POSTSCRIPT.
SATURDAY NIGHT.
The proceedings began with a public breakfast, at the Albion Hotel; at which the Secretary to the institution read a flourishing report of its state.
At six o'clock, there was a banquet in the Free Trade Hall, followed by speeches; the orators being Lord Idorpeth, Dr. Whately, Mr. Dawson, Lord Ebrington, Mr. William Chambers, Mr. Mark Philips, and Mr. Wil- liam Brown. The two most prominent speeches were those delivered by the Chairman and the Archbishop. They were both excellent in tissue, and deserved the cordial reception they met with; but Lord Morpeth's presents few salient points for notice.
Dr. Whately declared, as the result of thirty-eight years' experience in promoting education, that the wide diffusion of knowledge will always tend more or less in the end to the diffusion of every other good. The dangers attending it are not to be put in comparison with the dangers of Ignorance: men are liable to be misled, but it is in darkness more than in light. The educated agitator may cajole the multitude, and incite them to dangerous conduct. The remedy is to teach the multitude to be judges of truth and falsehood. The agitator, the demagogue, and such mischiev- ous men, are a kind of quacks. It is well known that if a man has a cer- tain knowledge of chemistry and medicine, he may play on the credulity of the ignorant by persuading them to swallow his mischievous drugs; but if all understood medicine, there would be none to take his quack me- dicines. The danger is not in the positive knowledge given, but in the neglect of some other knowledge, or in the cultivation of some one faculty to the exclusion of others; for there should be a well-regulated and a ju- diciously-balanced cultivation of the faculties. After earnestly claiming, as an interchange of sympathy, the countenance of his hearers for the Vational system of education in Ireland, the Archbishop touched with approval upon the Main features of the Atheneum, its lectures, and its library— Lectures alone give but an imperfect and crude sort of notions to those who have not access to books. Books, again, are a sort of spacious sea, on which an un - practised student, without any tutor to direct him, might be apt to be lost. Bu lectures excite the desire to read, and point directly to the way in which the best course of reading can be taken. The books supply the want which the lectures have created.
The speechmaking over, there was a;ball in the Theatre, and dancing was kept up to a late hour.
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