to be long, and that to be
followed by a genial winter, which, if it be as frosty as his hair,
shall also be as kindly as his heart. [Applause.]

He has enough excess and versatility of ability to be a genius. He has
enough quality and quantity of virtues to be a saint. But he has
honorably transmuted his genius into work, whereby it has been brought
into relations with literature and with life. And he has preferred warm
fellowship to cold perfection, so that sinners love him and saints are
content to wait for him. May they wait long. [Applause.]

I think he is entitled to be regarded as the Dean of America's humor;
that he is entitled to the distinction of being the greatest humorist
this nation ever had. I say this with a fair knowledge of the chiefs of
the entire corps, from Francis Hopkinson and the author of "Hasty
Pudding," down to Bill Nye and Dooley. None of them would I depreciate.
I would greatly prefer to honor and hail them all for the singular
fittedness of their gifts to the needs of the nation in their times.
Hopkinson and Joel Barlow lightened the woes of the Revolution by the
touch of nature that makes the whole world grin. Seba Smith relieved the
Yankee sense of tension under the impact of Jacksonian roughness, by
tickling its ribs with a quill. Lieutenant Derby turned the searchlight
of fun on the stiff formalities of army posts, on the raw conditions of
alkali journalism and on the solemn humbugs of frontier politics. James
Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy
or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England
conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic,
satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of
contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy
and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life
and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the
coveted treasures of primeval nature. Charles F. Browne made "Artemus
Ward" as well known as Abraham Lincoln in the time the two divided the
attention of the world. Bill Nye singed the shams of his day, and Dooley
dissects for Hinnissey the shams of our own. Nor should we forget Eugene
Field, the beatifier of childhood; or Joel Chandler Harris, the fabulist
of the plantation; or Ruth McEnery Stuart, the coronal singer of the
joys and hopes, the loves and the dreams of the images of God in ebony
in the