I beg to
propose to you to drink "Prosperity to the Dramatic, Equestrian,
and Musical Sick Fund Association."
[Mr. Dickens, in proposing the next toast, said:-]
Gentlemen: as I addressed myself to the ladies last time, so I
address you this time, and I give you the delightful assurance that
it is positively my last appearance but one on the present
occasion. A certain Mr. Pepys, who was Secretary for the Admiralty
in the days of Charles II., who kept a diary well in shorthand,
which he supposed no one could read, and which consequently remains
to this day the most honest diary known to print--Mr. Pepys had two
special and very strong likings, the ladies and the theatres. But
Mr. Pepys, whenever he committed any slight act of remissness, or
any little peccadillo which was utterly and wholly untheatrical,
used to comfort his conscience by recording a vow that he would
abstain from the theatres for a certain time. In the first part of
Mr. Pepys' character I have no doubt we fully agree with him; in
the second I have no doubt we do not.
I learn this experience of Mr. Pepys from remembrance of a passage
in his diary that I was reading the other night, from which it
appears that he was not only curious in plays, but curious in
sermons; and that one night when he happened to be walking past St.
Dunstan's Church, he turned, went in, and heard what he calls "a
very edifying discourse;" during the delivery of which discourse,
he notes in his diary--"I stood by a pretty young maid, whom I did
attempt to take by the hand.
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