CHAPTER XIII.
LECTURES AND SOCIETIES.
I THINK the Colymbians are the greatest lecturers and the greatest lovers of lectures in the world. Every town has several lecture-halls, and these are occupied almost every night with orators declaiming and audiences listening with rapt attention to their utterances, delivered always in their exquisite musical oratory. But, as in their government it is customary to entrust the supervision of every department of state to some one utterly unacquainted with the subject matter of that department, so their lectures are usually, though not necessarily, delivered by persons who cannot possibly have any experience of or acquaintance with the subject lectured on. So just as the minister who presides over the natural history department is ostentatiously ignorant of natural history, can scarcely tell a bull from a bullfinch, or a cocoa-nut from a ribston-pippin, so a lecturer, say on the duties of the poorer classes, is invariably one belonging to the richer classes of society; a lecturer on the education of women is invariably a confirmed old bachelor and woman-hater; a lecturer on athletic exercises is certain to be one who never takes any exercise at all. And then the
