Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O

This volume rescues a nearly vanished art form: the after-dinner speech, those elegant, witty, occasionally profound addresses delivered over cigars and cognac in the Gilded Age. The collection spans names now half-forgotten and ideas that shaped a nation still wrestling with its identity after civil war. The opening piece, George Cary Eggleston's lively defense of American literature as a unified tradition rather than regional fragments, sets the tone: these are not dry lectures but conversational performances, full of self-deprecating humor, gentle provocation, and the occasional startling insight. Readers will find speeches on politics, literature, society, and the fleeting moments between courses where important men tried to say something worth remembering. The rhetoric feels foreign to modern ears, more elaborate, more willing to soar and occasionally to tumble into puns that would make a 21st-century audience wince. Yet there's something seductive about a world where people gathered to listen to a well-crafted sentence as intently as we now scroll through feeds. For anyone curious about how Americans once practiced the art of public persuasion, or simply want to witness a vanished era's way with words, this collection offers unexpected rewards.