enefit:

"I am thinking of giving, or trying to give, a lecture by
invitation at the Athenaeum. I am offered thirty guineas, and
as my old friends the cotton-spinners have invited me to meet
them, I think of handing the sum, whatever it may be, to
them, or rather letting them take it and fit up a room as a
coffee-room on the plan of the French cafes, where men,
women, and children may go, instead of to whisky-shops. There
are coffee-houses already, but I don't think there are any
where they can laugh and talk and read papers just as they
please. The sort I contemplate would suit poor young fellows
who cannot have a comfortable fire at home. I have seen men
dragged into drinking ways from having no comfort at home,
and women also drawn to the dram-shop from the same cause.
Don't you think something could be done by setting the
persons I mention to do something for themselves?"

Edinburgh conferred on Livingstone the freedom of the city, besides
entertaining him at a public breakfast and hearing him at another
meeting. We are not surprised to find him writing to Sir Roderick
Murchison from Rossie Priory, on the 27th September, that he was about
to proceed to Leeds, Liverpool, and Birmingham, "and then farewell to
public spouting for ever. I am dead tired of it. The third meeting at
Edinburgh quite knocked me up." It was generally believed that his
appearances at Edinburgh were not equal to some others; and probably
there was truth in the impression, for he must have come to it
exhausted; and besides, at a public breakfast, he was put out by a
proposal of the chairman, that they should try to get him a pension. Yet
some who heard him in Edinburgh received impressions that were never
effaced, and it is probable that seed was silently sown which led
afterward to the Scotch Livingstonia Mission--one of the most hopeful
schemes for carrying out Livingstone's plans that have yet been
organized.

Among the other honors conferred on him during this visit to Britain was
the degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford. Some time before,
Glasgow had given him the honorary degree of LL.D. In the beginning of
1858, when he was proposed as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the
certificate on his behalf was signed, among others, by the Earl of
Carlisle, then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, who after his signature added
P.R. (_pro Regina_), a thing that had never