Added to Blair’s lessons on rhetoric, young William had been trained in the visuals of public speaking, particularly posture and gesture. His key text was John Walker’s The Elements of Gesture, which provided a practical guide for eager younger statesmen – a nineteenth-century version of How to Make Friends and Influence People. The speaker ‘shall always keep the body in a graceful position, and shall so carry its motions at proper intervals, as to seem the subject operating upon the words, and not the speaker on the subject’. Specific instructions were then offered on the positioning of the
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