--lectures
and libraries, for example--are not free from serious faults. It may
seem rash and indefensible to criticize lectures upon the platform of
the lecturer; but, as the audience can inflict whatever penalty they
please upon the speaker, he will so far assume responsibility as to say
that amusement is not the highest object of a single lecture, and when
sought by managers as the desirable object of a whole course, the
lecture-room becomes a theatre of dissipation; surely not so bad as
other forms of dissipation, but yet so distinctly marked, and so
pernicious in its influence, as to be comparatively unworthy of general
support. Let it not, however, be inferred that wit, humor, and drollery
even, are to be excluded from the lecture-room; but they should always
be employed as means by which information is communicated. Between
lecturers equal in other respects, one with the salt of humor, native to
the soil, should be preferred; but it is a sad reflection upon public
taste, when a person whose entire intellectual capital is wit, humor, or
buffoonery, is preferred to men of solid learning. But it is a worse
view of human nature, when men of real merit and worth depreciate
themselves and lower the public taste, by attempting to do what, at
best, they can have but ill success in, and what they would despise
themselves for, were they to succeed completely. Shakspeare says of a
jester:

"This fellow's wise enough to play the fool;
And to do that well, craves a kind of wit:

* * * * *

This is a practice
As full of labor as a wise man's art:
For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit;
But wise men, folly-fallen, quite taint their wit."

A kindred mental dissipation follows in the steps of progress, and
demands aliment from our public libraries. In the selection of books
there is a wide range, from the trashy productions of the fifth-rate
novelist, to stately history and exact science. It is, however, to be
assumed that libraries will not be established until they are wanted,
and that the want will not be pressing until there is a taste for
reading somewhat general. Where this taste exists, it is fair to assume
that it is in some degree elevated. The direction, however, which the
taste of any community is to take, after the establishment of a public
library, depends, in a great degree, upon the selection of books for its
shelves. Two d