'In every age there is some question raised as to its wants and powers, its strength and weakness, its great or small worth and work; and in every age that question is waste of time and speech. To a small soul the age which has borne it can appear only as an age of small souls; the pigmy brain and emasculate spirit can perceive in its own time nothing but dwarfishness and emasculation. Each century has seemed to some of its children an epoch of decadence and decline in national life and spiritual, in moral or material glory; each alike has heard the cry of degeneracy raised against it, the wave of emulous impotence set up against the weakness of the age.'--SWINBURNE. Before the invention of printing, or let me say before the cheapening of printing, the lecturer was in a more fortunate position than he is to- day; because, if a learned man, he was able to give his audience certain pieces of information which he could be fairly sure _some_ of his listeners had never heard before. The arrival in town or city of Abelard, Paracelsus, or Erasmus, to take the first instances occurring to me, must have been a great event, the importance of which we can scarcely appreciate at the present day. It must have excited our forefathers, at least as much as the arrival of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in any large city, excites I imagine, all of us to-day. But multiplication of books has really rendered lecturers, as instructors, mere intellectual Othellos; their occupation is gone; the erudition of the ages is now within reach of all; though educational books were fairly expensive within living memory. You owe, therefore, a debt of gratitude to the _Times_ and the _Daily Mail_ for bringing Encyclopaedias of all kinds into the range of the shallowest purse and in contact with the shallowest heads in the community. But in case your learned professors have not contributed all their hidden lore and scholarship to the cheap Encyclopaedias, and still allow their learning to leak out at lectures, you may have come expecting instruction from me on some neglected subject. If that is so, I must confess myself at once an impostor. I have no information to give you. I assume your erudition to compensate for my own lack of it. There are no facts which I might bring before you that you cannot find stated more clearly in valuable manuals or works of reference, if you have not mastered them already. There is no scientific or philosophic theory which I might propound that you could not hear with greater benefit from others. Briefly, I have no orange up my sleeve.