Mr. Mayor, I beg to assure you, and those gentlemen who are associated with you in this kind gift, that I accept with heartfelt delight and cordial gratitude such beautiful specimens of the work of your famous town. The kind expressions with which you have accompanied this presentation, and the response which they have received from the assembly, will never be obliterated from my memory. You have heard my voice so much tonight that out of pure forbearance I will not say more than to assure you that these things shall be heirlooms in my family. They will be prized by those who love me as testifying not only to the work of Sheffield hands, but to the warmth and generosity of Sheffield hearts.
Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, that to the earnestness of my aim and desire to do right by my readers, and to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people, I shall ever be faithful – to my death – in the principles which have won your approval. Allow me to take a reluctant leave, wishing you, one and all, many many merry Christmases, and many, many happy new years.
During the course of the evening, after the usual proceedings, one of the toasts proposed was ‘The health of the Royal Academicians’, which was acknowledged by their president, Sir Martin Archer Shee. ‘A Similar compliment to the Stewards was acknowledged by Mr. Dickens, whose presence we may add, gave no slight additional éclat to the affair, and whose name was received as a donor to the fund with such a burst of enthusiasm, again and again renewed, as we have never heard equalled in a meeting of this sort.’
The institution, he said, although at this time but a very young plant almost in the bud, had struck a deep root and taken a strong hold in the bosoms of tens of thousands of our fellow creatures. Little more than six months, according to the report just read, had passed since the hospital was open for the reception of patients, and within that short time no fewer than sixty or seventy patients had occupied its beds, while the number of out-patients – many whom they had been delighted to learn had, by the skill and timely aid they had received, been enabled to resume their accustomed occupations – amounted to no fewer than 750.
If this charity had not existed, the doors of no sick house within London’s wide bounds would have been open to these poor persons. Before the hospital was founded they would have suffered, lingered, pined, and died in their poor homes, without a hand stretched out to help them in their slow decay. Remembering that the classes of suffering which the charity purposed to alleviate were of all others peculiarly the growth and produce of the country; that they were often the inheritance of the youngest, fairest, best amongst us, that they deprived fair England of those whom it could least afford to lose, struck down the objects of our dearest hopes when in their youthful prime, and when it was hardest to lose them – remembering these things who could doubt that such a charity must be munificently endowed? He now called upon them to drink ‘Prosperity’ to the institution, not as an unmeaning toast, but as a pledge that nothing on their parts should be wanting to aid and urge it onward in its prosperous course.
If I felt your warm and generous welcome less, I should be better able to thank you. If I could have listened, as you have listened, to the glowing language of your distinguished chairman, and if I could have heard, as you heard, the “thoughts that breathe and words that burn”, which he has uttered, it would have gone hard but I should have caught some portion of his enthusiasm, and kindled at his example. But every word which fell from his lips, and every demonstration of sympathy and approbation with which you received his eloquent expressions, renders me unable to respond to his kindness, and leaves me at last all heart and no lips. Yearning to respond as I would do to your cordial greeting – possessing, Heaven knows, the will, and desiring only to find the way.
The way to your good opinion, favour, and support, has been to me very pleasant – a path strewn with flowers and cheered with sunshine. I feel as if I stood amongst old friends, whom I had intimately known and highly valued. I feel as if the deaths of the fictitious creatures, in which you have been kind enough to express an interest, had endeared us to each other as real afflictions deepen friendships in actual life; I feel as if they had been real persons, whose fortunes we had pursued together in inseparable connexion, and that I had never known them apart from you.
It is a difficult thing for a man to speak of himself or of his works. But perhaps on this occasion I may, without impropriety, venture to say a word on the spirit in which mine were conceived. I felt an earnest and humble desire, and shall do till I die, to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness. I felt that the world was not utterly to be despised; that it was worthy of living in for many reasons. I was anxious to find, as the Professor has said, if I could, in evil things, that soul of goodness which the Creator has put in them. I was anxious to show that virtue may be found in the by-ways of the world, that it is not incompatible with poverty and even with rags, and to keep steadily through life the motto, expressed in the burning words of your Northern poet
The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.
And in following this track, where could I have better assurance that I was right, or where could I have stronger assurance to cheer me on than in your kindness on this, to me, memorable night?
I am anxious and glad to have an opportunity of saying a word in reference to one incident in which I am happy to know you were interested and still more happy to know, though it may sound paradoxical, that you were disappointed: I mean the death of the little heroine. When I first conceived the idea of conducting that simple story to its termination, I determined rigidly to adhere to it, and never to forsake the end I had in view. Not untried in the school of affliction, in the death of those we love, I thought what a good thing it would be if in my little work of pleasant amusement I could substitute a garland of fresh flowers for the sculptured horrors which disgrace the tomb. If I have put into my book anything which can fill the young mind with better thoughts of death, or soften the grief of older hearts; if I have written one word which can afford pleasure or consolation to old or young in time of trial, I shall consider it as something achieved – something which I shall be glad to look back upon in after life. Therefore I kept to my purpose, notwithstanding that towards the conclusion of the story, I daily received letters of remonstrance, especially from the ladies. God bless them for their tender mercies! The Professor was quite right when he said that I had not reached to an adequate delineation of their virtues; and I fear that I must go on blotting their characters in endeavouring to reach the ideal in my mind. These letters were, however, combined with others from the sterner sex, and some of them were not altogether free from personal invective. But notwithstanding, I kept to my purpose, and I am happy to know that many of those who at first condemned me are now foremost in their approbation.
