The Lord Chief Justice of England inaugurated the new lecture-
room at the Manchester Atheneum yesterday week in an eloquent speech of that verbose and showy kind more common in a past gene- ration, a speech with a good deal of reference in it to Athens and Florence, and Cicero, and fountains of youth and elixirs of life, and much vague praise of literatuv, all rather in the ornate style. It was what De Quincey once cfiled a " jewelly male of words." Lord Salisbury, who spoke after him, mage a good point by insisting on the little that can be expected from institutions of the Atheneum kind, and the great superiority of the secondary schools and colleges for the real education of the people, and by suggesting that in an age of popular science it was too common to found the most anarchic speculations on a very shallow basis of fact, and still to make them plausible to the half-educated. Lord Houghton, on -the contrary, put in a plea for vague, general culture, as exceed- ingly useful in its way, and especially as counteracting the effect of narrow study of special subjects. He thought the old distrust of it had greatly declined, and that in recent times, the clerk in a commercial house who was known to read or even write poetry would no longer be thought, on that account, necessarily unfit to rise to a high place in the firm. Both the politician and the poet certainly touched more solid ground in their speeches than the great and eloquent Judge.
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