pt is as bad
as sea-sickness.

A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a
while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to
touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no
longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the
calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the
novelty and get the blisters.--The story is often quoted of
Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had
been preached forty times. A lecture doesn't begin to be old until
it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have
doubled, if not quadrupled, that number. These old lectures are a
man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also,--like the pipes,
fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day. One learns to make
the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones,
--to take out the really good things which don't tell on the
audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades
him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery.
A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five
hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

--No, indeed,--I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful
of audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may
occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the AVERAGE
intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very
high. It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not
very rapid or profound. A lecture ought to be something which all
can understand, about something which interests everybody. I
think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different
account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or
forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their
manner, whatever they talk about,--even when they don't talk very
well.

But an AVERAGE, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of
the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is
awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two
communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions,
so far as we can see. Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each,
are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in
many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place
and time by which one can tell the "remarkably intelligent
audience"