The second requisite is the presence
of a body of entertainers,--a great multitude of hosts so cheerful
and good-humoured (under, I am sorry to say, some personal
inconvenience),--so warm-hearted and so nobly in earnest, as those
whom I have the privilege of addressing. The third, and certainly
not the least of these requisites, is a president who, less by his
social position, which he may claim by inheritance, or by fortune,
which may have been adventitiously won, and may be again
accidentally lost, than by his comprehensive genius, shall fitly
represent the best part of him to whom honour is done, and the best
part of those who unite in the doing of it. Such a president I
think we have found in our chairman of to-night, and I need
scarcely add that our chairman's health is the toast I have to
propose to you.
Many of those who now hear me were present, I daresay, at that
memorable scene on Wednesday night last, {25} when the great vision
which had been a delight and a lesson,--very often, I daresay, a
support and a comfort to you, which had for many years improved and
charmed us, and to which we had looked for an elevated relief from
the labours of our lives, faded from our sight for ever. I will
not stop to inquire whether our guest may or may not have looked
backward, through rather too long a period for us, to some remote
and distant time when he might possibly bear some far-off likeness
to a certain Spanish archbishop whom Gil Blas once served.
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