tell us, who has not been a lecturer, and put to bed in the best chamber, in January. Saddened and humbled, you descended to the fried pork, swimming in its own sap, for breakfast; or the toothsome steak, boiled in a skillet; and drowning it all in a dreadful decoction of boot-heels, mixed with cold milk, which is drank with enthusiasm by the American from Maine to Texas, and called coffee, you were sent back to your Boston, with the thermometer at zero, and ten dollars in your pocket. You were remorselessly handled in the weekly village paper of the next Saturday by Aristides and Z, a copy of the paper being sent to you by each of the nibbling anonymouses, and you threw them into the fire hastily, to spare your dear Jane Maria's feelings-thereby getting the only warmth you had derived from your little lecturing effort, in the Puritanic purlieus of the metropolis of Suffolk.

But times change, and fees. While Mr. Ticknor gave his admirable lectures upon Shakespeare, and Mr. Dana his, and Mr. Hudson his, and Mr. Emerson intoned his lyric wisdom; while Dr. Cyclopædia Lardner proved to us, scientifically, that steam-ships could not cross the sea and the demonstration and steamer arrived together-while the pious and persuasive Joseph Silk Buckingham told us of Lebanon and the Ganges, and innumerable "Professors," with electrical machines and mirrors, flashed between, the public taste was gradually ripening for the system of popular lectures as it is now conducted, and as the far-seeing Herald and other E. M.'s of the press regularly inform us, at the beginning of every season, it will not be conducted much longer.

For ourselves, we doubt whether the lecturing term has yet completed its great cycle. If it has, we are quite confident that another one has commenced. If you will reflect a moment, you will see that the public of this country has been addressed now, for more than six years, weekly, upon every variety of topic, by the best oratorical talent of the land. Now, every seed helps some kind of harvest. If you sow tares, tares, at least, will come up. The public has been pursuing lions without mercy; but, then, it has also watched them while they devoured the bait. If a man stood upon his head, for ten minutes, upon a clothes-pole, any

where within reach of the post, the return mail, without doubt, brought him a hundred letters from the Y. M. A. of B., C., and D., to address them upon Thursday evening, the 25th; but, if he went, he did stand upon his head; or, if he could not, it was the end of his lecturing career, and he was asked no

more.

What do the results show? That, although it was the roar of the animal which attracted the hunters, yet it was his strength or his beauty which enchanted their eyes and hearts. You, for instance, had walked over the desert, or through the valleys of the sca; your blithe genius or your fiery rhetoric had lighted the house of God with the beauty of holiness; your name was, consequently, tossed from tongue to tongue, and the editor's trumpet had whispered your deed to every lonely corner of the land with its morning music. Then the lion-hunters came down upon you. Then you were summoned to leave a lecture and take fifty dollars. But when your hour was past, if, in your tone, or mien, or manner, if, somewhere in your presence, there were no touch of that power, whose mere report fascinated, then, indeed, and forever, your hour was past.

Think, how few men have done the lecturing for this country, during half-adozen years. Hundreds of men have lectured, yet there are but a score or two whose names figure upon the lists of every lyceum, and who are first invited everywhere. A lecturer told us, that he went from Maine to the Mississippi, two years ago, and there were certain names that appeared upon every programme along the route. With only one or two exceptions, the same names and men do lecture-duty this year, and probably will during the next.

Who are those men, and what does their universal popularity imply?

They are the intellectual leaders of an intelligent progress in the country. They are especially, and in the best sense, Americans. They are, we believe, without an exception, of the largest and wisest liberality of thought and culture. They are men of all pursuits, and ages, and denominations; but if they are clergymen, as some of the chiefest are, then, whatsoever their form of faith, it is vivified by Christian charity. Week after week, from November to April, these men go through

is

the land, talking in the most genial, serious, witty, learned, or wise way, about all kinds of subjects. Week after week, throngs of people, of every age and every degree of cultivation, come to listen and enjoy. The lyceum opera, theatre, ball; and yet this fact is remarkable: if the lecture be only ludicrous or amusing, if the object of the lecturer be plainly only to make himself a buffoon, and to make his audience laugh--they do laugh, but they do not forgive him. The experience of the system shows, that the men who have hidden the soundest sense under the most brilliant and humorous rhetoric are the permanently popular lec

turers.

