d than good. If what has led up to it has softened
the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical
edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any
platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of
coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as
with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of
sentiment refreshes "the burning forehead and the parching tongue" like
a gush of genuine poetry. The mere reputation of the speaker goes a
great way, almost the whole way; and, especially if he is a comic
speaker, he might rise up and sit down without a word and yet leave his
hearers the sense of having been richly amused. If he does more, if he
really says something droll, no matter how much below the average of the
give and take of common talk, the listener's gratitude is frantic. It
is so eager, it so outruns utterance, that it is not strange the
after-dinner speech should be the favorite field of the fake-humorist,
who reaps a full and ever-ripened harvest in it, and prospers on to a
celebrity for brilliancy which there is little danger of his ever
forfeiting so long as he keeps there.

The fake-humorous speaker has an easier career than even the
fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes out
mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and
splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will
applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They
will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the
old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of
eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are
going to get. The note of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance of the
accustomed, the expected; not tolerance of the novel, the surprising.
They wish to be at rest, and what taxes their minds molests their
intellectual repose. They do not wish to climb any great heights to
reach the level of the orator. Perhaps, after all, they are difficult in
their torpidity.

The oratory seems to vary less throughout any given dinner than from
dinner to dinner, and it seems better or worse according as the dinner
is occasional or personal. The occasional dinner is in observance of
some notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the Surrender of
Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gunpowder, or the Discover