If I have made a mistake in detaining you with this little incident, I do not regret having done so; for your kindness has given me such a confidence in you, that the fault is yours and not mine. I come once more to thank you, and here I am in a difficulty again. The distinction you have conferred upon me is one which I never hoped for, and of which I never dared to dream. That it is one which I shall never forget, and that while I live I shall be proud of its remembrance, you must well know. I believe I shall never hear the name of this capital of Scotland without a thrill of gratitude and pleasure. I shall love while I have life her people, her hills, and her houses, and even the very stones of her streets. And if, in the future works which may lie before me, you should discern – God grant you may – a brighter spirit and a clearer wit, I pray you to refer it back to this night, and point to that as a Scottish passage for evermore. I thank you again and again, with the energy of a thousand thanks in each one, and I drink to you with a heart as full as my glass, and far less easily emptied, I do assure you.
I have the honour to be entrusted with a toast, the very mention of which will recommend itself to you I know, as one possessing no ordinary claims to your sympathy and approbation, and the proposing of which is as congenial to my wishes and feelings as its acceptance must be to yours. It is the health of our Chairman, and coupled with his name I have to propose the ‘Literature of Scotland’: a literature which he has done much to render famous through the world, and of which he has been for many years – as I hope and believe he will be for many more – a most brilliant and distinguished ornament. Who can revert to the literature of the land of Scott and of Burns without having directly in his mind, as inseparable from the subject and foremost in the picture, that old man of might, with his lion heart and sceptred crutch, Christopher North? I am glad to remember the time when I believed him to be a real, actual, veritable old gentleman, that might be seen any day hobbling along the High Street with the most brilliant eye – but that is no fiction – and the greyest hair in all the world, who wrote not because he cared to write, not because he cared for the wonder and admiration of his fellow-men, but who wrote because he could not help it, because there was always springing up in his mind a clear and sparkling stream of poetry which must have vent, and like the glittering fountain in the fairy tale, draw what you might, was ever at the full, and never languished even by a single drop or bubble. I had so figured him in my mind, and when I saw the Professor two days ago, striding along the Parliament House, I was disposed to take it as a personal offence – I was vexed to see him look so hearty, I drooped to see twenty Christophers in one. I began to think that Scottish life was all ‘light’ and no ‘shadows’, and I began to doubt that beautiful book to which I have turned again and again, always to find new beauties and fresh sources of interest.
It had been the happy lot of Scotland that her great writers have loved to exhibit her in various forms, whether in scenes of solitary grandeur or her simple village ways. The mighty genius who lately departed from you was equally at home in the wild grandeur of Highland scenery or the burning sands of Syria, and in the low haunts of London life; while there is not a shepherd or peasant who has not his type immortalized in the verse of him whose hand was on the plough while his heart was with the muse. There is not a glen of a lonely haunt in the Highlands which has not been visited by Christopher North in his shooting jacket, with a heart as free and as wild as the winds that swept over him. His voice has been heard from the lonely heaths and the snow drifts of the mountains, in the highways of Edinburgh, and in the caves of the Covenanters. By his genius every foot of ground in Scotland has been pictured to dwellers afar off as a fairy land. It is difficult to follow the Professor through all the scenes which he has depicted with such exquisite beauty, from the varied stores of his rich and teeming fancy; so that the epitaph of Goldsmith may be applied to him, that there was no subject but he touched, and nothing which he touched that he did not adorn.
But the literature of Scotland comprises other names which are familiar to you: poets, historians, critics, all of the foremost rank. The learned Lord who I am proud to call my friend, to whom, by his fine taste and just appreciation of the beauties of an author, literature owes so much, and to the generosity of whose nature those who are opposed to him have borne high testimony; the author of Matthew Wold and Adam Blair, who has lately depicted with vivid colouring the last days of the mighty genius who departed on the banks of the river he loved so well; the gentleman who is present amongst us, and who under the signature of ‘Delta’ has given the world assurance of a poet, who has raised in us all admiration which we would fain be at liberty to increase still further by meeting him oftener; these, and other great names, are all included in the toast, which we drink to do honour, not to them, but to ourselves.
I am less fortunate than the two gentlemen who have preceded me in their toasts, for I have to mention a name known to all present, but which I cannot utter at this time without deep sorrow – a name in which Scotland had high and endearing pride, which England delighted to honour, and which was cherished in the breast of every reflecting man throughout the whole civilized world. From among the gifted spirits of our times a gentle, honest, generous and true one has passed away, as it were but yesterday. The life of one devoted to all that was true and beautiful, and elevating, in art and nature, hath come to an end. I will give you the memory of Wilkie. It is not as one whom many of us knew and loved; it is not as one whose simple nature his high fame and fortune never spoiled or changed; it is not as one who acted up to what he taught, and who made the domestic virtues and duties his daily practice, that I think of him tonight. I think of him as one – and you should do so too – who has left behind him unwonted fire, who has left an undying and imperishable name, who made the cottage hearth his grave theme, and who surrounded the lives, and cares, and daily toils, and occupations of the poor, with dignity and beauty: who indeed found ‘books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything’, and who has left behind in all his works the same breathing of health, as of the air wafted from the heather of his native land.
