Ah! you remember, you remember well, what a throb
of pain, what a great tidal wave of grief swept over
us all when Joan of Arc fell at Waterloo. [Much laughter.]
Who does not sorrow for the loss of Sappho, the sweet
singer of Israel? [Laughter.] Who among us does not
miss the gentle ministrations, the softening influences,
the humble piety of Lucretia Borgia? [Laughter.]
Who can join in the heartless libel that says woman
is extravagant in dress when he can look back and
call to mind our simple and lowly mother Eve arrayed
in her modification of the Highland costume. [Roars
of laughter.] Sir, women have been soldiers, women
have been painters, women have been poets. As
long as language lives the name of Cleopatra will live.
And, not because she conquered George III. [laughter]—but
because she wrote those divine lines:
“Let
dogs delight to bark and bite,
For
God hath made them so.”
[More laughter.] The story of the world is adorned
with the names of illustrious ones of our own sex—some
of them sons of St. Andrew, too —Scott,
Bruce, Burns, the warrior Wallace, Ben Nevis—[laughter]—the
gifted Ben Lomond, and the great new Scotchman, Ben
Disraeli. [Great laughter.] Out of the great plains
of history tower whole mountain ranges of sublime
women—the Queen of Sheba, Josephine, Semiramis,
Sairey Gamp; the list is endless—[laughter]—but
I will not call the mighty roll, the names rise up
in your own memories at the mere suggestion, luminous
with the glory of deeds that cannot die, hallowed by
the loving worship of the good and the true of all
epochs and all climes. [Cheers.] Suffice it for our
pride and our honor that we in our day have added to
it such names as those of Grace Darling and Florence
Nightingale. [Cheers.] Woman is all that she should
be-gentle, patient, long suffering, trustful, unselfish,
full of generous impulses. It is her blessed
mission to comfort the sorrowing, plead for the erring,
encourage the faint of purpose, succor the distressed,
uplift the fallen, befriend the friendless in a word,
afford the healing of her sympathies and a home in
her heart for all the bruised and persecuted children
of misfortune that knock at its hospitable door. [Cheers.]
And when I say, God bless her, there is none among
us who has known the ennobling affection of a wife,
or the steadfast devotion of a mother, but in his heart
will say, Amen! [Loud and prolonged cheering.]
—[Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, at that time
Prime Minister of England, had just been elected Lord
Rector of Glasgow University, and had made a speech
which gave rise to a world of discussion.]
I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old
building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied
for years until I came. The place had long been
given up to dust and cobwebs, to solitude and silence.
I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy
of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters.
For the first time in my life a superstitious dread
came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the
stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof
in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who
had encountered a phantom.
