A new lecture is just like any other new tool.  We use it for a while with pleasure.  Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it.  By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any sensitiveness about it.  But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the blisters.—­The story is often quoted of Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had been preached forty times.  A lecture doesn’t begin to be old until it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that number.  These old lectures are a man’s best, commonly; they improve by age, also,—­like the pipes, fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day.  One learns to make the most of their strong points and to carry off their weak ones, to take out the really good things which don’t tell on the audience, and put in cheaper things that do.  All this degrades him, of course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery.  A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.

——­No, indeed,—­I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful of audiences.  I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may occasionally face one hereafter.  But I tell you the average intellect of five hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very high.  It may be sound and safe, so far as it goes, but it is not very rapid or profound.  A lecture ought to be something which all can understand, about something which interests everybody.  I think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or forcible speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their manner, whatever they talk about,—­even when they don’t talk very well.

But an average, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of the most extraordinary subjects of observation and study.  It is awful in its uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action.  Two communities of ants or bees are exactly alike in all their actions, so far as we can see.  Two lyceum assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the “remarkably intelligent audience” of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New England town of similar size.  Of course, if any principle of selection has come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage.  But let there be no such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well even the look the audience will have, before he goes in.  Front seats:  a few old folks,—­shiny-headed,—­slant up best ear towards the speaker,—­drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a