However desirous one may be on an occasion like the present to separate his memory from these mournful associations which gather around it, it is impossible, they are peculiarly inseparable from him: the painter’s study with the empty easel, the brush and palette which he was wont to use, now lie idly by, his unfinished pictures turn their faces to the wall, and that bereaved and affectionate mourner whom he loved in his days to honour, will look upon him no more. He is gone, and has left behind him, particularly to his countrymen and all who knew him, a name and fame as pure and unsullied as the bright sky which shines over the painter’s grave. He has filled our minds and memories with what is mournful, yet as soothing as the roll of the blue waters over his honoured head. Mindful of his only sister, I cannot help expressing the hope that the time will shortly come when she, like us, will feel a solemn pleasure in speaking of his goodness and greatness, and when she will have the grateful recollection that he died in the fulness of his powers, before age or sickness had dimmed his sight, or had bowed his head.
Gentlemen, to say that I thank you for the earnest manner in which you have drunk the toast just now so eloquently proposed to you; to say that I give you back your kind wishes and good feelings with more than compound interest, and that I feel how dumb and powerless the best acknowledgements would be beside such genial hospitality as yours–is nothing. To say that in this winter season, flowers have sprung up in every footstep’s length of the path which has brought me here, that no country ever smiled more pleasantly than yours has smiled on me, and that I have rarely looked upon a brighter summer prospect than that which now lies before me now – is nothing.
But it is something to be no stranger in a strange place; to feel, sitting at a board for the first time, the ease and affection of an old guest, to be at once on such intimate terms with the family as to have a homely, genuine interest in its every member; it is, I say, something to be in this novel and happy frame of mind. And as it is of your creation, and owes its being to you, I have no reluctance in urging it as a reason why, in addressing you, I should not so much consult the form and fashion of my speech, as I should employ the universal language of the heart which you, and such as you, best teach and best can understand. Gentlemen, in that universal language–common to you in America, and to us in England, as that younger mother tongue which, by means of, and through the happy union of our two great countries, shall be spoken ages hence, by land and sea, over the wide surface of the glove–I thank you.
I had occasion, gentlemen, to say the other night in Boston, as I have more than once had occasion to remark before, that it is not easy for an author to speak of his own books. If the task be a difficult one at any time, its difficult certainly is not diminished when a frequent occurrence to the same theme has left one nothing new to say. Still I feel that, in a company like this, and especially after what has been said by the President, that I ought not to pass over those labours of love which, if they have no other merit, have been the happy means of bringing us together.
It has been observed that you cannot judge of an author’s personal character from his writings. It may be that you cannot–I think it very likely, for many reasons, that you cannot–but, at least, a reader will rise from the perusal of a book with some defined and tangible idea of the writer’s moral creed and broad purposes, if he has any at all; and it is probably enough that he may like to have this idea confirmed from the author’s lips, or dissipated by his explanation. Gentlemen, my moral creed–which is a very wide and comprehensive one, and includes all sects and parties–is very easily summed up. I have faith, and I wish to diffuse faith in the existence–yes, of beautiful things, even in those conditions of society which are so degenerate, degraded, and forlorn that, at first sight, it would seem as though they could not be described but by a strange and terrible reversal of the words of Scripture – God said, Let there be light, and there was none. I take it that we are born and that we hold our sympathies, hopes, and energies in trust for the many, and not for the few. That we cannot hold in too strong a light of disgust and contempt, before the view of others, all meanness, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression, of every grade and kind. Above all, that nothing is high, because it is in a high place; and that nothing is low, because it is in a low one. [Loud applause.] This is a lesson taught us in the great book of nature. This is the lesson which may be read, alike in the bright track of the stars, and in the dusty course of the poorest thing that drags its tiny length upon the ground. This is the lesson every uppermost in the thoughts of that inspired man, who tells us that there are
Tongues in tress, books in the running brooks
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Gentlemen, keeping these objects steadily before me, I am at no loss to refer your favour and your generous hospitality back to the right source. While I know, on the one hand, that if, instead of being what it is, this were a land of tyranny and wrong, I should care very little for your smiles or frowns, so I am sure upon the other, that if, instead of being what I am, I were the greatest genius that every trod the earth, and had exerted myself for the oppression and degradation of mankind, you would despise and reject me. I hope you will, whenever, through such means, I give you the opportunity. Trust me that whenever you give me the like occasion, I will return the compliment with interest.
Gentlemen, as I have no secrets from you, in the spirit of confidence you have engendered between us, and as I have made a kind of compact with myself that I never will, while I remain in America, omit an opportunity of referring to a topic in which I and all others of my class on both sides of the water are equally interested–equally interested, there is no difference between us–I would beg leave to whisper in your ear two words, International Copyright. I use them in no sordid sense, believe me, and those that know me best, best know that. For myself, I would rather that my children coming after me, trudged in the mud, and knew by the general feeling of society that their father was beloved, and had been of some use, that I would have them ride in their carriages, and know by their banker’s books that he was rich. But I do not see, I confess, why one should be obliged to make the choice, or why fame, besides playing that delightful reveille for which she is so justly celebrated, should not blow out of her trumpet a few notes of a different kind from those with which she has hitherto contented herself.
It was well observed the other night by a beautiful speaker, whose words went to the heart of every man who heard him, that if there had existed any law in this respect, Scott might not have sunk beneath the mighty pressure on his brain, but might have lived to add new creatures of his fancy to the crowd which swarm about you in your summer walks and gather round your winter evening hearths.
