ABSTRACT
Ancient as an art form, the public speech in our age has gained new prominence as more and more public men appear on the television screen and in great public halls to “appeal directly to the people.” Systematic criticism of any sort has no long and well-established heritage in America. In truth, it can hardly be said to have existed at all before the nineteenth-century. As the literary critic, Van Wyck Brooks, once remarked, “There is nothing else in all modern history like the unanimity of praise and confidence with which, by its passengers, the American Ship of State was launched and manned. The problem of criticism was sometimes complicated by literary men. They were uncertain of their genre, yet faced with a body of material that required consideration. Biographers and historians, with their own tools and preoccupations, likewise looked into the literature of speeches with some concern about how to use it.
