In New York, which tends rapidly to become the center of activity for most of the important influences of our country, there are every year many dinners, anniversaries, and assemblies, at which oratory of an ephemeral nature finds expression and attention.  All the nationalities, all the religious and literary societies, all the clubs, all the distinguished foreigners, and all the leading and following colleges, must have a dinner, and every dinner must have at least a dozen speeches.  Most of these speeches are more eloquent to the opinion of their authors than to the minds of their hearers.

It certainly is one of the best moral illustrations of the first law of motion that in spite of all the heroism necessary to endure such a volume of speech, the patient public seems (if we may judge from the increase in volume) every year more and more willing to sit at the tables and listen to this flow of sound.  Perhaps this patience is only apparent, for competition for an opportunity to speak is said to be lively.  Possibly every one of the thousands who listen is secretly comparing the eloquence of the speaker with his own skilful ability, and not quite calmly biding the time when he shall enrapture, where the present speaker wearies and annoys.

Yet not every speech made on those occasions is dull.  Now and then the happy mingling of fun and sense really lifts the company out of the tiresome monotony.  Were it not for these addresses beautiful and rare, we can believe that dinner speeches would be abandoned, or exchanged for a single oration from one competent to delight.

For the distinguishing mark of the dinner speech should be that it amuse not in the rough, coarse way of the demagogue, but in the subtle, fine way of the man of culture.

The dinner speeches with which the readers of this paper are perhaps most familiar, those made when the alumni of a noble college gather around the table of their alma mater, ought to be characterized by the broad sympathy, the quick insight, the flexible grace and the genial humor of the thoroughly educated man.  Although to make fine dinner speeches can never be an aim worthy of an earnest man, yet to have the power and culture from which such a speech usually comes, is the highest aim in a literary regard that any man can have.  It is a short-sighted and one-sighted earnestness that despises the wit and banter of society, and affects the isolation and grandeur of pure thought.  The mountain summit is too far removed from the walks of men to make it possible for the recluse to wield all the influence that his powers may entitle him to exert.  The metaphysician less than the poet, the country minister less than the successful lawyer, is the autocrat of the dinner-table.