As I listened to his words there came back fresh upon me, that touching scene in the great man’s life, when he lay upon his couch surrounded by his family and listened, for the last time, to the rippling of the river he had so well loved, over its stony bed. I pictured him to myself, faint, wan, dying, crushed both in his mind and body by his honourable struggle, and hovering round him the ghosts of his own imagination–Waverley, Ravenswood, Jeannie Deans, Rob Roy, Caleb Balderstone, Dominie Sampson–all the familiar throng – with cavaliers, and Puritans, and Highland chiefs innumerable overflowing the chamber, and fading away in the dim distance beyond. I pictured them, fresh from traversing the world, and hanging down their heads in shame and sorrow that, from all those lands into which they had carried gladness, instruction, and delight for millions, they had brought him now one friendly hand to help to raise him from that sad, sad bed. No, nor brought him from that land in which his own language was spoken, and in every house and hut of which his own books were read in his own tongue, one grateful dollar-piece to buy a garland for his grave. Oh! if every man who goes from here, as many do, to look upon that tomb in Dryburgh Abbey, would but remember this, and bring the recollection home!
Gentlemen I thank you again, and once again, and many times to that. You have given me a new reason for remembering this day, which is already one of the mark of my calendar, it being my birthday; and you have given those who are nearest and dearest to me a new reason for recollection it with pride and interest. Heaven knows that, although I should grow ever so grey, I shall need nothing to remind me of this epoch in my life. But I am glad to think that from this time you are inseparably connected with every recurrence of this day; and, that on its periodical return, I shall always, in imagination, have the unfading pleasure of entertaining you as my guests in return for the gratification you have afforded me tonight.
Mr. President and Gentlemen, I don’t know how to thank you – I really don’t know how. You might, perhaps, suppose that by the dint of custom and from the experience your kindness has heaped upon me since my arrival in this country, that the difficult would have been somewhat diminished or dwindled into nothing but I do assure you the fact is exactly the reverse. Unlike that rolling stone which gathers no moss, I have, in my progress to your city, collected around me such a heap of obligation and weight of acknowledgement, that in my power of expressing it I have grown more and more unwieldy every hour! I picked up such a quantity of fresh moss – so to speak – at a certain brilliant scene on Monday night, that I thought I never could, by any possibility, grow any bigger. But crowded upon that, there comes again tonight a new accumulation of such extent and magnitude, that I am fairly at a standstill and can roll no more!
Gentlemen, we know from all the authorities, that whenever a fairy stone, or ball, or reel of thread, stopped of its own accord–which I do not–some catastrophe was sure to be at hand. Its precedent, however, holds good in my case. For, remembering the short time I have before me in this land of mighty interest, and the poor opportunities I can have at best of acquiring a knowledge of, and making myself acquainted with it, I have felt it almost a duty to decline the honours which my generous friends elsewhere would heap upon me, and henceforth to pass through the country more quietly. Argus himself, though he had but one mouth for his hundred eyes, would have found the reception of a public entertainment once a week somewhat relaxing to his vigilance and activity. And as I would lose no scrap or jot from the rich mines of gratification and instruction which await me, I know, on every hand–and of which I have already derived no small instalment from your hospitals and common jails–I have resolved to take up my staff, and go upon my way rejoicing, and for the future to shake hands with Americans not at parties, but at home. And therefore, gentlemen, I say tonight, with a full heart and an honest purpose and grateful feelings, that I bear with me, and shall ever bear with me, a deeper sense of your kind, affectionate and noble greeting, than it is possible to convey in words; that no European sky without, and no cheerful home or well-warmed room within shall every shut out this land from my vision; that I shall often hear your words of welcome in my quiet room, oftenest when it is most quiet, and shall see your aces in the winter evening fire; that if I should live to grow old, the light of this hall and others like it will shine as brightly to my dull eyes fifty years hence as it does tonight and that when my course is run the sympathy you have shown to me shall be well remembered and paid back, so please God, in my undying love and honest endeavours for the good of my race.
Gentlemen, one other word with reference to this tiresome first person, and I close that theme. I came here in an open, honest, and confiding spirit, if ever man did, and because I heartily inclined toward you; had I felt otherwise I should have kept away. As I came here, and am here, without the least admixture of the hundredth portion of a grain of base alloy, without the faintest unworthy reference to self in any word I have ever addressed to you, or in any sentiment I have ever interchanged with you, I assert my right tonight, in regard to the past for the last time, my right in reason, truth, and justice, to appeal to you, as I have done on two former occasions, on a question of universal literary interest in both countries. And, gentlemen, I claim this justice: that I have made the appeal as one who has a most righteous claim to speak and to be heard; and that I have done so in a frank, and courteous, and good-humoured spirit of deference to those who frankly, courteously, and good humouredly differed from me in any or every respect. For myself, gentlemen, I have only to add that I will ever be as true to you as you have been to me. I recognise in your enthusiastic approval of the creations of my fancy, as in a glass, your enlightened care for the happiness of the many, your tender and gentle regard for the afflicted and helpless, your sympathy for the downcast, your plans for the correction and improvement of the bad, and the encouragement and solace of the good–the education and advancement of every member of society. My constant and increasing devotion to the end of my life to these ends, and to every other object to the extent of my humble capacity, having the common good in view, shall prove to you that in this you do not mistake me, and that the light you have shed around my path was not unworthily bestowed.
