Enormous halls are built for them.  Tickets for long courses are taken with avidity.  Very large sums are paid to popular lecturers, so that the profession is lucrative—­ more so, I am given to understand, than is the cognate profession of literature.  The whole thing is done in great style.  Music is introduced.  The lecturer stands on a large raised platform, on which sit around him the bald and hoary-headed and superlatively wise.  Ladies come in large numbers, especially those who aspire to soar above the frivolities of the world.  Politics is the subject most popular, and most general.  The men and women of Boston could no more do without their lectures than those of Paris could without their theaters.  It is the decorous diversion of the best ordered of her citizens.  The fast young men go to clubs, and the fast young women to dances, as fast young men and women do in other places that are wicked; but lecturing is the favorite diversion of the steady-minded Bostonian.  After all, I do not know that the result is very good.  It does not seem that much will be gained by such lectures on either side of the Atlantic—­except that respectable killing of an evening which might otherwise be killed less respectably.  It is but an industrious idleness, an attempt at a royal road to information, that habit of attending lectures.  Let any man or woman say what he has brought away from any such attendance.  It is attractive, that idea of being studious without any of the labor of study; but I fear it is illusive.  If an evening can be so passed without ennui, I believe that that may be regarded as the best result to be gained.  But then it so often happens that the evening is not passed without ennui!  Of course in saying this, I am not alluding to lectures given in special places as a course of special study.  Medical lectures are, or may be, a necessary part of medical education.  As many as two or three thousand often attend these popular lectures in Boston, but I do not know whether on that account the popular subjects are much better understood.  Nevertheless I resolved to hear more, hoping that I might in that way teach myself to understand what were the popular politics in New England.  Whether or no I may have learned this in any other way, I do not perhaps know; but at any rate I did not learn it in this way.

The next lecture which I attended was also given in the Tremont Hall, and on this occasion also the subject of the war was to be treated.  The special treachery of the rebels was, I think, the matter to be taken in hand.  On this occasion also the room was full, and my hopes of a pleasant hour ran high.  For some fifteen minutes I listened, and I am bound to say that the gentleman discoursed in excellent English.  He was master of that wonderful fluency which is peculiarly the gift of an American.  He went on from one sentence to another with rhythmic tones and unerring pronunciation.  He never faltered,