[
97]
Human Life, The Emancipation of Labor, and The Formation of Character.
In a lecture on Poets and Poetry, printed in his autobiography, he commented freely on almost the entire list of English poets, pronouncing The Faery
Queen “a bore, unreal, insupportable,” and confessing his hatred of the Toryism of
Shakespeare; and in another lecture, on Literature as a Vocation, he styled the great dramatist “the highest type of literary hack,” finding in his writings a combination of “starry flights and paltry jokes, celestial penetration and contemptible puns,” and expressing his unqualified admiration for
Mrs. Hemans, in whose Adopted
Child he had found “hours of pure and tranquil pleasure.”
Most of the audiences which listened to these discourses were lyceums, or young men's associations in country villages.
The great place for lectures in New York city was the Tabernacle, which seated 3,000 persons.
Greeley's audiences there numbered on an average 1,200 in the early fifties.
In a course of lectures delivered in Chicago in 1853, when its population was about 30,000, Greeley stood second as a “drawing card,” being only preceded by Bayard Taylor in a list which included John G. Saxe, R. W. Emerson, Theodore
