be registered.  We may be encouraged by the reflection that this is truer than ever it was before, owing to the greater spread of education, the increased community of taste between classes, and the almost absolute divorce of the stage from mere wealth and aristocracy.  Wealth and aristocracy come around the stage in abundance, and are welcome, as in the time of Elizabeth; but the stage is no longer a mere appendage of court-life, no longer a mere mirror of patrician vice hanging at the girdle of fashionable profligacy as it was in the days of Congreve and Wycherley.  It is now the property of the educated people.  It has to satisfy them or pine in neglect And the better their demands the better will be the supply with which the drama will respond.  This being not only so, but seen to be so, the stage is no longer proscribed.  It is no longer under a ban.  Its members are no longer pariahs in society.  They live and bear their social part like others—­as decorously observant of all that makes the sweet sanctities of life—­as gracefully cognizant of its amenities—­as readily recognized and welcomed as the members of any other profession.  Am I not here your grateful guest, opening the session of this philosophical and historic institution?  I who am simply an actor, an interpreter, with such gifts as I have, and such thought as I can bestow, of stage plays.  And am I not received here with perfect cordiality on an equality, not hungrily bowing and smirking for patronage, but interchanging ideas which I am glad to express, and which you listen to as thoughtfully and as kindly as you would to those of any other student, any other man who had won his way into such prominence as to come under the ken of a distinguished institution such as that which I have the honor to address?  I do not mince the matter as to my personal position here, because I feel it is a representative one, and marks an epoch in the estimation in which the art I love is held by the British world.  You have had many distinguished men here, and their themes have often been noble, but with which of those themes has not my art immemorial and perpetual associations?  Is it not for ever identified with the noblest instincts and occupations of the human mind?  If I think of poetry, must I not remember how to the measure of its lofty music the theatre has in almost all ages set the grandest of dramatic conceptions?  If I think of literature, must I not recall that of all the amusements by which men in various states of society have solaced their leisure and refreshed their energies, the acting of plays is the one that has never yet, even for a day, been divorced from literary taste and skill?  If I meditate on patriotism, can I but reflect how grandly the boards have been trod by personifications of heroic love of country?  There is no subject of human thought that by common consent is deemed ennobling that has not ere now, and from period to period, been illustrated in the bright vesture, and