For though various sadly comical experiences of the results of my own efforts have led me to entertain a very moderate estimate of the purely intellectual value of lectures; though I venture to doubt if more than one in ten of an average audience carries away an accurate notion of what the speaker has been driving at; yet is that not equally true of the oratory of the hustings, of the House of Commons, and even of the pulpit?

The churches, the public halls, the street corners, moving trains, and rushing steamers, were such hustings as the Athenian improvised in the porticoes, when her orators inflamed the heart of Greece to repel the barbarians, to die with Leonidas in the gorges of the Thermopylae.

These, with a confirmation of the privileges of their court of hustings, wardmotes, and common halls, and their liberty of hunting in Middlesex and Surrey, are the chief articles of this charter

The one hope in both cases was to foster a 'national and manly tone' of political morals; to lead all parties alike to look to their own Parliament, and neither to the London press nor the American hustings, for the solution of all problems of Provincial government.

"It was felt that the battle of free-trade must be fought first by the conversion of individuals, then at the hustings, and lastly in the House of Commons.

To be the rival of Mr. Millbank on the hustings of Dartford!

Mr. Hobhouse is a greater man at the hustings, Lord Rolle at Plymouth Dock; but Mr. Bentham would carry it hollow, on the score of popularity, at Paris or Pegu.

At the hustings, or as an election-candidate, Mr. Tooke did better.

Neither do we wonder when we hear that he fought a six-foot carter in the street and beat him, or that, when nearly eighty years of age, he jumped off his horse and put up his hands to a farm-laborer who had insulted him, or that, when he ran as candidate for Parliament, for Nottingham, and was hissed and groaned in that radical city, he stepped down from the hustings and proposed a set-to with any voter in the crowd.

Who ever heard a Southern gentleman speak of them, save in Congress or on the hustings, otherwise than with aversion and contempt?[C]

There can be no doubt that Mrs. Beecher Stowe has had no small share in the abolition excitement which has been raging in the States, and which has made Kansas the battle-field of civil war; but the effect of this agitation has gone farther: owing to husting speeches and other occurrences, the negro's mind has been filled with visionary hopes of liberty; insurrections have been planned, and, worse still, insurrections have been imagined.

Curious customs of great antiquity such as the Saxon Court Leet and the Court of Hustings, a copy of a London civic institution dating from the first charter of the town, have continued to present times.

Half legendary are some of the tales of the hustings at Andover in those days of "free and open" voting, and the old "George" seems to have been a centre of the excitement on election days, where most of the guineas changed hands and where most free drinks were handed to the incorruptibles.

A temporary tribunal for the presiding officer, with accommodation for counsel, witnesses, and jury, was erected in the open air; and the scene may perhaps best be pictured by imagining the principal square in some large town fitted up with open hustings on a large scale for an old-fashioned county election, by no means omitting the intense popular excitement and mob violence appropriate to such occasions.

I became convinced, however, that the "third party" has strong reasons in its favor, and that in various important respects the abolitionists of the United States are differently circumstanced in regard to elections from those of my own country; and it must not be forgotten that many of the men who pledged themselves on the hustings in England were not faithful at the time of trial.

Behold at length the time arrived!Guildhall crowded to excessthe hustings throngedthe aldermen retirethey returntheir choice is announced to the peopleit has fallen upon John Ebenezer Scropps, Esq., Alderman and spectacle makera sudden shout is heard"Scropps for ever!"

We do not say that these and the rest of the propositions which make up the true theoretic basis of a conservative creed, are proper for the hustings, or expedient in an election address or a speech in parliament.

A "greasy rogue" before the hustings, seeing the baronet candidate take an orange from his pocket, put up for the fruit, with the cry "Give us that orange, Billy."

Nay, even to the guardians of social rectitudemembers of the legislaturethey might use the tu quoque argument: asking whether bribery of a customer's servant, is any worse than bribery of an elector? or whether the gaining of suffrages by claptrap hustings-speeches, containing insincere professions adapted to the taste of the constituency, is not as bad as getting an order for goods by delusive representations respecting their quality?

What Act of Parliament, debate at St. Stephen's, on the hustings or elsewhere, was it that brought this Shakespeare into being?

He was a great electioneerer, as befitted times when the claims of two rival dynasties virtually met upon the hustings, and he took a prominent part in the great Yorkshire contest of the year 1734.

In fact he said those very words concerning me on the hustings.

His manner, I remember thinking, was unlike any that I had ever witnessed in the pulpit, and appeared to me to resemble rather that of a very earnest speaker at the hustings than the usual pulpit style.

The whole scene on the hustings, as well as around them, seemed to me one seething mass of senseless but good-humoured hustling and confusion.

Suddenly in the midst of the uproar an ominous cracking was heard, and in the next minute the hustings swayed and came down with a crash, heaping together in a confused mass all the two or three hundreds of human beings who were on the huge platform.