Never before did I completely understand what Demosthenes meant by laying such stress on delivery.* You are to bring before you the venerable figure of the preacher, his blindness constantly recalling to your recollection old Homer, Ossian and Milton,* and associating with his performance the melancholy grandeur of their genius: you are to imagine that you hear his slow, solemn, well-accented enunciation, and his voice of affecting, trembling melody; you are to remember the pitch of passion and enthusiasm to which the congregation were raised; and then the few moments of portentous, death-like silence which reigned throughout the house: the preacher, removing his white handkerchief from his aged face (even yet wet from the recent torrent of his tears), and slowly stretching forth the palsied hand which holds it, begins the sentence: “Socrates died like a philosopher” — then pausing, raised his other hand, pressing them both, clasped together, with warmth and energy to his breast, lifting his ‘sightless balls’* to heaven, and pouring his whole soul into his tremulous voice “but Jesus Christ — like a God!” If he had been in truth an angel of light, the effect could scarcely have been more divine.
From ‘The Letters of a British Spy’ (1803), by William Wirt (1772-1834). Additional information from ‘Emile, or Education’ (1769), by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) translated by Barbara Foxley.
* According to Cicero (the speaker is Crassus) in De Oratore III.lvi, “The story goes that when Demosthenes was asked what is the first thing in speaking, he assigned the first role to delivery, and also the second, and also the third.” See It’s All in the Delivery.
* Homer (?750-?650 BC), the blind poet of classical Greece who is credited with The Iliad and The Odyssey; Ossian, a blind Irish bard from the third century AD, whose existence is uncertain, but whose supposed verses were published in 1762 by Scotsman James Macpherson; and John Milton (1608-1674), poet and aide to Oliver Cromwell, who wrote Paradise Lost.
* Wirt does not indicate why he put ‘sightless balls’ in quotation marks. Gilbert West (1703–1756), a poet included by Samuel Johnson in his catalogue of eminent English poets, wrote in his translation of the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius: “He spoke; when straight tow’rd Heaven disclosing wide / His sightless balls, the senior thus replied” etc..