14
‘Love will find out the way, though that way involve a shaven head, a cavern dwelling, a discouraging mirror and punitive sword, a disciplining of the tongue, a belated apprenticeship to the actor’s art, a straining of the memory, a conquest over clamour, and a borrowing of night hours to lengthen toilsome daysSee Demosthenes in Notes.. All this your Demosthenes endured, and who knows not what an orator it made of him? his speech packed with thought and terse of language, himself convincing in his knowledge of human nature, as splendid in the elevation as mighty in the force of his sentiments, the master and not the slave of his words and his ideas, ever fresh with the graces of his art. He is the one orator whose speech has, in the bold phrase of Leosthenes, at once the breath of life and the strength of wrought iron.
15
'Callisthenes remarked of Aeschylus that he wrote his tragedies in wine, which lent vigour and warmth to his work. With Demosthenes it was otherwise; he composed not on wine but on water; whence the witticism of Demades, that most men’s tongues are regulated by waterSpeeches in the law courts had a time limit appointed, which was measured by the water-clock or clepsydra, generally called simply ‘the water,’ ‘my water,’ ‘his water,’ etc., but Demosthenes’s pen was subject to the same influence. And Pytheas detected the smell of the midnight oil in the very perfection of the speeches. Well, there is much in common between your subject and mine, so far as this branch of them is concerned; on Homer’s poems I was no worse off than you are.
