Grenville Kleiser

Model Speeches for Practise Grenville Kleiser

Book Excerpt: ...dation. This, I say, is the general superstition, and I hope that a few words of mine may serve in some sort to correct it. I ask you, if there is any other people who have confined their national self-laudation to one day in the year. I may be allowed to make one remark as a personal experience. Fortune had willed it that I should see as many--perhaps more--cities and manners of men as Ulysses; and I have observed one general fact, and that is, that the adjectival epithet which is prefixt to all the virtues is invariably the epithet which geographically describes the country that I am in. For instance, not to take any real name, if I am in the kingdom of Lilliput, I hear of the Lilliputian virtues. I hear courage, I hear common sense, and I hear political wisdom called by that name. If I cross to the neighboring Republic Blefusca--for since Swift's time it has become a Republic--I hear all these virtues suddenly qualified as Blefuscan. I am very glad to be able to thank Lord Coleridge for having, I be...