Lectures and Speeches Author:Wendell Phillips Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE LOST ARTS. A lecture delivered at Steinway Hall in New York. I am to talk to you to-night about "The Lost Arts"—a lecture which has grown under my ha... more »nd year after year, and which belongs to that first phase of the lyceum system before it undertook to meddle with political duties or dangerous and angry questions of ethics; when it was merely an academic institution, trying to win busy men back to books, teaching a little science, or repeating some tale of foreign travel, or painting some great representative character, the symbol of his age. I think I can claim a purpose beyond a moment's amusement in this glance at early civilization. I perhaps might venture to claim that it was a medicine for what is the most objectionable feature of our national character, and that is self-conceit—an undue appreciation of ourselves, an exaggerated estimate of our achievements, of our inventions, of our contributions to popular comfort and of our place, in fact, in the great procession of the ages. We seem to imagine that whether knowledge will die with us or not, it certainly began with us. We have a pitying estimate, a tender pity for the narrowness, ignorance and darkness of the bygone ages. We seem to ourselves not only to monopolize, but to have begun the era of light. In other words, we are all running over with a fourth day of July spirit of self-content. I am often reminded of the German whom the English poet Coleridge met at Frankfort. He always took off his hat with profound respect when he ventured to speak of himself. It seems to me the American people might be painted in the chronic attitude of taking off its hat to itself, and therefore it can be no waste of time with an audience in such a mood to take their eyes for a moment from the present civilization and guide them...« less