balance was not an unjust balance, the scale that sank down heavily to-day might kick the beam to-morrow. It was sometimes difficult to reconcile what he was saying with what he had said before—partly, no doubt, because he was content to say one thing at a time, without much heed of qualifications and conditions; but there was never any difficulty in following what he said while he was saying it. For he had learnt one thing that some men never learn— the relation of the speaker to the listener. What was said of John Bradford, the old Puritan preacher, might have been said with equal truth of George Dawson. Bradford, we are told, " was a master of speech, but he had learned not to speak what he could speak, but what his hearers could hear. He knew that clearness of speech was the excellency of speech; and therefore resolved like a good orator to speak beneath himself rather than above his audience." Aim low if you mean to hit your mark; that is the speaker's first law. Dawson commenced to lecture, in 1845, and he went on lecturing to the very end of his life. It would be an exaggeration to say that like Bacon he took all knowledge for his province; but there were few subjects in literature or in life that he did not touch. I spare you a catalogue in detail, though I could take up several minutes with the list. When I say that he ranged from Calvin at one end to Benvenuto Cellini at the other, from Rousseau to Beau Brummel, from Tennyson to Voltaire, from " Ill-used men " to " Church decoration," from the music of Mendelssohn to the pictures of Holman Hunt, you can
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