nd points out their relations to individual and universal
good, and organizes around them the popular thought, and uses them to
give direction to the popular life, and does all this with masterly
skill, is the man whose houses are never large enough to contain those
who throng to hear him. This is the popular lecturer, _par excellence_.
The people have an earnest desire to know what a strong, independent,
free man has to say about those facts which touch the experience, the
direction, and the duty of their daily life; and the lecturer who with
a hearty human sympathy addresses himself to this desire, and enters
upon the service with genuine enthusiasm, wins the highest reward there
is to be won in his field of effort.

The more ill-natured critics of the popular lecturer have reflected with
ridicule upon his habit of repetition, A lecturer in full employment
will deliver the same discourse perhaps fifty or a hundred times in a
single season. There are probably half a dozen favorite lectures which
have been delivered from two hundred to five hundred times within the
last fifteen years. It does, indeed, at first glance, seem ridiculous
for a man to stand, night after night, and deliver the same words, with
the original enthusiasm apparently at its full height; and some
lecturers, with an extra spice of mirthfulness in their composition,
have given public record of their impressions in this respect. There
are, however, certain facts to be considered which at least relieve him
from the charge of literary sterility. A lecture often becomes famous,
and is demanded by each succeeding audience, whatever the lecturer's
preferences may be. There are lectures called for every year by
audiences and committees which the lecturer would be glad never to see
again, and which he never would see again, if he were to consult his own
judgment alone. Then the popular lecturer, as has been already
intimated, is usually engaged during two thirds of the year in some
business or profession whose duties forbid the worthy preparation of
more than one discourse for winter use. Then, if he has numerous
engagements, he has neither time nor strength to do more than his
nightly work; for, among all the pursuits in which literary men engage,
none is more exhaustive in its demands upon the nervous energy than that
of constant lecturing. The fulfilment of from seventy-five to ninety
engagements involves, in round numbers, ten thousand miles of
railroad-t