The more ill-natured critics of the popular lecturer have reflected with ridicule upon his habit of repetition, A lecturer in full employment will deliver the same discourse perhaps fifty or a hundred times in a single season. There are probably half a dozen favorite lectures which have been delivered from two hundred to five hundred times within the last fifteen years. It does, indeed, at first glance, seem ridiculous for a man to stand, night after night, and deliver the same words, with the original enthusiasm apparently at its full height; and some lecturers, with an extra spice of mirthfulness in their composition, have given public record of their impressions in this respect. There are, however, certain facts to be considered which at least relieve him from the charge of literary sterility. A lecture often becomes famous, and is demanded by each succeeding audience, whatever the lecturer's preferences may be. There are lectures called for every year by audiences and committees which the lecturer would be glad never to see again, and which he never would see again, if he were to consult his own judgment alone. Then the popular lecturer, as has been already intimated, is usually engaged during two thirds of the year in some business or profession whose duties forbid the worthy preparation of more than one discourse for winter use. Then, if he has numerous engagements, he has neither time nor strength to do more than his nightly work; for, among all the pursuits in which literary men engage, none is more exhaustive in its demands upon the nervous energy than that of constant lecturing. The fulfilment of from seventy-five to ninety engagements involves, in round numbers, ten thousand miles of railroad-travel, much of it in the night, and all of it during the most unpleasant season of the year. There is probably nothing short of a military campaign that is attended by so many discomforts and genuine hardships as a season of active lecturing. Unless a man be young and endowed with an extraordinary amount of vital power, he becomes entirely unfitted by his nightly work, and the dissipation consequent upon constant change of scene, for consecutive thought and elaborate composition.