And now that I have said this much in reference to myself, let me have the gratification I have long expected of saying a few words in reference to somebody else. There is in this city a gentleman who, at the conclusion of one of my books–I well remember it was the Old Curiosity Shop – wrote to me in England a letter so generous, so affectionate, and so manly, that if I had written the book under every circumstance of disadvantage, discouragement, and difficult, instead of with everything to cheer and urge me on, I should have found in the receipt of that letter my best and happiest reward. I answered him, and he answered me, and so we kept shaking hands autobiographically, as if no ocean rolled between us, until I came here on Saturday night, longing and eager to see him. And here he sits! And I I need not tell you that it is the crowning circumstance to me of the night, that he is here in this capacity.
Why, gentlemen, I don’t go upstairs to bed two nights out of seven, as I have a credible witness very near at hand to testify,–I say, gentlemen, I do not go to bed two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm upstairs to bed with me; and when I don’t take him I take his next of kin – his own brother – Oliver Goldsmith. Washington Irving! Why, who but he was in my thoughts the other day as I approached your city in the steamboat from New Haven, when I was looking out for the Hog’s Back, the Frying Pan, and Hell Gate and all those horrible places of renown that were a terror to the Dutch navigators? Washington Irving! Why, when I visited Shakespeare’s birthplace not long ago, and went beneath the roof where he first saw light, whose name but his was the first that was pointed out with pride upon the wall?– Washington Irving! – Diedrich Knickerbocker, Geoffrey Crayon! Why, where can we go that they have not been before us? In the English farmhouse, in the crowded city, along the beautiful lanes, across the pleasant fields of England, and amidst her blessed, happy homes, his name above every name rises up with hallowed recollections of his virtues and talents, and like his memory will continue to be hallowed in those bright and innocent sanctuaries, until the last tick of the clock of Time!
If we go into the country are there no Bracebridge Halls in existence? If we visit the crowded city, has Little Britain never had a chronicler? Is there no Boar’s Head in Eastcheap? Why, gentlemen, when Mr. Crayon left England he left sitting in the small back parlour of a certain public house near that same Boar’s Head, a man of infinite wisdom, with a red nose and an oilskin hat, who was sitting there when I came away. Yes, gentlemen, it was the same man – not a man that was very like him, but the self-same man–his nose in an immortal redness, and his hat in an undying glaze. Why, Mr. Crayon was also on terms of intimacy, in a certain village near that same Bracebridge Hall, with a certain radical fellow, who used to go about very much out at elbow, with his hat full of old newspapers. Gentlemen, I knew the man. He’s there to this very hour, with the newspapers in his hat, very much to the dissatisfaction of Mr. Tibbets the elder. And he has not changed a hair; and when I came away he charged me to give his best respects to Washington Irving!
Gentlemen, leaving the town and ‘Rural Life in England,’ and forgetting for a moment, if anybody can, ‘The Pride of the Village,’ and ‘The Broken Heart’, let us cross the water again and ask who has associated himself most closely with the Italian Post-House, and the Bandits of the Pyrenees? When the traveller beyond the Alps is lighted to his little chamber, along dark, echoing, and spacious corridors, damp, gloomy, and cold; when he has sat down by the fire to watch the gradual change of his room from misery to comfort; when he has drawn his curtains, such as they are, moth-eaten and mouldy, and hearts the tempest beating with fury against his window; and when all the ghost stories that ever were told crowd around and I upon him – amid all his thick-coming fancies – who is it he thinks of at such a time? Why, Washington Irving!
Go further away still, to the Moorish fountain, sparkling full in the moonlight, with a few water carriers and village gossips lingering about it still, as in days of old, for its refreshing coolness, and the voices of others going to the village dying away in the distance, like bees. Who, at such an hour, takes his silent stand beside the traveller, and points with his magic wand to the walls of Alhambra? Who awakens in every cave the echoing music, the tread of many twinkling feet, the sound of cymbals, the rattling clang of armour, the tramp of mailed men, and bids legions which for centuries have slept a dreamless sleep within the earth, or watched unwinkingly for buried treasure – who bids them start up and pass in grim array before your eyes?
Or, leaving this, who embarked with Colombus in his gallant ship, traversed with him the dark and mighty ocean, leaped into the main, upon the land, and planted there the flag of Spain? Who but this same man now sitting by my side. And who, to come to your coast, is a more fit companion for the buccaneers, and monder-diggers, or who more fit to accompany Rip Van Winkle in his fearful journey to the mountains, where the uncouth crew did play at ninepins on that thundery afternoon? [Roars of laughter.] What pen but his could call such spirits from the vasty deep – make them come, too, at his call – peopling those Catskill mountains until they seem as much a part of them as any crag that ever frowned, or torrent that ever darted headlong from their heights.
But, gentlemen, this is a most dangerous theme for me, for I have been enchanted with these people from my boyhood, and my glass slipper is on me still. Lest I should be tempted now to talk too long about them I will, in conclusion, give you a sentiment, most appropriate in the presence of Bryant, Halleck, and – but I suppose I must not mention the ladies here – I will give you ‘The Literature of America – She well knows how to honour her own literature, and to do honour to that of other lands, when she chooses Washington Irving for her representative in the country of Cervantes!’
It does not require any extraordinary sagacity in a commercial assembly to appreciate the dire evils of war. The great interests of trade enfeebled by it, the enterprise of better times paralysed by it, all the peaceful arts sent down before it too palpably indicate its character and results, so that far less practical intelligence than that by which I am surrounded would be sufficient to appreciate the horrors of war. But there are seasons when the evils of peace though not so acutely felt are immeasurably greater, and when a powerful nation by admitting the right of any autocrat to do wrong sows by such complicity the seeds of its own ruin, and overshadows itself in time to come with that fatal influence which great and ambitious powers are sure to exercise over their weaker neighbours.
