but the scale was more limited. Mrs. Candour, Mrs. Malaprop, Sir Benjamin Backbite, and the brothers Surface were already there. The standards of conduct, the ideals of honor, were not essentially different.

A generation ago Sir Benjamin bowed and danced and supped at Mrs. Malaprop's ball with all the gay world of that time, which is now in wigs, caps, turbans, or heaven; and the next day, dining with Mrs. Candour, Sir Benjamin told, with infinite relish and to the great amusement of the table, the story of his hostess's verbal trips and stumbles. It did not seem to be conduct essentially base, because this sparkling summer realm by the sea is like Charles Lamb's conception of the artificial comedy of the eighteenth century: "I confess, for myself, that, with no great delinquencies to answer for, I am glad for a season to take an airing beyond the diocese of the strict conscience—not to live always in the precincts of the law courts—but now and then, for a dream-while or so, to imagine a world with no meddling restrictions, to get into recesses whither the hunter cannot follow me—

To take permanent lodgings beyond the diocese of the strict conscience, however, is a critical enterprise. If you take a house in Capua, you must needs breathe the Capuan air. The magnetic rock in Sindbad's story drew out the nails of the ships that ventured too near. Old Mithridates fed on poisons until they "became a kind of nutriment," as Dr. Rappaccini fed his daughter, until, too late, he discovered that she was doomed. The graybeards who drive out to see the coach parade, and recall the days, before the ocean drive, when the rocks beyond Lily Pond were a glimmering land of Beulah, may prattle of the golden age of Newport as of a happy past in which the graybeards were born. But will they seriously contend that the age of Crœsus and Midas is not the golden age of Newport?

While they are gossiping, the coaches approach. They have been through the town, and are driving out by the Fort road; and as they appear, the vast throng of carriages which have driven out to meet them pull to the side of the road to allow a free course. A multitude of spectators awaiting a festal procession, which at last is coming, naturally suggests applause. But there is profound silence. There is no cheer for every spectator to catch up and pass on. The first coach is at hand, and gravely passes at a deliberate pace, and the great world in carriages gravely looks on. The second coach deliberately follows, and is surveyed with equal gravity. The next perhaps will strike a spark of applause. But the next passes deliberately amid a silence profound. One friend, perhaps, in the stately procession gravely nods to another gravely gazing from a carriage. The "function" proceeds. Far out at sea the white sails flash, and the summer surf breaks gently along the shore. Every coach rolls slowly by. The moment for cheering has not yet arrived. Indeed, it does not arrive before the pageant has passed, and the reviewing carriages are turning and following on in its wake. It is truly a solemn function. Graybeard recalls nothing like it for multitude and display in the old drives on "beach days" along the beach in what he calls the golden age. But does he doubt that old Newport would have done it gladly if it could have done it?

If the ghost of Heliogabalus haunts the villa'd shore, it is with no hope of resuming the imperial crown. His court merely makes a pretty summer spectacle when the opera ends. The coach and the stately equipage and the flashing splendor of busy idleness are the pageant which is kindly displayed gratis for the passengers in the omnibus, for the pedestrians and the nurses. They sit and stroll and stare at their ease while the gay play proceeds before their eyes. Nowhere more constantly than in the summer Newport does the remark of the little child watching the march of the soldiers recur—"Mamma, how good they are to make such a show!"

THE LECTURE LYCEUM.

HE Utica Herald in a pleasant article recently recalled the lecture lyceum of a quarter of a century ago. It was then what is called a power. It greatly influenced public opinion. Its spirit was indicated by the reply of Wendell Phillips to an invitation which asked him his terms and his subject. He answered that for a literary lecture he should expect a hundred dollars, but he would deliver an antislavery address for nothing, and pay his own expenses. The lecturers who were most sought at that time were almost without exception men of very strong convictions upon the great question which, however evaded and dexterously hidden, was the vital thought of the country; and every successive week from November to April, in the largest cities and the smallest cities, along the belt of country from the Kennebec through New England and New York westward through Ohio and the Northwest to the Mississippi, before thousands of the most intelligent American citizens, this band of lecturers advanced, like a well-ordered platoon of sharp-shooters, and delivered their destructive volley at what they felt to be the common enemy.

Edward Everett, "the monarch of the platform," as Mr. Edward Parker called him in his book upon American contemporary orators, during part of this same time was making a tour through much of the same region with his oration upon Washington, for the benefit of the fund for the purchase of Mount Vernon, and he was also writing the Mount Vernon papers for the Ledger, in one of which he gave an entertaining description of a night in a sleeping-car, when those itinerant bedchambers had but recently taken to the road. Mr. Everett's conservative temperament made his oration a kind of corrective of the influence of the great tendency of the lyceum lecture. But patriotic as his purpose undoubtedly was, his effort to stem the rapidly rising tide of public sentiment was like the protests of Governor Hutchinson and the Colonial conservatives against the fervid revolutionary appeals of Otis and Adams and Quincy. Other popular speakers of the same sympathy as that of Mr. Everett found themselves out of tune with the lyceum audience, and were but meteors flashing across the stage, whose light was lost in the steady and increasing glow of the group of men who were identified with the great day of the lyceum lecture. These men were not all like Wendell Phillips, open leaders of a specific agitation, nor were these lectures always ostensibly upon what are called public questions. But the influence of the lecturers was unmistakable. They were all men known to be in the strongest sympathy with the most advanced feeling of the agitation. It was the plain spirit and tone and drift of those lectures, an occasional allusion and the necessary application of the remarks, however general, to the actual situation, rather than any deliberate discussion of the question itself, which characterized the lyceum of that day. There was sometimes an attempted reaction against this tendency. In Philadelphia it was discovered that colored persons were not admitted to the Musical Fund Hall, in which the lectures had been given. The leading lecturers instantly informed the committee that they declined to speak in the hall so long as the restriction continued. In Albany the reactionary sentiment in the Young Men's Association succeeded in electing a lecture committee which was resolved upon a purely "literary" course, and which