full of indistinguishable attentive faces. I
sometimes fancy too that I cannot have forgotten what are now favorite
passages from those lectures--passages read and re-read, and then read
again, till they are known almost by heart. I cannot acknowledge to
myself that I do not remember his voice and look, and the tribute of
listening silence which waited upon him while he spoke.

One at least of these evenings is well remembered. Its distinguishing
feature was my being tipped. My mother and I had gone on this occasion
quite early to our places--half an hour or three-quarters before the
time when the lecture should begin--and we found the lecturer already at
his post. He, with head thrown back, had been walking with long strides
up and down the little waiting-room, and talking in bright spirits to my
mother, when a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and diving into one
of his pockets he brought out a sovereign--perhaps it was a five-dollar
gold piece--and insisted upon giving it to me; but the proposal produced
at once a most severe parental resistance, while I disinterestedly
looked on--a resistance apparently quite unlooked for by "my illustrious
friend," who had much trouble in explaining that this species of
beneficence was a thing of course in England. But American pride was
silenced at last, though not convinced, as will be seen, for it planned
on the spot a compromise which should reconcile the differences of
national feeling, though _I_ was induced to suppose that the sovereign
was as far out of my reach as ever; and being then, as I said before,
above or below such things, I turned all my attention to the lecture,
which began soon afterward, and whose subject, the royal bugbear of
patriotic schoolboys of that time, I imagined I knew all about. It was
therefore with astonished awe that I heard the peroration, when the
speaker said, appealing directly to us all: "O brothers speaking the
same dear mother-tongue! O comrades! enemies no more, let us take a
mournful hand together as we stand by this royal corpse and call a truce
to battle! Low he lies to whom the proudest used to kneel once, and who
was cast lower than the poorest--dead whom millions prayed for in vain.
Driven off his throne, buffeted by rude hands, with his children in
revolt, the darling of his old age killed before him untimely--our Lear
hangs over her breathless lips and cries, Cordelia! Cordelia! stay a
little!

Vex not his ghost: oh, let hi