Therefore it is, ladies and gentlemen, that the tree has not its roots in English ground from which the yard wand will be made that will measure – the mine has not its place in English soil which will supply the material of a pair of scales to weigh – the influence, that may be at stake in the war in which we are now straining all our energies. That war is at any time, and in any shape, a most dreadful and deplorable calamity we need no proverb to tell us; but it is just because it is such a calamity, and because that calamity must not for ever be impending over us at the fancy of one man against all mankind, that we must not allow that man to darken from our view the figures of peace and justice between whom and us he now interposes.
Ladies and gentlemen, if ever there were a time when the true spirits of two countries were really fighting in the cause of human advancement and freedom – no matter what diplomatic notes or other nameless botherations, from number one to one hundred thousand and one, may have preceded their taking the field – if ever there were a time when noble hearts were deserving well of mankind by exposing themselves to the obedient bayonets of a rash and barbarian tyrant, it is now, when the faithful children of England and France are fighting so bravely in the Crimea. Those faithful children are the admiration and wonder of the world so gallantly are they discharging their duty; and therefore I propose to an assembly emphatically representing the interests and arts of peace, to drink the health of the Allied Armies of England and France, with all possible honours.
I think it may be assumed that most of us here present know something about travelling. I do not mean in distant regions or foreign countries, although I dare say some of us have had experience in that way, but at home, and within the limits of the United Kingdom. I dare say most of us have had experience of the extinct ‘fast coaches’, the ‘Wonders’, ‘Taglionis’, and ‘Tallyhos’, of other days. I dare say most of us remember certain modest post-chaises, dragging us down interminable roads through slush and mud, to little country towns with no visible populations except half a dozen men in smock frocks smoking pipes under the lee of the Town Hall; half a dozen women with umbrellas and pattens, and a washed-out dog or so shivering under the gables to complete the desolate picture. We can all discourse, I dare say, if so minded, upon our recollections of the ‘Talbot’, the ‘King’s Head’, or the ‘Lion’ of those days. We have all been to that room on the ground floor on one side of the old inn yard, not quite free from a certain fragrant smell of tobacco, where the cruets on the sideboard were usually absorbed by the skirts of the box coats that hung from the wall, where driving-seats were laid out at every turn like so many human mantraps, where county members framed and glazed were eternally presenting that petition which somehow or other made their glory in the county, though nothing else had ever come of it. Where the Book of Roads, the first and last thing always required, was always missing, and generally wanted the first and last dozen leaves, and where one man was always arriving at some unusual hour in the night, and requiring his breakfast at a similarly singular period of the day. I have no doubt we could all be very eloquent on the comforts of our favourite hotel, wherever it was, – its beds, its stables, its vast amount of posting, its excellent cheese, its head waiter, its capital dishes, its pigeon-pies, or its 1820 port. Or possibly we could recall our chaste and innocent admiration of its landlady, or our fraternal regard for its handsome chambermaid. A celebrated dramatic critic once writing of a famous actress, renowned for her virtue and beauty, gave her the character of being ‘an eminently gatherable-to-one’s-arms, sort of person’. Perhaps someone amongst us has borne a somewhat similar mental tribute to the charms of the ladies associated with the administration of our favourite hotel.
With the travelling characteristics of later times we are all, no doubt, equally familiar. We know all about that station of which we have a clear idea although we were never there; we know that if we arrive after dark we are certain to find it half a mile from the town, where the old road is sure to have been abolished, and the new road is going to be made, where the old neighbourhood has been tumbled down, and the new one is not half built up. We know all about that porter on the platform who with the best intentions in the world cannot do anything particularly efficacious with the luggage by looking at it with that bell in his hand. We know all about that particularly short omnibus, in which one is to be doubled up to the imminent danger of the crown of one’s hat; and about that fly, whose leading peculiarity is never to be there when it is wanted. We know, too, how instantaneously the lights of the station disappear the moment the train slips away, and about that grope to the new Railway Hotel, which will be an excellent house when the customers come, but which at present has nothing to offer but a liberal allowance of damp mortar and new lime.
I record these little incidents of home travel mainly with the object of increasing your interest in the purpose of this assemblage. Every traveller has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering. If he has no home, he learns the same lesson unselfishly by turning to the homes of other men. He may have his experiences of cheerful and exciting pleasures abroad; but home is the best, after all, and its pleasures are the most heartily and enduringly prized. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, everyone must be prepared to learn that commercial travellers as a body know how to prize those domestic relations from which their pursuits so frequently sever them; for no one could possibly invent a more delightful or more convincing testimony to the fact than they themselves afford in founding and maintaining a school for the children of deceased or unfortunate members of their own body, – those children who now appeal to you in mute but eloquent terms from the gallery.
It is to support that school, founded with such high and friendly objects, so very honourable to your calling, and so useful in its solid and practical results, that we are here tonight. It is to roof that building which is to shelter the children of your deceased friends with one crowning ornament, the best that any building can have, namely a receipt stamp for the full amount of the cost. It is for this that your active sympathy is appealed to, for the completion of your own good work. You know how to put your hands to the plough in earnest as well as any men in existence, for this little book informs me that you raised last year no less a sum than eight hundred pounds; and while fully half that sum consisted of new donations to the Building Fund, I find that the regular revenue of the charity has only suffered to the extent of thirty pounds. After this I most earnestly and sincerely say that were we all authors together I might boast, if in my profession were exhibited the same unity and steadfastness I find in yours.