This, of course, is in the nature of the case. The value of a lecture is in its general tone, rather than in its details. It is a fresco picture. It is to be contemplated by a multitude at a distance. With the utmost propriety, therefore, the lecturer lays on his color freely. If he be a man accustomed rather to write to be read than to be heard, he will soon discover that the essay, polished with care in his study, and full of genial delights to the eye, falls dull upon the ear-for they are different organs. To the secret bower of your heart's approval, as to a boudoir in a palace, there are two approachesthe stately gateway and the private door. Through the one you pass with noiseless, gliding footstep; but through the other with the resonant prance of steeds. Therefore, many a lecturer will not allow his lecture to be printed, and they all quarrel with the reporters. He will tell you that you must not read it. You must hear it. What right have you to climb into the lofty belfry, and survey, with curious inquisition, the hues and joints of the statue that strikes the hour? Does it seem to you a huge, shapeless, bronze giant, banging with a great hammer a shield of metal, and causing a crash of roaring sound? To the eye below, for which it was designed, it seems a fairy tapping a flower-bell, and the ear, it was meant for, hears music trickling from it like melodious drops of dew.

Now, is it likely these men have been talking all this time quite without effect? Have the towns and cities been piped to and wept to in such various measures, and must no dance or tears be looked for? We believe, on the contrary, that no

institution has done more in humanizing and refining us than the lecture. How rapidly it has done this may be seen in the kind of lecture that is now required. The old recipe was simply, having caught your encyclopædia or biographical article, to flay it, and squeeze it, and cover it with some worsted work of your own, lard it liberally with the least worn jokes that could be procured; then serve, warm, for an hour. This is no longer possible. The audience gradually tired of such diet, higher prices and higher-toned lectures came in together, and the public, which had been educated by a constantly improving character, now demands the best. The very number of the most popular lectures shows this. Why are there no more? Why are there not new ones every year? It seems so easy and so delightful to pass a summer week in writing a lecture, and three months of the winter in delivering it, and so completing the business of the year. It is easy to those who can do it. There seems to be no especial reason for you to laugh at them, until you have tried it for yourself and contemplated the result.

Undoubtedly, a lecture is the most profitable form of literary labor. A lecturer, in the flood-tide of his career, will write a discourse of sixty or eighty pages, occupying an hour in the delivery, which he will deliver five evenings in the week for three months; and if he be paid, as he probably will be, fifty dollars every time, his three months' lecturing give him just three thousand dollars. If he publish his manuscript as a pamphlet, how soon would he get three thousand dollars for it? And the next season he may repeat his lecture, and his receipts-or, if he prefers not to be paid, he may decline the fee, but express his willingness to receive "a compliment" of double the amount.

But no hod-carrier or mariner earns his money more laboriously and faithfully than a lecturer. Wherever, between November and April, there is a snow-drift, you may be sure there is a lecturer in it. Wherever there is a tough beef-steak, you may be sure there is a lecturer eating it. Wherever there is a sullen, dusky dawn, with the mercury lost below zero, you may know there is a lecturer getting up in it. And oh, north poles and glaciers! wherever there is a bed-chamber without a fire

place, you may know there is a lecturer going to bed in it. He shivers wild nights away upon the prairies; he drags out dreary days in rummy bar-rooms; he hires rickety vehicles, with stolid drivers and inadequate horses, to carry him over unbeaten roads to distant towns; and, when he lands in the inevitable bar-room, the inevitable loafer, who is cooking expectoration on a redhot stove, drawls out to him, indifferently, that there "won't be no lecter, koz Miss Smucks has a sort o' party tonight." He pays his team and his lodging, and departs-himself unpaid. He arrives too late for tea, too late to shave, too late to shirt; he plunges, grim and grimy, into the desk, and spins his hour's discourse; he is taken home reluctantly toward that bed; but, before his final fate is reached, he undergoes, tealess, supperless, the homage of a select circle of literary spinsters, who ask him his views of the Infinite and of Tupper's poetry. With the sad, slow day returns the giddy monotony of the national breakfast-tough steak, weak boot-heels, milk-and-water sauce, hot bread of pearlash, and fried leather blankets, fondly termed buckwheats. He starts again; his feet freeze, his head aches, his stomach refuses to be pacified. His neighbor batters him with questions; he changes cars in the snow, and loses his place, and shakes in his corner by a broken window, where his cold nose gets the fumes of scorched trowsers, fried spit,* and sizzled appleparings from the stove, without any of the warmth. His days are desultory his nights dreary. Wherever he goes, he is told, Oh, you should come in the summer!" Wherever the snow blocks him, banks him, barricades him, the committee evidently consider him at fault, and wonder what they can say to the audience. He must bear with the man who tells him, as he told him last year, that Deacon Bump's evening meeting and the remarkable weather have diminished the audience; and, as they were asleep, and did not applaud, he must blandly smile upon the other man, who recalls to him the close attention with which he was heard, and informs him that the directors have resolved to keep good order by putting out any boys who endeavor to stamp or clap during the lecture. He must

