Broadly, ladies and gentlemen, this is the whole design. There are
foundation scholars at Eton, foundation scholars at nearly all our
old schools, and if the public, in remembrance of a noble part of
our standard national literature, and in remembrance of a great
humanising art, will do this thing for these children, it will at
the same time be doing a wise and good thing for itself, and will
unquestionably find its account in it. Taking this view of the
case--and I cannot be satisfied to take any lower one--I cannot
make a sorry face about "the poor player." I think it is a term
very much misused and very little understood--being, I venture to
say, appropriated in a wrong sense by players themselves.
Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I can only present the player to
you exceptionally in this wise--that he follows a peculiar and
precarious vocation, a vocation very rarely affording the means of
accumulating money--that that vocation must, from the nature of
things, have in it many undistinguished men and women to one
distinguished one--that it is not a vocation the exerciser of which
can profit by the labours of others, but in which he must earn
every loaf of his bread in his own person, with the aid of his own
face, his own limbs, his own voice, his own memory, and his own
life and spirits; and these failing, he fails. Surely this is
reason enough to render him some little help in opening for his
children their paths through life.
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