A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its
delivery. One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his
mind. After a few deliveries of it, one gets tired and then
disgusted with its repetition. Go on delivering it, and the
disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a hundred or a
hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first or
hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience. But this is
on one condition,--that he never lays the lecture down and lets it
cool. If he does, there comes on a loathing for it which is
intense, so that the sight of the old battered manuscript is as bad
as sea-sickness.
A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a
while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to
touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no
longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the
calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the
novelty and get the blisters.--The story is often quoted of
Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had
been preached forty times. A lecture doesn't begin to be old until
it has passed its hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have
doubled, if not quadrupled, that number. These old lectures are a
man's best, commonly; they improve by age, also,--like the pipes,
fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day.
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