activity for
most of the important influences of our country, there are every year
many dinners, anniversaries, and assemblies, at which oratory of an
ephemeral nature finds expression and attention. All the
nationalities, all the religious and literary societies, all the
clubs, all the distinguished foreigners, and all the leading and
following colleges, must have a dinner, and every dinner must have at
least a dozen speeches. Most of these speeches are more eloquent to
the opinion of their authors than to the minds of their hearers.

It certainly is one of the best moral illustrations of the first law
of motion that in spite of all the heroism necessary to endure such a
volume of speech, the patient public seems (if we may judge from the
increase in volume) every year more and more willing to sit at the
tables and listen to this flow of sound. Perhaps this patience is only
apparent, for competition for an opportunity to speak is said to be
lively. Possibly every one of the thousands who listen is secretly
comparing the eloquence of the speaker with his own skilful ability,
and not quite calmly biding the time when he shall enrapture, where
the present speaker wearies and annoys.

Yet not every speech made on those occasions is dull. Now and then the
happy mingling of fun and sense really lifts the company out of the
tiresome monotony. Were it not for these addresses beautiful and rare,
we can believe that dinner speeches would be abandoned, or exchanged
for a single oration from one competent to delight.

For the distinguishing mark of the dinner speech should be that it
amuse not in the rough, coarse way of the demagogue, but in the
subtle, fine way of the man of culture.

The dinner speeches with which the readers of this paper are perhaps
most familiar, those made when the alumni of a noble college gather
around the table of their alma mater, ought to be characterized by the
broad sympathy, the quick insight, the flexible grace and the genial
humor of the thoroughly educated man. Although to make fine dinner
speeches can never be an aim worthy of an earnest man, yet to have the
power and culture from which such a speech usually comes, is the
highest aim in a literary regard that any man can have. It is a
short-sighted and one-sighted earnestness that despises the wit and
banter of society, and affects the isolation and grandeur of pure
thought. The mountain summit is too far removed from the walks of men
to ma