Not for one of those
considerations, but because it had been my happiness to have a
public opportunity of testing the spirit of its people. I had
asked Liverpool for help towards the worthy preservation of
Shakespeare's house. On another occasion I had ventured to address
Liverpool in the names of Leigh Hunt and Sheridan Knowles. On
still another occasion I had addressed it in the cause of the
brotherhood and sisterhood of letters and the kindred arts, and on
each and all the response had been unsurpassably spontaneous, open-
handed, and munificent.
Mr. Mayor, and ladies and gentlemen, if I may venture to take a
small illustration of my present position from my own peculiar
craft, I would say that there is this objection in writing fiction
to giving a story an autobiographical form, that through whatever
dangers the narrator may pass, it is clear unfortunately to the
reader beforehand that he must have come through them somehow else
he could not have lived to tell the tale. Now, in speaking fact,
when the fact is associated with such honours as those with which
you have enriched me, there is this singular difficulty in the way
of returning thanks, that the speaker must infallibly come back to
himself through whatever oratorical disasters he may languish on
the road. Let me, then, take the plainer and simpler middle course
of dividing my subject equally between myself and you.
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