.-The first business of a teacher of elocution is to enumerate and classify the various elementary sounds of which the words of a language are composed, and to explain how they are severally formed by the organs of speech.

2. Breath-Aspirate and Vocal.-The raw material of the elementary sounds is breath. The windpipe may be compared to a flute, through which we may blow in such a manner as either merely to cause the passage of air to be heard, or to produce a musical sound. And in a precisely similar manner the air may either pass through the larynx as merely aspirate breath, or be modified by the vibration of the chords of the glottis, and so made vocal. On this distinction of breath into aspirate

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