But he was as dramatic at his climaxes as Edwin Booth ever was in
Hamlet. His face paled, or seemed to pale; his hands clinched with a
desperate energy, and the whole attitude of the man was that of one in
awful wrath. Yet his voice was not raised above the common current of
the evening's address--if anything, it was lower. While the mature
mind cannot endure Ingersoll's rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that
his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coarse) was
nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips. Still, in his intense
passages Ingersoll was almost fiercely earnest. And Plutarch tells us
that Cicero's friends feared he would kill himself by bursting a
blood-vessel, with such intense energy did he speak.
Both of these men had that instinctive taste of the great speaker
which Shakespeare has described better than any one else in
literature, when he makes Hamlet tell the players not to "mouth it, as
many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.
Nor do not saw the air too much--your hand thus: but use all gently:
for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of
passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it
smoothness.
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