whom we prize and
admire is no worn-out veteran retiring to a rest he can no longer
enjoy--that he leaves us in the prime of his powers, with many years to
come, in the course of nature, of that dignified leisure for which every
public man must have sighed in the midst of his triumphs, and though we
cannot say of him that his "way of life is fall'n into the sere, the
yellow leaf," yet we can say that he has prematurely obtained "that
which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of
friends;" and postponing for this night all selfish regret, not thinking
of the darkness that is to follow, but of the brightness of the sun that
is to set, I call upon you to drink with full glasses and full hearts,
"Health, happiness and long life to William Macready."

* * * * *

FAREWELL TO CHARLES DICKENS

[Speech of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton at a farewell banquet given to
Charles Dickens, London, November 2, 1867, prior to his departure on a
reading tour in the United States. In giving the toast of the evening,
Lord Lytton, the chairman, delivered the following speech.]

MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN:--I now approach the toast which is
special to the occasion that has brought together a meeting so numerous
and so singularly distinguished. You have paid the customary honors to
our beloved sovereign, due not only to her personal virtues, but to that
principle of constitutional monarchy in which the communities of Europe
recognize the happiest mode of uniting liberty with order, and giving to
the aspirations for the future a definite starting-point in the
experience and the habits of the past. You are now invited to do honor
to a different kind of royalty, which is seldom peacefully acknowledged
until he who wins and adorns it ceases to exist in the body, and is no
longer conscious of the empire which his thoughts bequeath to his name.
Happy is the man who makes clear his title-deeds to the royalty of
genius while he yet lives to enjoy the gratitude and reverence of those
whom he has subjected to his sway. Though it is by conquest that he
achieves his throne, he at least is a conqueror whom the conquered
bless; and the more despotically he enthralls, the dearer he becomes to
the hearts of men.

Seldom, I say, has that kind of royalty been quietly conceded to any man
of genius until his tomb becomes his throne, and yet there is not one of
us now present who thinks it strange that