2 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the BERNARD MOSES CONTENTS. WORDS AND THE MATERIAL OF EXPRESSION. I. General Expression of Thought and Feeling. II. The Origin and Use of Language. III. How to acquire the Knowledge of Words...... IV. Short and expressive Words.... V. Long Words, and Directions upon the Choice of Words.. IX. How to acquire a good Style. X. Style adapted to produce Emotion. XI. Taste, and its Cultivation. XII. Style modified by the Nature of the Production. XIII. Addresses, Lectures, Orations, Sermons.. T PREFACE. HIS work may be said to have grown, rather than to have been written for the purpose of making a book. Having used in the class-room, in academy and college, many of the text-books on Rhetoric, ancient and modern, foreign and American, and having instructed some classes without using a text-book, I have been most satisfied with the result when the method herein presented has been pursued. This book is therefore the result of actual experiment. Abstruse arguments about style and oratory, about the conflicting theories of taste and beauty, about conviction and persuasion, and the laws of mind, and the philosophy of language, are all good and valuable in their place; but a student may read and repeat them with but little more effect on his own habits of speaking or power to write well, than he would receive from an equal amount of study in mathematics, medicine, or law, or any other subject. At the same time, mere exercises in composition, on a series of topics presented, with a few outlines and directions, are too superficial to produce the desired result. What the student needs is an orderly and perspicu |