irror of patrician vice hanging at the
girdle of fashionable profligacy as it was in the days of Congreve and
Wycherley. It is now the property of the educated people. It has
to satisfy them or pine in neglect And the better their demands the
better will be the supply with which the drama will respond.
This being not only so, but seen to be so, the stage is no longer
proscribed. It is no longer under a ban. Its members are no longer
pariahs in society. They live and bear their social part like
others--as decorously observant of all that makes the sweet sanctities
of life--as gracefully cognizant of its amenities--as readily
recognized and welcomed as the members of any other profession. Am
I not here your grateful guest, opening the session of this
philosophical and historic institution? I who am simply an actor,
an interpreter, with such gifts as I have, and such thought as I
can bestow, of stage plays. And am I not received here with perfect
cordiality on an equality, not hungrily bowing and smirking for
patronage, but interchanging ideas which I am glad to express, and
which you listen to as thoughtfully and as kindly as you would to
those of any other student, any other man who had won his way
into such prominence as to come under the ken of a distinguished
institution such as that which I have the honor to address? I do not
mince the matter as to my personal position here, because I feel it
is a representative one, and marks an epoch in the estimation in
which the art I love is held by the British world. You have had many
distinguished men here, and their themes have often been noble, but
with which of those themes has not my art immemorial and perpetual
associations? Is it not for ever identified with the noblest instincts
and occupations of the human mind? If I think of poetry, must I not
remember how to the measure of its lofty music the theatre has in
almost all ages set the grandest of dramatic conceptions? If I think
of literature, must I not recall that of all the amusements by which
men in various states of society have solaced their leisure and
refreshed their energies, the acting of plays is the one that has
never yet, even for a day, been divorced from literary taste and
skill? If I meditate on patriotism, can I but reflect how grandly the
boards have been trod by personifications of heroic love of country?
There is no subject of human thought that by common consent is deemed
ennobling that has not ere n