t, it is not less certain that no body
of men are more than artists responsive to their stimulating force.
How closely science, which is knowledge, is interwoven on many sides
with art, it is needless here to say. In the name of letters I have to
call upon one of the most versatile of their votaries, a man whose
nimble intellect plays with luminous ease round many and various
subjects; delicate as a poet, acute and picturesque as a critic, a
sparkling journalist, no one has pursued with more earnest and more
fruitful zeal the graver study of the birth and evolution of natural
myths than Mr. Andrew Lang, to whom I turn for response."]

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS, MR. PRESIDENT, MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--He
to whom it falls or rather on whom falls the task of replying for
English literature may well feel ground to dust by the ponderous honor.
Who can be the representative of such a Parnassian constituency of
divine poets, philosophers, romancers, historians, from Beowulf to the
last new novel? The consciousness is crushing. The momentary
representative feels himself to be like Mr. Chevy Slyme "the most
littery fellow in the world," who is over-borne like the bride of the
Lord of Burleigh--

"By the burden of an honor
Unto which she was not born."

Naturally he flies to thoughts which whisper of humility. He finds them
easily. In the first place literature is but a very insignificant flake
on the foam of the wave of the world. As Mr. Pepys reminds us, most
people please themselves "with easy delights of the world, eating,
drinking, dancing, hunting, fencing," and not with book learning. Easy
he calls them! I wish they were:--

"I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good."

Still less can I dance or hunt. Yet to the general public these things
come easier than reading; and their good-humored contempt keeps us poor
"littery gents" in our proper place and frame of mind. I have lately
read somewhere about a man of letters who conceived himself to be the
idol of the great and good-natured American people. They sent him the
kindest letters, they invited him to lecture, but ah! when his
publishers' accounts came in, he found there "To American sales: six and
twopence!" [Laughter.] Here is matter for mortification!

Again, one is not so much to speak for English literature as to speak
about it; one is not a representative but a reporter; we critics are but
the cagots or despised pariah class in