OCR Text |
Show A NEW YORK ORATOR. Lucius Van Allen, the Man With the Rectangular mouth. The Democrats may well dread the appearance ap-pearance of one Republican orator in tho campaign. This is Lucius L. Van Allen, who was a proxy from the Eleventh district dis-trict during the meeting of the committee. commit-tee. It is understood that Mr. Van Allen will go upon the stump and speak throughout the various parts of the State. I have had the pleasure of hearing all of the great orators of this country and have heard all of our leading public men discourse, dis-course, but I never, in all my experience, heard anything resembling the eloquence and oratory of Mr. Van Allen. He is nearly six feet in height. His figure is thin and clad in loose fitting black clothes. His head is very large and set upon quite a small neck. His forehead is broad and bulging, faintly shaded bv thin, sandy blonde hair. His eyes are a, watery blue. His nose is straight, while his mouth is hidden under a drooping moustache. He wears the most enormous enor-mous standing shirt collar known to the trade. It encircles his narrow neck threatening his ears and jaws. Around the collar is twisted a black satin string. His waistcoat is cut very low, giving a very broad expanse of shirt bosom? This shirt bosom rises and falls with the movement of Mr. Van Allen's sentences, its glaring whiteness and ag gressive size forcing themselves on one, so that at times Mr. Van Allen looks like an animated shirt bosom. He is the only orator in the United States whose mouth is squared at the corners when he is talking. talk-ing. He has a voice which is a dull, booming roar. When he opens his rectangular-shaped mouth and begins, there is so much grace and impressive swing' about the man that you feel impelled to listen to him. His style of oratory borders bor-ders continually upon the sublime. He discusses the most trivial subject as if it were the gloomiest of tragedies. And yet he never says anything. He is so completely charmed with his own voice as to forget that something else is required re-quired of a speaker than the stringing of words together. He is the very ideal of oratorial noise. If his little speech the other day, kindly granting the Mugwumps permission to return to the Republican party, could have been printed as it was delivered, it would have made the funniest funni-est topic for this class of Republicans to read that has been furnished to them for many a day. T. C. Crawford in Neiv York World. |