At the annual general meeting
held at the house of the society on the above date, the following
speech was made by Mr. Charles Dickens:]
Sir,--I shall not attempt to follow my friend Mr. Bell, who, in the
profession of literature, represents upon this committee a separate
and distinct branch of the profession, that, like
"The last rose of summer
Stands blooming alone,
While all its companions
Are faded and gone,"
into the very prickly bramble-bush with which he has ingeniously
contrived to beset this question. In the remarks I have to make I
shall confine myself to four points: --1. That the committee find
themselves in the painful condition of not spending enough money,
and will presently apply themselves to the great reform of spending
more. 2. That with regard to the house, it is a positive matter
of history, that the house for which Mr. Williams was so anxious
was to be applied to uses to which it never has been applied, and
which the administrators of the fund decline to recognise. 3.
That, in Mr. Bell's endeavours to remove the Artists' Fund from the
ground of analogy it unquestionably occupies with reference to this
fund, by reason of their continuing periodical relief to the same
persons, I beg to tell Mr. Bell what every gentleman at that table
knows--that it is the business of this fund to relieve over and
over again the same people.
MR.
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