Often
and often, then, God willing, my memory will recall this brilliant
scene, and will re-illuminate this banquet-hall. I, faithful to
this place in its present aspect, will observe it exactly as it
stands--not one man's seat empty, not one woman's fair face absent,
while life and memory abide by me.
Mr. Mayor, Lord Dufferin in his speech so affecting to me, so
eloquently uttered, and so rapturously received, made a graceful
and gracious allusion to the immediate occasion of my present visit
to your noble city. It is no homage to Liverpool, based upon a
moment's untrustworthy enthusiasm, but it is the solid fact built
upon the rock of experience that when I first made up my mind,
after considerable deliberation, systematically to meet my readers
in large numbers, face to face, and to try to express myself to
them through the breath of life, Liverpool stood foremost among the
great places out of London to which I looked with eager confidence
and pleasure. And why was this? Not merely because of the
reputation of its citizens for generous estimation of the arts; not
merely because I had unworthily filled the chair of its great self-
educational institution long ago; not merely because the place had
been a home to me since the well-remembered day when its blessed
roofs and steeples dipped into the Mersey behind me on the occasion
of my first sailing away to see my generous friends across the
Atlantic twenty-seven years ago.
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