Success Quote by George Combe

There is a sly, almost bureaucratic deadpan to Combe's phrasing that makes the line land harder than any open insult. "The same practice was continued every evening" reads like a report on a well-run institution, not a confession that the audience needed coping mechanisms to survive a lecture. The punch is in the euphemism: "simple means of relieving the tedium of a long discourse". Combe doesn't argue that the discourse was tedious; he treats tedium as an environmental fact, like bad lighting, and then notes - with chilly satisfaction - that a workaround was found.

As an educator writing in an era when public lectures were a major technology of mass instruction (and self-improvement was a civic religion), Combe is also revealing the lecture hall's hidden economy. Attention isn't freely given; it has to be managed, bribed, or engineered. The line's "success" metric isn't intellectual transformation but compliance: people stayed, felt "gratification", and the course kept running. That's the subtextual win - not enlightenment, but retention.

Context matters: Combe, associated with the 19th-century drive to systematize minds and morals, often framed human behavior as something predictable and optimizable. Here, the audience becomes another system to tune. The comedy is that the "discovered" solution is described as if it were scientific progress, when it's really an admission that pedagogy can slide into endurance testing. The quote captures a modern problem before it had modern vocabulary: engagement as logistics, boredom as data.