Such is our birthright and yours.  Such the succession in which it is ours to labor and yours to enjoy.  For Shakespeare belongs to the stage for ever, and his glories must always inalienably belong to it.  If you uphold the theatre honestly, liberally, frankly, and with wise discrimination, the stage will uphold in future, as it has in the past, the literature, the manners, the morals, the fame, and the genius of our country.  There must have been something wrong, as there was something poignant and lacerating, in prejudices which so long partly divorced the conscience of Britain from its noblest pride, and stamped with reproach, or at least depreciation, some of the brightest and world-famous incidents of her history.  For myself, it kindles my heart with proud delight to think that I have stood to-day before this audience—­known for its discrimination throughout all English-speaking lands—­a welcome and honored guest, because I stand here for justice to the art to which I am devoted—­because I stand here in thankfulness for the justice which has begun to be so abundantly rendered to it.  If it is metaphorically the destiny of humanity, it is literally the experience of an actor, that one man in his time plays many parts.  A player of any standing must at various times have sounded the gamut of human sensibility from the lowest note to the top of its compass.  He must have banqueted often on curious food for thought as he meditated on the subtle relations created between himself and his audiences, as they have watched in his impersonations the shifting tariff—­the ever gliding, delicately graduated sliding-scale of dramatic right and wrong.  He may have gloated, if he be a cynic, over the depths of ghastly horror, or the vagaries of moral puddle through which it may have been his duty to plash.  But if he be an honest man, he will acknowledge that scarcely ever has either dramatist or management wilfully biassed the effect of stage representation in favor of evil, and of his audiences he will boast that never has their mind been doubtful—­never has their true perception of the generous and just been known to fail, or even to be slow.  How noble the privilege to work upon these finer—­these finest—­feelings of universal humanity!  How engrossing the fascination of those thousands of steady eyes, and sound sympathies, and beating hearts which an actor confronts, with the confidence of friendship and co-operation, as he steps upon the stage to work out in action his long-pent comprehension of a noble master-piece!  How rapturous the satisfaction of abandoning himself, in such a presence and with such sympathizers, to his author’s grandest flights of thought and noblest bursts of emotional inspiration!  And how perpetually sustaining the knowledge that whatever may be the vicissitudes and even the degradations of the stage, it must and will depend for its constant hold on the affection and attention of mankind upon its loftier work; upon its more penetrating passion; upon its themes which most deeply search out the strong affections and high hopes of men and women; upon its fit and kindling illustration of great and vivid lives which either have been lived in noble fact or have deserved to endure immortally in the popular belief and admiration which they have secured.