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could secure money enough to support himself while he was writing a really good book, and that one course of Bayard Taylor's lectures brought him profit enough to pay his way ten times around the world.
Greeley always loved to talk, and the lecture-field was a tempting one to him. In later years it used to be said in the office that the only way he could be induced to take a vacation was to start him off on a lecturing tour.
His first attempt on the platform was made in New York in February, 1842,1 and he wrote soon after, asking his friend Griswold to get him an engagement in Philadelphia, saying, “I know there are hardly a hundred persons in Philadelphia who know of me,” but suggesting that he could “fill a hole” in a program.
Greeley was never an orator, but people have a curiosity to see a public man of wide reputation, and after the Tribune became established he “drew” on this account, although his subjects were abstract rather than, in the common acceptance, entertaining.
Eleven such lectures, written between 1842 and 1848, each of them in less than a day, were published in 1850 under the title Hints toward Reform, and the subjects included
1 Letters of R. W. Griswold, p. 104.
New York, D. Appleton and Company, March 1903.
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