The Long-Winded Public Speaker
SPEAKING of public assemblies, was there ever yet a great meeting in which some part of the exercises was not wearisome to the majority of the listeners? Where two or three are gathered together, there always appears some one who thinks the others will be edified by listening exclusively to him, and who cannot see that they want to hear that other man. The "Spectator" recently heard a somewhat prosy speaker consume sixty-five mortal minutes in torturing an audience who were waiting to hear another man; and, to make it worse, he seemed to think the storm of applause which greeted his retirement from the speaker's desk was an exhibition of approval and not of relief. Committees of arrangements may find it impossible or ungracious to restrain a fluent tongue; but, in justice to a long-suffering but patient public, they ought to place it at that point in the programme where it will work the least harm; viz., the end. —Christian Union.