price
that the work of the lecturer shall be incidental to some worthy
pursuit, from which that work temporarily calls him. There seems to be a
kind of coquetry in this. The public do not accept of those who are too
openly in the market or who are too easily won. They prefer to entice a
man from his chosen love, and account his favors sweeter because the
wedded favorite is deprived of them.

A lecturer's first invitation, in consonance with these facts, is almost
always suggested by his excellence or notoriety in some department of
life that may or may not be allied to the platform. If a man makes a
remarkable speech, he is very naturally invited to lecture; but he is no
more certain to be invited than he who wins a battle. A showman gets his
first invitation for the same reason that an author does,--because he is
notorious. Nearly all new men in the lecture-field are introduced
through the popular desire to see notorious or famous people. A man
whose name is on the popular tongue is a man whom the popular eye
desires to see. Such a man will always draw one audience; and a single
occasion is all that he is engaged for. After getting a place upon the
platform, it is for him to prove his power to hold it. If he does not
lecture as well as he writes, or fights, or walks, or lifts, or leaps,
or hunts lions, or manages an exhibition, or plays a French horn, or
does anything which has made him a desirable man for curious people to
see, then he makes way for the next notoriety. Very few courses of
lectures are delivered in the cities and larger villages that do not
present at least one new man, who is invited simply because people are
curious to see him. The popular desire is strong to come in some way
into personal contact with those who do remarkable things. They cannot
be chased in the street; they can be seen only to a limited extent in
the drawing-room; but it is easy to pay twenty-five cents to hear them
lecture, with the privilege of looking at them for an hour and
criticizing them for a week.

It is a noteworthy fact, in this connection, that, while there are
thousands of cultivated men who would esteem it a privilege to lecture
for the lecturer's usual fee, there are hardly more than twenty-five in
the country whom the public considers it a privilege worth paying for to
hear. It is astonishing, that, in a country so fertile as this in the
production of gifted and cultivated men, so few find it possible to
establish