Lectures and Lecturers

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LECTURES AND LECTURERS.

It is singular how, with capacious halls, and a numerous, refined, and educated population, we do not get more and better lectures in Williamsburgh during the winters. That the fact is so, we are all aware; but it is not easy at first sight to assign a plausible reason for the anomaly. Within these few days, Caleb Lyon,¹ after lecturing in New York, actually passed on to the obscure village of Flushing and lectured there, omitting this place from his programme. And so it is with all the first class lecturers. The Everetts, the Beechers, the Holmes's, the Emerson's, the Curtis's,² cross from New York to the Western District, but the sound of their melodious voices is never heard in Williamsburgh. Certainly the approaches to the place are none of the best—the look of the scraggy mules of the Greenpoint route does not reflect much credit on the locality whither they tend, nor would the rivalry between Law's and Laytin's pilots induce a prudent man to lightly place his life in jeopardy by crossing in their boats if he could avoid it. But men who travel half over the Union in quest of fifty dollars a night and a crowded house are not likely to be kept away by trifling perils of land or water. The causes of the neglect which we experience must be looked for deeper.

One cause undoubtedly is, that we have no Literary Association here, worthy the name, which could invite these men, and guarantee them their ordinary high fees. Yet there could be no reasonable doubt that a course of lectures here by truly eminent men would be a most excellent pecuniary speculation. So anxious are our citizens for literary winter evening amusement, that even the dullest of pedants and the most uninteresting of subjects, will draw a pretty fair audience; and we have no doubt that the announcement of such men as we have named would crowd the Odeon, large as it is, to overflowing. The report of the Brooklyn Mercantile Library Association shows that they have netted in their first year $1345,64 from lectures along. Surely this is encouragement enough to warrant some of our money-loving "prominent citizens" in taking measures to found a similar institution here.

But if anything of the kind is to be attempted, let the policy of the Brooklyn Association be taken as a guide. They have engaged the very first specimens of the lecturer genus. A lecturer is like a horse in one respect—a poor one is dear at any price. It is cheaper to pay a first rate man a high fee, than to engage for a mere song some "peripatetic humbug" who recites the same vapid stuff twenty times over, every succeeding winter having neither industry nor originality enough to add to the stock with which he originally started in the lecturing profession. This is another reason, we opine, why good lecturers do not come here—that in past years mere pretenders have been here with their worn-out thread-bare effusions, and have been greeted by houses empty as their own craniums. Such men are as much out of place here now as ever; but if the Curtis's and the Beechers will visit us, we assure them that as great crowds will assemble to hear them lecture, as thronged to listen to their speeches here on behalf of "the Pathfinder," in the last Presidential Campaign.

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