[page 26, continued:]

MR. HUDSON, on Tuesday evening last, read to an audience of some two hundred persons, at the Society Library, his lecture on Lear (or a portion of it) recently delivered at Boston, and much complimented in one or two of the Boston papers. We listened to the lecturer with profound attention, and (for the first time) heard him throughout. He did not favorably impress us. His good points are a happy talent for fanciful, that is to say for unexpected (too often far-fetched) illustration, and a certain cloudy acuteness in respect [page 27:] to motives of human action. His bad points are legion — want of concentration — want of consecutiveness — want of definite purpose — want of common school education — utter incapacity to comprehend a drama out of its range of mere character — an absurd passion for the lower species, that is to say, for the too obvious species of antithesis — a more absurd rage for metaphor and direct simile, without the least ability to keep them within bounds, or to render them consistent either per se, or with the matter into which they are introduced — to crown all, a pitiable affectation of humility altogether unbecoming a man, an elocution that would disgrace a pig, and an odd species of gesticulation of which a baboon would have excellent reason to be ashamed.