I will not urge on you the casualties of a life of travel, or the vicissitudes of business, or the claims fostered by that bond of brotherhood which ought always to exist amongst men who are united in a common pursuit. You have already recognized those claims so nobly, that I will not presume to lay them before you in any further detail. Suffice it to say that I do not think it is in your nature to do things by halves. I do not think you could so if you tried, and I have a moral certainty that you never will try. To those gentlemen present who are not members of the travellers’ body, I will say in the words of the French proverb, ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves’. The Commercial Travellers having helped themselves so gallantly, it is clear that the visitors who come as a sort of celestial representatives ought to bring that aid in their pockets which the precept teaches us to expect from them. With these few remarks, which not even your good nature will induce me to prolong, I beg to give you as a toast, ‘Success to the Commercial Travellers’ School’.
Ladies and Gentlemen, You have made me tonight the representative of so many travellers rich in all kinds of enthusiasm, in addition to my own seven poor ones, and that necessity has involved the necessity of your hearing my voice so often, that I shall confine myself to simply thanking you most sincerely for the very kind manner in which you have received my health.
If the President of this Institution had been here, I should possibly have made one of the best speeches you ever heard, but as he is not here, I shall turn to the next toast on my list, the Health of your worth Treasurer, Mr. George Moore, – a name which is a synonym for integrity, enterprise, public spirit, and benevolence. He is one of the most zealous officers I ever saw in my life; he appears to me to have been doing nothing during the last week but rushing into and out of railway-carriages, and making eloquent speeches at all sorts of public dinners in favour of this charity. Last evening he was in Manchester, and this evening he comes here, sacrificing his time and convenience, and exhausting in the meantime the contents of two vast leaden inkstands, and no end of pens, with the energy of fifty bankers’ clerks rolled into one. But I clearly foresee that the Treasurer will have so much to do tonight, such gratifying sums to acknowledge, and such large lines of figures to write in his books, that I feel the greatest consideration I can show him is to propose his health without further observation, leaving him to address you in his own behalf. I propose to you, therefore, the health of Mr. George Moore, the Treasurer of this charity, and I need hardly add that it is one which is to be drunk with all the honours.
So many travellers have been going up Mont Blanc lately, both in fact and in fiction, that I have heard recently of a proposal for the establishment of a company to employ Sir Joseph Paxton to take it down. Only one of those travellers, however, has been enabled to bring Mont Blanc to Piccadilly, and by his own ability and good humour so to thaw its eternal ice and snow, as that the most timid lady may ascend it twice a day ‘during the holidays’, without the smallest danger or fatigue. Mr. Albert Smith, who is present amongst us tonight, is undoubtedly ‘a Traveller’. I do not know whether he takes many orders, but this I can testify, on behalf of the children of his friends, that he gives them in the most liberal manner.
We have also amongst us my friend Mr. Peter Cunningham, who is also a traveller, not only in right of his able edition of Goldsmith’s Traveller, but in right of his admirable Handbook, which proves him to be a traveller in the right spirit through all the labyrinths of London. We have also amongst us my friend Horace Mayhew, very well known also for his books, but especially for his genuine admiration of the company at that end of the room, and who, whenever the fair sex is mentioned, will be found to have the liveliest personal interest in the conversation.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am about to propose to you the health of these three distinguished visitors. They are all admirable speakers, but Mr. Albert Smith has confessed to me, that on fairly balancing his own merits as a speaker and a singer, he rather thinks he excels in the latter art. I have, therefore, yielded to his estimate of himself, and I have now the pleasure of informing you that he will lead off the speeches of the other two gentlemen with a song. Mr. Albert Smith has just said to me in an earnest tone of voice, ‘What song would you recommend?’ and I replied, ‘Galignani’s Messenger’. Ladies and gentlemen, I therefore beg to propose the health of Messrs. Albert Smith, Peter Cunningham, and Horace Mayhew, and call on the first-named gentleman for a song.
In that hotel I had seen many members of the present company, next morning, brushing their coats in the hall, and I then considered whether anything could be done with the word Travellers; and I thought whether any fanciful analogy could be drawn between those travellers who diffuse the luxuries and necessities of existence, and those who carry into desert places the waters of life, such as Dr. Livingstone, or Captain McClintock and his bold companions, who have graved the record of English modesty, gallantry and perseverance in the everlasting ice surrounding the North Pole. This put into my mind the fact that the best and greatest of these travellers have usually been amongst the gentle and mildest of men. I then asked myself whether I could make any fanciful parallel between my friend Mr. Layard, who brought to light the hidden memorials of a long extinct people, and my friend Mr. George Moore, who sits beside me, who has brought to light the hidden capabilities of a great trade.
Not deriving any comfort from these ingenious speculations, I resolved, like the heroes in the fairy tales, to go out to seek my fortune; and I resorted to a friendly giant – a commercial giant – and we sallied out together only yesterday. We travelled on and on, very like the people in the fairy tales, until we came to a great castle of a bright red colour, looking perfectly glorious in the cold sunlight of a winter afternoon. We were received, not by one of those conventional monsters with a great eye in his forehead as large as six, but by a man with an extremely humorous expression of countenance and two bright eyes, under whose guidance we inspected the livestock and eatables of the establishment, which suggested to us nothing but an abundance of milk and pork.
