lf to an occasion
like this--an occasion which deliberately emphasizes, as well as
expresses, that good feeling between our two countries which, I think,
every good man in both of them is desirous to deepen and to increase. If
I look back to anything in my life with satisfaction, it is to the fact
that I myself have, in some degree, contributed--and I hope I may
believe the saying to be true--to this good feeling. [Applause.]

You alluded, Mr. Chairman, to a date which gave me, I must confess, what
we call on the other side of the water "a rather large contract." I am
to reply, I am to answer to Literature, and I must confess that a
person like myself, who first appeared in print fifty years ago, would
hardly wish to be answerable for all his own literature, not to speak of
the literature of other people. But your allusion to sixty years ago
reminded me of something which struck me as I looked down these tables.

Sixty years ago the two authors you mentioned, Irving and Cooper, were
the only two American authors of whom anything was known in Europe, and
the knowledge of them in Europe was mainly confined to England. It is
true that Bryant's "Water-Fowl" had already begun its flight in immortal
air, but these were the only two American authors that could be said to
be known in England. And what is even more remarkable, they were the
only American authors at that time--there were, and had been, others
known to us at home--who were capable of earning their bread by their
pens. Another singular change is suggested to me as I look down these
tables, and that is the singular contrast they afford between the time
when Johnson wrote his famous lines about those ills that assail the
life of the scholar, and by the scholar he meant the author--

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."

And I confess when I remember that verse it strikes me as a singular
contrast that I should meet with a body of authors who are able to offer
a dinner instead of begging one; that I have sat here and seen "forty
feeding like one," when one hundred years ago the one fed like forty
when he had the chance. [Laughter.]

You have alluded also, in terms which I shall not qualify, to my own
merits. You have made me feel a little as if I were a ghost revisiting
the pale glimpses of the moon, and reading with considerable wonder my
own epitaph. But you have done me more than justice in attributing so
much to me with regard to International Cop