CHAP. XL] POPULAR LECTURES. 153 



a city as Boston there was at present (October, 1845) no regular 

 theater, I was told, among other reasons, that if I went into the 

 houses of persons of the middle and even humblest class, I should 

 often find the father of a family, instead of seeking excitement in 

 a shilling gallery, reading to his wife and four or five children 

 one of the best modern novels, which he has purchased for twenty- 

 five cents ; whereas, if they could all have left home, he could 

 not for many times that sum have taken them to the play. They 

 often buy, in two or three successive numbers of a penny news 

 paper, entire reprints of the tales of Dickens, Bulwer, or other 

 popular writers. 



Dana, now a lawyer in Boston, and whose acquaintance I 

 had the pleasure of making there, has, in his singularly interest 

 ing and original work, entitled &quot; Two Years before the Mast,&quot; 

 not only disclosed to us a lively picture of life in the forecastle, 

 but has shown incidentally how much a crew, composed of the 

 most unpromising materials, rough and illiterate, and recruited 

 at random from the merchant service of different nations, could 

 be improved by associating with a single well-educated messmate. 

 He was able, on one of the few holidays which were granted to 

 them in California by the most tyrannical of captains, to keep 

 them from going ashore, where they would have indulged in dis 

 sipation, by reading to them for hours Scott s historical tale of 

 &quot; Woodstock.&quot; We ought scarcely, then, to wonder, after what 

 I have said of the common schools of this city, that crowded 

 audiences should be drawn night after night, through the whole 

 winter, in spite of frost and snow, from the class of laborers and 

 mechanics, mingled with those of higher station, to listen with 

 deep interest to lectures on natural theology, zoology, geology, 

 the writings of Shakspeare, the beauties of &quot; Paradise Lost,&quot; 

 the peculiar excellencies of &quot; Comus&quot; and &quot; Lycidas,&quot; treated in 

 an elevated style by men who would be heard with pleasure by 

 the most refined audiences in London. 



Still, however, I hear many complaints that there is a want 

 of public amusements to give relief to the minds of the multitude, 

 whose daily employments are so monotonous that they require, 

 far more than the rich, opportunities of innocent recreation, such 