We then entered the castle, and found it within, a noble structure, with a cheerful lofty hall, large airy corridors, dormitories, and bathrooms, and an admirable banqueting-hall – not at all a mere matter of form, as I found on perusing the dietary table hanging on the wall; for I perceived that the most agreeable weekly exercises were practised, varying from roast beef and plum pudding to boiled mutton and hashes, with cold meat as an exceptional mortification, until the weekly circle was completed, and the roast beef of old England with its pleasing concomitant of plum pudding – by the by, suggestive of the season – made the pleasing appearance on the table before the happy and cheerful faces of the recipients of your bounty.
My attention was called to the circumstance that one hundred young male giants, and fifty young female giants, with a partakers of this magnificent diurnal hospitality, and that they were at the same time receiving an excellent education in this spacious edifice. I looked over some of the examination papers, and I found them remarkable for a prevailing good sense and adaptation to the solid business and solid virtues of life, which I had not seen – no verily - in some colleges and ancient foundations. I looked at these young people – the male creatures – and I saw that they were healthy, cheerful, easy, and rational, under system of moral restraint far better than all the physical force that ever crushed a timid nature and never bent a stubborn one. I found other of these young people walking under their own control in the lanes outside the establishment, and coming home in the frosty air with cheery faces that were worthy of the season and of the weather. I spoke to many of them, and I found that they answered truly and fearlessly. I observed that they had an excellent way of looking those in authority full in the face. I did not see the sisterhood, and was very glad not to see them, because they were out for a long walk and had not yet come home. Gentlemen, I am told that these young people of both sexes are instructed, lodged, clothed, and boarded until they are fifteen years of age, when they are sent into the world, to the region of gold and silver which is the dream of aspiring youth. Some of the children were preparing themselves for this great world, which many of them will no doubt hereafter distinguish themselves. by studying a number of cardboard locomotive engines and trains, admirably made, and closely resembling those which by day and night pass before the windows of their school at Pinner. Finally, I made two discoveries of considerable importance to me; firstly that this was indeed, a most rare magical castle, by reason that it costs some £20,000, and belongs to a public body, and is paid for; secondly, and lastly, I found that I had gone out to seek my fortune not in vain, for in this castle I discovered my speech.
Gentlemen, this castle is your own, and I assure you that its solid timbers, bricks and stones are not more solid than the effects which I have fancifully set before you. This castle is the Commercial Travellers’ Schools; and, in the endowing and maintaining of such an institution, the Commercial Travellers must raise themselves both in their own esteem and in the public regard. In this place any individual here can establish an individual right and title by the humble contribution of one guinea, and it could be handsomely maintained if every commercial traveller in the world would give it one half crown on a given day in every year. Gentlemen, I wish I could say of my order, or of others of greater pretensions, that its members were united in following such an example. I can say that there is no other order of men in this kingdom who, in their selection of men in whom to propose educational trust, do greater honour to themselves or to the cause of education than the board of management of this institution. I hope then, sincerely, that the time is not far distant when the Commercial Traveller who does not belong to this institution will be a rare and isolated case. I do hope this with some confidence, because I cannot believe that it is possible that many Commercial Travellers can look upon their own dear children and not feel they would be better and lighter hearted for being sharers in this institution.
Gentlemen, we should remember tonight that we are all Travellers, and every round we take converges nearer and nearer to our home; that all our little journeyings bring us together to one certain end; and that the good that we do, and the virtues that we show, and particularly the children that we rear, survive us through the long and unknown perspective of time. When those children who now contemplate our proceedings pass around as presently, it can scarcely be but that some of this company will recognize in some little face the likeness of some friend or companion. An yone of us may read the affecting words of tenderness which were spoken by Him, who was once a child, and who loved little children. Let those words, not mine, speak eloquently for those Schools.
And now I will not detain you longer; I feel that I have put the case of this invaluable institution on its own merits, and having done so feel cold upon to propose the toast of the evening, namely ‘Prosperity to the Commercial Travellers’ Schools’. In half a century to come, the boys of today will remember what has occurred this evening and, at a meeting like the present, evince by their conduct how they appreciate the good performed by those who had gone before them.
They were sometimes told, he said, as if it were a new discovery, that war was the greatest of all evils. Now, he thought he preferred no high claim on the intelligence of this company when he said they all knew it to be so. Common humanity taught them to regard war as an unparalleled calamity. So strongly rooted was this feeling in the English mind, that it might truly be said that the popular voice was almost always for peace, and always attached enormous responsibility to any men in power who, for selfish ends, should be the first to ‘cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war’. But the next greatest sin to such an act was that of any men who accepted the responsibility of government and left the people ill prepared to resist aggressive war. It was because they who sat there were devoted to the arts and ways of peace, and because they exhibited all the signs of outward prosperity, that he congratulated them upon the manly and national spirit which was then stirring amongst them as well as amongst our professed defenders by sea and land.
We Englishmen uttered no defiance, no braggart boast, against any nation on the face of the earth, but wished quietly to keep our own; and, with the blessing of heaven, which helped those who helped themselves, they would most assuredly do it. The plain meaning of the Rifle movement was but the revival of the old brave spirit of our forefathers, and a proof that all who had a stake in the country – and who that had life in it had not? – were ready if occasion required to fight and die in its defence. On that account, he would, with their permission, slightly alter the toast about the be proposed, and give ‘The Army and Navy, and the Volunteers’.