of speech, than an Eastern audience. Indeed, there are those who
suppose that a lecture which would fully meet the demands of an average
Eastern audience would be beyond the comprehension of an average Western
audience; but the lecturer who shall accept any such assumption as this
will find himself very unpleasantly mistaken. At the West, the lecture
is both popular and fashionable, and the best people attend it. A
lecturer may always be certain, then, that the best he can do will be
thoroughly appreciated. The West is not particularly tolerant of dull
men; but if a man be alive, he will find a market there for the best
thought he produces.

In the larger cities of the East, the opera, the play, the frequent
concert, the exhibition, the club-house, the social assembly, and a
variety of public gatherings and public excitements, take from the
lecture-audiences the class that furnishes the best material in the
smaller cities; so that a lecturer rarely or never sees his best
audiences in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia.

Another requisite to popularity upon the platform is earnestness. Those
who imagine that a permanent hold upon the people can be obtained by
amusing them are widely mistaken. The popular lecture has fallen into
disrepute with many worthy persons in consequence of the admission of
buffoons and triflers to the lecturer's platform; and it is an evil
which ought to be remedied. It is an evil, indeed, which is slowly
working its own remedy. It is a disgraceful fact, that, in order to draw
together crowds of people, men have been admitted to the platform whose
notoriety was won by the grossest of literary charlatanism,--men whose
only hold upon the public was gained by extravagances of thought and
expression which would compromise the dignity and destroy the
self-respect of any man of character and common sense. It is not enough
that these persons quickly disgust their audiences, and have a brief
life upon the list. They ought never to be introduced to the public as
lecturers; and any momentary augmentation of receipts that may be
secured from the rabble by the patronage of such mountebanks is more
than lost by the disgrace they bring and the damage they do to what is
called "The Lecture System." It is an insult to any lyceum-audience to
suppose that it can have a strong and permanent interest in a trifler;
and it is a gross injustice to every respectable lecturer in the field
to introduce into his guild m