Any Easy Chair must be often reminded of such incidents when it reads in the papers the cards and notices and invitations and petitions to which conspicuous names are attached. It discovers, for instance, that the most eminent ministers, merchants, lawyers, and capitalists are very anxious to hear Dr. Dunderhead upon the history of chaos. They compliment the learned doctor's erudition and eloquence, and beg him to name the evening when he will speak to them. The doctor replies in blushing rhetoric, and will yield to their desires on Thursday evening, the 32d. On that evening the Easy Chair, which has perused the correspondence with eager expectation, and which has a profound interest in chaos, repairs to the hall, finds a dozen surprised stragglers like itself, but not one of the conspicuous clergymen, lawyers, merchants, or capitalists, and goes home in bewilderment to read in the morning's paper an elaborate report of Dr. Dunderhead's lecture, delivered at the request of the following distinguished gentlemen--who are duly named; and it slowly dawns upon the Easy Chair that it has been assisting at an advertisement, that the invitation to Dr. Dunderhead was also written by Dr. Dunderhead, that the gentlemen signed because they were asked to do so, and that the whole proceeding is intended to impress the rural districts, and to procure the learned and erudite Dunderhead invitations to lecture in other places. Have these gentlemen no respect for their names? They would not indorse the note of a stranger for a thousand dollars because somebody asked them to do it for good-nature. But it is just as dishonorable to indorse a man's learning and eloquence when you know nothing of it as to indorse a man's promise to pay of whose solvency you are equally ignorant. Indeed, in the one case you could supply the money if the maker of the note failed. But, dear sirs, can you supply the eloquence and erudition which you indorsed in Dr. Dunderhead, for which many Easy Chairs paid many dollars, and which Dunderhead failed to display? You cannot, indeed, be sued at the City Hall, but you are prosecuted at another, even loftier tribunal, and you are mulcted in damages. Your own good name pays the penalty, and is thereafter less respected. If a man does not respect his own name, who will? But if he publicly announces that his name is of no weight, how can he complain if it becomes a jest?