successful. In the Northern States of America the matter stands on
a very different footing. Lectures there are more popular than
either theaters or concerts. Enormous halls are built for them.
Tickets for long courses are taken with avidity. Very large sums
are paid to popular lecturers, so that the profession is lucrative--
more so, I am given to understand, than is the cognate profession
of literature. The whole thing is done in great style. Music is
introduced. The lecturer stands on a large raised platform, on
which sit around him the bald and hoary-headed and superlatively
wise. Ladies come in large numbers, especially those who aspire to
soar above the frivolities of the world. Politics is the subject
most popular, and most general. The men and women of Boston could
no more do without their lectures than those of Paris could without
their theaters. It is the decorous diversion of the best ordered
of her citizens. The fast young men go to clubs, and the fast
young women to dances, as fast young men and women do in other
places that are wicked; but lecturing is the favorite diversion of
the steady-minded Bostonian. After all, I do not know that the
result is very good. It does not seem that much will be gained by
such lectures on either side of the Atlantic--except that
respectable killing of an evening which might otherwise be killed
less respectably. It is but an industrious idleness, an attempt at
a royal road to information, that habit of attending lectures. Let
any man or woman say what he has brought away from any such
attendance. It is attractive, that idea of being studious without
any of the labor of study; but I fear it is illusive. If an
evening can be so passed without ennui, I believe that that may be
regarded as the best result to be gained. But then it so often
happens that the evening is not passed without ennui! Of course in
saying this, I am not alluding to lectures given in special places