uld be preferable, if
you could keep your name out of the Directory,) the number of applicants
in person is limited; and as for the letters, we know that the
post-office department is very badly managed, and a great many epistles
never reach their destination. Besides, it's astonishing how soon and
how easily an author acquires the reputation of being unapproachable. If
he don't pour out his heart, in unlimited torrents and cascades of
feeling, to a curious stranger, the latter goes away with the report
that the author, personally, is "icy, reserved, uncommunicative; in the
man, one sees nothing of his works; it is difficult to believe that that
cold, forbidding brow conceived, those rigid, unsmiling lips uttered,
and that dry, bloodless hand wrote, the fervid passion of"--such or such
a book. When I read a description of myself, written in that style, I
was furious; but I afterwards noticed that the number of my visitors
fell off very rapidly.

Most of us American authors, however, now go to the people, instead of
waiting for them to come to us. And this is what I mean by coming to the
worst. Four or five years ago, I determined to talk as well as write.
Everybody was doing it, and well paid; nothing seemed to be requisite
except a little distinction, which I had already acquired by my comic
and didactic writings. There was Mr. E---- declaiming philosophy; Drs.
B---- and C---- occupying secular pulpits; Mr. C---- inculcating loftier
politics; Mr. T---- talking about all sorts of countries and people; Mr.
W---- reading his essays in public; and a great many more, whom you all
know. Why should I not also "pursue the triumph and partake the gale"? I
found that the lecture was in most cases an essay, written in short,
pointed sentences, and pleasantly delivered. The audience must laugh
occasionally, and yet receive an impression strong enough to last until
next morning. The style which, as I said before, I claim to have
invented, was the very thing! I noticed, further, that there was a
great deal in the title of the lecture. It must be alliterative,
antithetical, or, still better, paradoxical. There was profound skill in
Artemus Ward's "Babes in the Wood." Such titles as "Doubts and Duties,"
"Mystery and Muffins," "Here, There, and Nowhere," "The Elegance of
Evil," "Sunshine and Shrapnel," "The Coming Cloud," "The Averted Agony,"
and "Peeps at Peccadillos," will explain my meaning. The latter, in
fact, was the actual title