No,—­what I complain of is not the lecturer’s opinions, but the eloquence with which he expressed them.  He does not like statues better than I do; but is it possible that he fails to see that the one nuisance leads directly to the other, and that we set up three images of Talkers for one to any kind of man who was useful in his generation?  Let him beware, or he will himself be petrified after death.  Boston seems to be specially unfortunate.  She has more statues and more speakers than any other city on this continent.  I have with my own eyes seen a book called “The Hundred Boston Orators.”  This would seem to give her a fairer title to be called the tire than the hub of creation.  What with the speeches of her great men while they are alive, and those of her surviving great men about those aforesaid after they are dead, and those we look forward to from her ditto ditto yet to be upon her ditto ditto now in being, and those of her paulopost ditto ditto upon her ditto ditto yet to be, and those—­But I am getting into the house that Jack built.

And yet I remember once visiting the Massachusetts State House and being struck with the Pythagorean fish hung on high in the Representatives’ Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be observed except on Sundays.  Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as a man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water that threatens the land.  Let us adopt as our creed these two propositions:—­

I. Tongues were given us to be held.

II. Dumbness sets the brute below the man:  Silence elevates the man above the brute.

Every one of those hundred orators is to me a more fearful thought than that of a hundred men gathering samphire.  And when we take into account how large a portion of them (if the present mania hold) are likely to be commemorated in stone or some even more durable material, the conception is positively stunning.

Let us settle all scores by subscribing to a colossal statue of the late Town Crier in bell-metal, with the inscription, “VOX ET PRAETEREA NIHIL,” as a comprehensive tribute to oratorical powers in general. He, at least, never betrayed his clients.  As it is, there is no end to it.  We are to set up Horatius Vir in effigy for inventing the Normal Schoolmaster, and by and by we shall be called on to do the same ill-turn for Elihu Mulciber for getting uselessly learned (as if any man had ideas enough for twenty languages!) without any schoolmaster at all.  We are the victims of a droll antithesis.  Daniel would not give in to Nebuchadnezzar’s taste in statuary, and we are called on to fall down and worship an image of Daniel which the Assyrian monarch would have gone to grass again sooner than have it in his back-parlor.  I do not think lions are agreeable, especially the shaved-poodle variety one