Another requisite to popularity upon the platform is earnestness. Those who imagine that a permanent hold upon the people can be obtained by amusing them are widely mistaken. The popular lecture has fallen into disrepute with many worthy persons in consequence of the admission of buffoons and triflers to the lecturer's platform; and it is an evil which ought to be remedied. It is an evil, indeed, which is slowly working its own remedy. It is a disgraceful fact, that, in order to draw together crowds of people, men have been admitted to the platform whose notoriety was won by the grossest of literary charlatanism,--men whose only hold upon the public was gained by extravagances of thought and expression which would compromise the dignity and destroy the self-respect of any man of character and common sense. It is not enough that these persons quickly disgust their audiences, and have a brief life upon the list. They ought never to be introduced to the public as lecturers; and any momentary augmentation of receipts that may be secured from the rabble by the patronage of such mountebanks is more than lost by the disgrace they bring and the damage they do to what is called "The Lecture System." It is an insult to any lyceum-audience to suppose that it can have a strong and permanent interest in a trifler; and it is a gross injustice to every respectable lecturer in the field to introduce into his guild men who have no better motive and no higher mission than the stage-clown and the negro-minstrel. But the career of triflers is always short. Only he who feels that he has something to do in making the world wiser and better, and who, in a bold and manly way, tries persistently to do it, is always welcome; and this fact--an incontrovertible one--is a sufficient vindication of the popular lecture from all the aspersions that have been cast upon it by disappointed aspirants for its honors, and shallow observers of its tendencies and results.