As for America and Lecturing, it is a thing I do sometimes turn
over, but never yet with any seriousness. What your friend says
of the people being more persuadable, so far, as having no
Tithe-controversy, &c., &c. will go, I can most readily understand
it. But apart from that, I should rather fancy America mainly a
new Commercial England, with a fuller pantry,--little more or little
less. The same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit
of endeavor, directed (woe is me!) to the making of money, or
money's worth; namely, food finer and finer, and gigmanic
renown higher and higher: nay, must not your gigmanity be a
_purse_-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purse-and-pedigree
one? Or perhaps it is not a whit worse; only rougher, more
substantial; on the whole better? At all events ours is fast
becoming identical with it; for the pedigree ingredient is as
near as may be gone: _Gagnez de l'argent, et ne vous faites pas
pendre,_ this is very nearly the whole Law, first Table and
second. So that you see, when I set foot on American land, it
will be on no Utopia; but on a _conditional_ piece of ground
where some things are to be expected and other things not. I may
say, on the other hand, that Lecturing (or I would rather it were
_speaking_) is a thing I have always had some hankering after:
it seems to me I could really _swim_ in that element, were I once
thrown into it; that in fact it would develop several things in
me which struggle violently for development. The great want I
have towards such an enterprise is one you may guess at: want of
a _rubric,_ of a title to name my speech by. Could any one but
appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdrockh's science,--
"Things in general"! To discourse of Poets and Poetry in the
Hazlitt style, or talk stuff about the Spirit of the Age, were
most unedifying: one knows not what to call himself. However,