t deserve welcome. But we do greet them as men
who have used their undoubted genius to increase the happiness of
their kind [applause]; men whose success has extended throughout the
nations and has added bright hours to the life of every man and woman
it has touched. [Applause.] That success has depended on no unworthy
means. Respecting themselves and their art, they have always respected
their audiences. They have so married wit and humor, and a most
delicate fancy, and the best light music of the time, to the public
temper, that we have seen here in New York, for example, their piece
so popular that we hadn't theatres enough in town to hold the people
who simultaneously and unanimously wanted to hear it. I propose first
the health of a gentleman who, not merely in the piece that has so
long been the rage of the town, but in a brilliant series of previous
successes, has always given us wit without dirt [applause]--a drama in
which the hero is not a rake, and the heroine is not perpetually
posing and poising between innocence and adultery."]

MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--As my friend Sullivan and I were
driving to this Club this evening, both of us being very nervous and
very sensitive, and both of us men who are highly conscious of our
oratorical defects and deficiencies, and having before us vividly the
ordeal awaiting us, we cast about for a comparison of our then
condition. We likened ourselves to two authors driving down to a theatre
at which a play of theirs was to be played for the first time. The
thought was somewhat harassing, but we dismissed it, because we
remembered that there was always an even chance of success [laughter],
whereas in the performance in which we were about to take part there was
no prospect of aught but humiliating failure.

We were rather in the position of prisoners surrendering to their bail,
and we beg of you to extend to us your most merciful consideration. But
it is expected of me, perhaps, that in replying to this toast with which
your chairman has so kindly coupled my name, I shall do so in a tone of
the lightest possible comedy. [Laughter.] I had almost said that I am
sorry to say that I cannot do so; but in truth I am not sorry. A man who
has been welcomed as we have been here by the leaders in literature and
art in this city, a man who could look upon that welcome as a string on
which to hang a series of small jokes would show that he was respondin