|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: main stock.
Great speakers in public are seldom agreeable in private
conversation, whether their faculty be natural, or acquired by
practice and often venturing. Natural elocution, although it may
seem a paradox, usually springeth from a barrenness of invention
and of words, by which men who have only one stock of notions upon
every subject, and one set of phrases to express them in, they swim
upon the superficies, and offer themselves on every occasion;
therefore, men of much learning, and who know the compass of a
language, are generally the worst talkers on a sudden, until much
practice hath inured and emboldened them; because they are
|
