Every winter, for several years, she gave a course of lectures to the working-people and tradesfolk of the place, in the Methodist school-room at the back of her house. Many of the gentry desired to attend, but she would have none of them, on the double ground that there was no room for them, and that the lectures were designed for people who had little access to books or other educational resources. The subjects that she treated were as various as those of her books, but all chosen with what I have previously observed seems to me to have been the object of all her works--to influence conduct through knowledge and reasoning. There was a course on sanitary matters, others on her travels (and we know from her books on the same topics from what point of view these were treated), some on the history of England, another on the history and constitution of the United States; and, finally, the last course for which she had health and strength was given in November and December, 1854, and was on the Crimean War and the character of the government of Russia. I have seen some of the older inhabitants of Ambleside who attended these lectures, and who now speak of them in the warmest terms of admiration. "They were so clear; and she never stopped for a word; and so interesting!--one could have listened to them over and over again." But there is no one who could tell, with the aid of a cultivated taste, what she was as a public speaker. So eloquent is some of her writing that one holds one's breath as one reads it; and the evident rapidity of the penmanship of her MS.[15] shows that such passages were produced with all the improvisatory impulse and flow of the orator. If, besides this, her delivery was fervent and impressive, one cannot but think how great a statesman and parliamentary leader she might have been, with these essential qualifications for modern public life added to all that knowledge, judgment, strength of principle, and political capacity which made men willing (as we shall see soon) to accept her as their political teacher in the daily and quarterly press. That she had the orator's stirring gifts, the personal magnetism which compels the minds of a mass to move with the words of a speaker, and the reciprocal power of receiving stimulus from an audience, when The hearts of many fires the lips of one,