"But if in your expectations I should become a screen to divert, for a
single moment, your attention from my country's cause and attract it
to myself, I entreat you, even here, to forget me, and bestow all your
attention and your generous sympathy upon the cause of my downtrodden
fatherland."
Kossuth gave rise to just criticism in that he appealed too often and
too elaborately to the local and national pride of his audiences. This
criticism was applicable to his speeches in England and in America.
In every attempt to fix Kossuth's place in the list of historical
orators,--and in that list he must have a conspicuous place,--certain
considerations cannot be disregarded, viz.:
First, he spoke to England and American in a language that he acquired
when he had already passed the middle period of life. The weight of
this impediment he felt when he said, "Spirit of American eloquence,
frown not at my boldness that I dare abuse Shakespeare's language in
Faneuil Hall."
Second, we are to consider the amount of work performed in a brief
period of time, and the conditions under which it was performed.
Between the twenty-fifth day of April and the fourteenth day of May,
1852, Kossuth delivered thirty speeches in Massachusetts, containing,
on an average, more than two thousand words in each speech, and not a
sentence inappropriate to the occasion.
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