Use of Societies to Thinkers.

Such societies are, to my mind, of most especial value to those who are more given to reading and thinking than to speaking; to those—forming no inconsiderable proportion of the best informed and most thoughtful men in the community—who, by temperament and personal circumstances, find a difficulty in expressing themselves readily in the presence of others.

Gentlemen, you will permit me to say it—although I can pretend to no special literary qualification myself—that in a community like ours, there must be, and there is—as indeed is the case in our great Mother Country—a great deal of very bad speaking, and very bad writing; that the variety of our popular institutions, and the vast number and fecundity of the so-called organs of opinion, tend necessarily to create a loose, slip-shod, inelegant, and, not unfrequently, vulgar style of composition, both written and verbal—though in this place and elsewhere there are honourable exceptions;—and that in our highest class of educational establishments, as in many of those of England itself, there is but scanty training in English composition, and in the art of oratory; and even the art of reading intelligently and effectively, is cultivated and possessed by a very inconsiderable minority of the educated population. The cultivation of a true taste in societies like yours, may materially check and reform this mischief, and supply this want.