ravel, much of it in the night, and all of it during the most
unpleasant season of the year. There is probably nothing short of a
military campaign that is attended by so many discomforts and genuine
hardships as a season of active lecturing. Unless a man be young and
endowed with an extraordinary amount of vital power, he becomes entirely
unfitted by his nightly work, and the dissipation consequent upon
constant change of scene, for consecutive thought and elaborate
composition.

It is fortunate for the lecturer that there is no necessity for variety.
The oft-repeated lecture is new to each new audience, and, being
thoroughly in hand, and entirely familiar, is delivered with better
effect than if the speaker were frequently choosing from a
well-furnished repertory. It is popularly supposed that a lecturer loses
all interest in a performance which he repeats so many times. This
supposition is correct, in certain aspects of the matter, but not in any
sense which detracts from his power to make it interesting to others. It
is the general experience of lecturers, that, until they have delivered
a discourse from ten to twenty times, they are themselves unable to
measure its power; so that a performance which is offered at first
timidly and with many doubts comes at length to be delivered
confidently, and with measurable certainty of acceptance and success.
The grand interest of a lecturer is in his new audience, in his
experiment on an assembly of fresh minds. The lecture itself is regarded
only as an instrument by which a desirable and important result is to be
achieved; and familiarity with it, and steady use in its elocutionary
handling, are conditions of the best success. Having selected the
subject which, at the time, and for the times, he considers freshest and
most fruitful, and with thorough care written out all he has to say upon
it, there is no call for recurrence to minor themes, either as regards
the credit of the lecturer or the best interests of those whom he
addresses.

What good has the popular lecture accomplished? Its most enthusiastic
advocates will not assert that it has added greatly to the stock of
popular knowledge, in science or art, in history, philosophy, or
literature; yet the most modest of them may claim that it has bestowed
upon American society a permanent good of incalculable value. The
relentless foe of all bigotry in politics and religion, the constant
opponent of every form of bondage to