THE PRACTICAL ELOCUTIONIST; AN EXTENSIVE COLLECTION OF RECITATIONS, Selected & Arranged expressly for School Use, WITH A FEW PLAIN RULES FOR INFLECTION, MODULATION, GESTURE AND ACTION, AND RHETORICAL PUNCTUATION. THE PRINCIPAL POSITIONS ILLUSTRATED TAKEN EXPRESSLY FOR THIS WORK. BY CONRAD HUME PINCHES, L.C.P. MEMBER OF THE COUNCIL OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PRECEPTORS. "Homines amplius oculis quam auribus credunt, longum iter est per LONDON: PIPER, STEPHENSON AND SPENCE, (LATE SHERWOOD, GILBERT ÅND PIPER,) PATERNOSTER ROW. 1854. 270.c.254 DEDICATION. MY DEAR FATHER, Justice-even more than filial regard-requires that this compilation should be dedicated to you, since it was from you that I received my earliest instruction in Elocution, and imbibed that fondness for the Art, which has induced the production of PREFACE. NOTWITHSTANDING the number,-and in many cases, the excellence, of the works which have issued from the press of late years on the subject of elocution, it must have occurred, I think, to many,-who, like myself, have been engaged in the more practical part of the art, that these works, with few exceptions, fail in their object from a two-fold cause;either the authors have endeavoured to make their books Progressive Readers, as well as Elocutionary Treatises or Speakers, or they have selected, to a very great extent, pieces, which, though highly poetical and very beautiful, are not really suitable for school recitations, or are of an order within the scope of a boy's power to deliver with ease and effect. În many of these treatises, too, a fourth, and, in some cases, even a larger proportion, of the entire volume, is occupied with an elaborate and almost impracticable essay on inflections,-followed by numerous critical rules for accentuation or intonation. For want of a work of a more special character, I have been for some time in the habit of using one in which nearly one hundred pages are occupied with an essay of the kind described, and which portion of the book I have never been able to use with any real advantage. It appears to me, that the authors of the books above referred to, have entirely overlooked the fact, that, although their works have almost invariably been intended as School Speakers, they seem nevertheless to have been arranged on the |