To read the Bible in church as if playing a part on the stage is as inappropriate and irreligious as to read like one in haste to catch a train.
Each kind of subject demands its own proper style in reading. Prose should not be read like poetry; nor all kinds either of prose or poetry alike. As in writing, each species should be dressed in language from its own wardrobe; so in reading, each several kind should receive its own appropriate tone, and travel at its own appropriate speed. To read everything alike is to read nothing--or at most only one thing--well.
[Illustration: Charming away the monotony and the weariness.]
Great authors are by no means invariably good readers, even of their own productions. Lord Tennyson read some of his own glorious poems beautifully; but others he read either droningly or with too much singsong. Dickens read his own works with wonderful power and realisation. Wordsworth read his own verse admirably; but we are told that neither Coleridge nor Southey could read verse well: "They read as if crying or wailing lugubriously."
Reading, therefore, is an art which doubtless requires, for the attainment of excellence, some degree of histrionic gifts--imagination, imitation, fervour, and passion.
Similarly with oratory and authorship. Both these arts are distinct from that of reading; as each of these again is distinct from the other.
It is curious, indeed, how few among great authors are great orators; or, among great orators, great authors. The gifts which tell in writing--condensation, terseness, finish--are not the gifts which tell most in speaking. In speaking, the essentials are clearness of enunciation, sympathy with the audience, copiousness of illustration, directness of statement, uninvolved reasoning. The merits which impart value to a book--wealth of fact, niceness in balancing opposing considerations, delicacy of assertion, depth and sweep of argument--may easily become ineffective in the delivery of a speech. Hence, therefore, whereas a good speaker is occasionally a good writer, owing to his rare combination of different orders of talent, it more frequently happens that the one set of talents is given to one man to enrich them in seclusion, and the other to another man to use them with publicity.