There is also another specially favorable opportunity for abstruse meditation, which I trust I may be pardoned for venturing to name. It is the grand occasion afforded by the laudable custom of patiently listening to dull speakers or readers in the lecture-room or the pulpit. A moment’s reflection will surely enable the reader to corroborate the remark that we seldom think out the subject of a new book or article, or elaborate a political or philanthropic scheme, a family compact, or the _menu_ of a large dinner, with so much precision and lucidity as when gazing with vacant respectfulness at a gentleman expatiating with elaborate stupidity on theology or science. The voice of the charmer as it rises and falls is almost as soothing as the sound of the waves on the shore, but not quite equally absorbing to the attention; while the repose of all around gently inclines the languid mind to alight like a butterfly on any little flower it may find in the arid waste, and suck it to the bottom. This beneficent result of sermon and lecture-hearing is, however, sometimes deplorably marred by the stuffiness of the room, the hardness and shallowness of the seats (as in that place of severe mortification of the flesh, the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street), and lastly by the unpardonable habit of many orators of lifting their voices in an animated way, as if they really had something to say, and then solemnly announcing a platitude,—a process which acts on the nerves of a listener as it must act on those of a flounder to be carried up into the air half a dozen times in the bill of a heron and then dropped flat on the mud. Under trials like these, the tormented thoughts of the sufferer, seeking rest and finding none, are apt to assume quite unaccountable and morbid shapes, and indulge in freaks of an irrational kind, as in a dream. The present writer and some sober-minded acquaintances have, for example, all felt themselves impelled at such hours to perform aërial flights of fancy about the church or lecture-room in the character of stray robins or bats. “Here,” they think gravely (quite unconscious for the moment of the absurdity of their reflection), “here, on this edge of a monument, I might stand and take flight to that cornice an inch wide, whence I might run along to the top of that pillar; and from thence, by merely touching the bald tip of the preacher’s head, I might alight on the back of that plump little angel on the tomb opposite, while a final spring would take me through the open pane of window and perch me on the yew-tree outside.” The whole may perhaps be reckoned a spontaneous mythical self-representation of the Psalmist’s cry: “Oh that I had wings like a dove, for then would I flee away and be at rest.”