tire of saying regularly at half-past seven o'clock, of five or six evenings in the week, "In the beautiful antediluvian year one, the wren one morning awoke in Eden, and said to the sparrow, 'good-day."" He must be haunted by the thought that at least twenty of his hearers have heard that before, and anticipate his jokes, and climb his climaxes, and drop asleep upon them, before he arrives. He knows that the lynx-eyed Rhadamanthus of the SemiWeekly Tempestuous Teapot is sitting under him, with his lynx eyes open, and his mind out in great force. He knows that there will surely be applause at the joke, out of which chronic reiteration has long since squeezed the last drop of any fun for himself; and he fears, as he falters out his peroration, as if intellectual deterioration had already set in with dreadful rapidity, and has a dizzy fancy that when his decay is completed, his fellow-countrymen will build him a gray granite monument, with five per cent. off the cost price for cash, and carve upon it, in the space upon which they have not cut their own names: He died young, and his country laments him; but she recalls, with pride, that he eat more tough steaks, and faster, in a given time, than any of his fellow-citizens, and-stranger, pause!-made upwards of THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLARS FROM A SINGLE LECTURE. Selah!"

tences and pictures. The popular lecture explodes like a battalion volley. It is a succession of climaxes and points. Often this is natural to the speaker, but, gradually, it shapes the performance of any man; so that, in preparing his lecture, he will be swayed by his consciousness of what the audience will expect, and what will surely amuse them. In reaching this brilliancy, he will naturally often lose, sometimes sacrifice, what is better than brilliancy. His lecture thus fades into a phantasmagoria, or blazes into rhetoric. It tastes sweetly, it looks brightly; but when the auditor gets home he is not fed, and has no vision. You will find, consequently, that the lecture audience is composed mainly of young people, and largely of women. Dry old men, and dryer young ones, quote to you the stalest of old stories, that when Mr. Emerson began to lecture in Boston, an ancient lawyer said, when he was asked, that he did not go because he did not understand him; "but," he added, "my daughters do." The inference was supposed to be that the lecture was nonsense, because the lawyer did not understand it. But then, even the song of the Syrens would be dull, if you had no ear for music.

We do not feel any serious apprehension that the lecturers will be too brilliant, or that any American audience will permanently dine upon whipped syllabub however ingeniously flavored with rosewater. It will surely do no harm that the popular mind requires a rather higher tone in preaching, for the dullness of sermons is proverbial; but it will, we confess, be rather hard upon the clergy, if they are compelled to prepare two "brilliant" lectures every week. Doubtless, however, they will assert their privilege by not doing so.

We will not follow E. M. and the Herald, by indulging in vaticination. It is not easy to foresee what modifications the lecture system will undergo, but we have no fear that it will perish. Perhaps, instead of the miscellaneous courses now offered, there will be a combined literary and scientific course, thereby giving unity to the interest of VOL. IX.-21

the winter, and making it worth a man's while to prepare a series of lectures upon subjects of his especial study; or, the interest may languish for a little, but will certainly revive again and flourish. For, to return to our text, it is the American amusement which is most congenial to our habits and tastes. The opera is always an exotic with us; the theatre is a reproduction of the English, in which the actors, the plays, and the local humor are British, and the dramas we have ourselves produced, are either adaptations of the French, or mere spectacles of the lowest and most prurient sarcastic scandal. The negro minstrelsy, which is partly indigenous, has degenerated into coarse burlesque and sentimental buffoonery. These things only thrive in the city, and there only by rapid and exciting changes. And in the city, naturally, lectures languish. Scarcely a lecture in the city this winter has attracted a crowd. But, in the country, where the insanity for intense excitement is less imperious, and the genuine Yankee character has fairer development and play, the weekly lecture flourishes, and the strolling theatre or minstrelsy live for a few uncertain evenings, and then move on, like other vagrants.

Since, then, the public will be amused, and is generally intelligent and sensible, is it likely to return to Jim along Josey, or to require that the lecture shall be constantly better and more attractive? As men of cultivation and talent find that they have the gift of public talking, and that they can, in that way, turn their advantages to the best pecuniary account, are they not likely to labor to make themselves more and more acceptable?

And every noble man, who knows the magic of speech, and believes that, in this country of good general morality and common schools, as great and as profound an influence is to be exerted, morally as it is politically, by that persuasive magic, will not let his talent lie and rot in the handsomest damask napkin, but will keep it turning and accumulating in the great exchange of the world.