SPEECH: THE OXFORD AND HARVARD BOAT RACE. SYDENHAM, AUGUST 30,
1869.
[The International University Boat Race having taken place on
August 27, the London Rowing Club invited the Crews to a Dinner at
the Crystal Palace on the following Monday. The dinner was
followed by a grand display of pyrotechnics. Mr. Dickens, in
proposing the health of the Crews, made the following speech:]
Gentlemen, flushed with fireworks, I can warrant myself to you as
about to imitate those gorgeous illusions by making a brief spirt
and then dying out. And, first of all, as an invited visitor of
the London Rowing Club on this most interesting occasion, I will
beg, in the name of the other invited visitors present--always
excepting the distinguished guests who are the cause of our
meeting--to thank the president for the modesty and the courtesy
with which he has deputed to one of us the most agreeable part of
his evening's duty. It is the more graceful in him to do this
because he can hardly fail to see that he might very easily do it
himself, as this is a case of all others in which it is according
to good taste and the very principles of things that the great
social vice, speech-making, should hide it diminished head before
the great social virtue action. However, there is an ancient story
of a lady who threw her glove into an arena full of wild beasts to
tempt her attendant lover to climb down and reclaim it.
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