"
Such unnatural prose impresses us to-day as merely an insincere play with
words, but in those days many thought a stilted, ornate style as necessary
for an impressive occasion as Sunday clothes for church. An _Oratorical
Dictionary_ for the use of public speakers, was actually published in the
first part of the nineteenth century. This contained a liberal amount of
sonorous words derived from the Latin, such as "campestral," "lapidescent,"
"obnubilate," and "adventitious." Such words were supposed to give dignity
to spoken utterance.
Edward Everett, the most finished classical speaker of the time, loved to
introduce the "Muses of Hellas," and to make allusions to the fleets "of
Tyre, of Carthage, of Rome," and to Hannibal's slaughtering the Romans
"till the Aufidus ran blood." He painted Warren "moving resplendent over
the field of honor, with the rose of Heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of
liberty in his eye."
Webster was cured of such tendencies by an older lawyer, Jeremiah Mason,
who graduated at Yale about the time Webster was born. Mason, who was
frequently Webster's opponent, took pleasure in ridiculing all ornate
efforts and in pricking rhetorical bubbles.
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