It has been suggested that perhaps the central theme in the biographical representations was the idea that within all people were elemental feelings. Language, and a man like Bright, could bring these feelings to expression: English might be the ‘natural garb’ of these passions, Bright in his access to ‘the great homely things of life and death’ their natural spokesman. Here are the elements of a theory of oratory, speech being that which makes the inner outer, the personal public. It is the speech of the great orator that taps into this reservoir of universal human emotion, because the great orator is, through his nature and his voice, in sympathy with a universal humanity. Therefore, simply by orating, the orator translated his human essence, part of all human essence, into the tangible and the known. He put his interlocuters into contact with themselves, each other, and – to the extent humanity expressed divinity – into contact with God himself.

A full understanding of Bright's, or any, oratory before the coming of recorded sound is beyond our knowledge. Oratory is in its essence evanescent, as perishable as the moment it is spoken. We can never know how such oratory was apprehended by contemporaries in the past, and it was a matter of the spoken as experientially present; being there, being part of the emotions of those moments, was what oratory was about.