listeners to lectures, they are sure to be composed of such as can derive no possible benefit from the lecture, even were it to the purpose, as they are certain to consist of persons who have no interest whatsoever, one would think, in its subject. Indeed, so well is this understood, that the greatest pains are taken to exclude those who might possibly have a direct interest in the subject of the lecture, and to whom the lecture is ostensibly addressed.
Thus if a fashionable lecturer announces that he will give a lecture to the working-classes with advice to them as to their behaviour, &c., no working-man by any chance is ever to be found among the audience, but the hall is filled with a distinguished company of rich and idle ladies and gentlemen, who understand just as little of the matter in hand as the lecturer, but who applaud him to the echo.
So also if a transcendentalist gives a lecture on the turpitude and immorality of not holding by the tenets of transcendental geography, he never expects to see at his lecture any opponent of transcendentalism, but only its staunch friends, who will cheer him when he launches out against the absent opposite party, because they all entertain precisely the same views as the lecturer himself.
In this way lectures are of a double advantage. It gratifies the audience to hear their own opinions elegantly expounded, and it gratifies the lecturer to find that he has an appreciative audience.
I attended many of the lectures, and whatever the subject I found one general principle pervaded them all. The lecturer invariably represented those to whom the lecture was supposed to be addressed as utterly bad, depraved, and almost criminal in being
