Charles James Fox rose, says Mr. Burke, "by slow degrees, to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world ever knew," and Fox himself has told us the secret of his skill. He gained it, he says, "at the expense of the House," for he had frequently tasked himself, during an entire session, to speak on every question that came up, whether he was interested in it or not, as a means of exercising and training his faculties.
Curran, the Irish orator and advocate, was known at school as "stuttering Jack Curran"; and, while studying at an Inn of Court, the members of a debating society to which he belonged called him "Orator Mum," in honor of his signal failure as a speaker. But he made up his mind to become an orator, and was not to be put down by obstacles. He spent his mornings, as he states, "in reading even to exhaustion," and the rest of the day in the more congenial pursuits of literature, and especially in unremitting efforts to perfect himself as a speaker. His voice was bad, and his articulation hasty and confused; his manner was awkward, his gestures constrained and meaningless, and his whole appearance calculated only to produce laughter. Such is the picture of him left us by his biographers. Surely, one would think, an orator could never be made out of such materials. Yet all these faults he overcame by severe and patient labor. Constantly on the watch against bad habits, he practised daily before a glass, reciting passages from Shakespeare, Junius, and the best English orators. He frequented debating societies, and unmindful of the ridicule that greeted his repeated failures, he continued to take part in the discussions. At last, he surmounted every difficulty. "He turned his shrill and stumbling brogue," says one of his friends, "into a flexible, sustained, and finely-modulated voice; his action became free and forcible; and he acquired perfect readiness in thinking on his legs"; in short, he became one of the most brilliant and eloquent advocates that the world has ever produced. Well might one of his biographers say: "His oratorical training was as severe as any Greek ever underwent."
The biographies of Pultney, of Burke, of Pitt, of Erskine, of Grattan, of Brougham--of all the great orators of England--contain records of the same careful training and discipline in the art of speaking.