William Augustus Beach. he was familiarly called), as Lord Campbell says they did to the Queen's Bench when the rumor went round, " Murray is up." Nor, though his style was declamatory, could it justly be said that his eloquence was merely splendid declamation. Unlike most men who are endowed by nature with the fatal gift of oratory, he was a tireless student, both of the law and the facts of his case. When he appeared for the trial or argument of a case, it could be safely assumed that every preparation possible had been made, — a careful study of all the pertinent ques tions of law involved, and a thorough investigation of the facts by a personal examination of every witness. He had his eye, so to speak, not only on the verdict, but on the bill of exceptions. One thing, however, he could never do, — prepare a speech by writing it out beforehand. It is said that Rufus Choate used to write out his summings up from time to time, as the trial of a case proceeded, and that, by the mere act of writing, the ar gument he wished to make became so fixed in his memory that he could always deliver it substantially in the language in which it was written. I once asked Mr. Beach if he did not sometimes write out his speeches, to which he replied, " Never but once in my life, and then I made a most dismal failure." It must not, however, be inferred that he did not prepare carefully. He often, in deed generally, wrote out the general plan and framework of his speeches, — topics, propositions, heads, and subdivisions of his arguments. The rest of his manuscript consisted of mere catchwords, full of mean ing to him, but meaningless to any one else; and he seldom ever looked at such notes as he had made. The language in which his thoughts should be clothed was left for the occasion. He was one of a very few men who could compose best in the white heat of speaking. Seargent S. Prentiss — perhaps the most brilliant of American extemporaneous speakers — was another. Henry Ward Beecher was another,
though he seemed to possess the faculty of invoking the divine glow in his study as well as before an audience. Roscoe Conkling was another, though for the sake of accuracy he wrote whenever he could. The Rev. Dr. Storrs, of Brooklyn, is another splendid example of this rare faculty. But investigation has proved that most of the speeches of great orators, which are pop ularly supposed to have been extempo raneous, so far as the language in which they were clothed was concerned, were carefully and laboriously prepared before hand and committed to memory. Even Webster's reply to Hayne, which all school-boys were taught to believe the product of a night's reflection, turns out to have been prepared long before the oc casion when it was delivered, and to have been twice revised after delivery before it was given to the public in the form in which it now appears. The manuscript of the speech as originally delivered is in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and differs in many important respects from the speech as printed in Webster's published works. Mr. Beach's speech was always finished and artistic; no one ever listened to him without marvelling at its perfection of form. I once asked him how he acquired his wonderful command of language. His an swer was : " In so far as the compliment is deserved, it is to be attributed to several causes, — first, to inheritance from my mother, whose command of language was remarkable; second, to her careful training from my earliest infancy. She made me a student of synonyms and subtle dis tinctions of meaning in my childhood, and the taste and habit have always continued. Then I have always been a wide reader of worthless literature. I have read very little of history or the sciences, but widely of novels, dramas, and essays. I could probably pass a better examination on the current literature of my time, and a worse on history or
