very gratefully for this kind welcome, and I think it a privilege to be allowed to take part in a festival so delightful as this, and join with you in paying respect to a name so justly renowned and honored as that of John Gilbert.  I cannot hope adequately to respond to the personal sentiments which have been so graciously expressed nor adequately celebrate the deeds and the virtues of your distinguished guest.  “I am ill at these numbers ... but such answer as I can make you shall command.”  For since first I became familiar with the stage—­in far-away days in old Boston, John Gilbert has been to me the fulfilment of one of my highest ideals of excellence in the dramatic art; and it would be hard if I could not now say this, if not with eloquence at least with fervor.

I am aware of a certain strangeness, however, in the thought that words in his presence and to his honor should be spoken by me.  The freaks of time and fortune are indeed strange.  I cannot but remember that when John Gilbert was yet in the full flush of his young manhood and already crowned with the laurels of success the friend who is now speaking was a boy at his sports—­playing around the old Federal Street Theatre, and beneath the walls of the Franklin Street Cathedral, and hearing upon the broad causeways of Pearl Street the rustle and patter of the autumn leaves as they fell from the chestnuts around the Perkins Institution and the elms that darkened the sombre, deserted castle of Harris’s Folly.  With this sense of strangeness though, comes a sense still more striking and impressive of the turbulent, active, and brilliant period through which John Gilbert has lived.  Byron had been dead but four years [1828] and Scott and Wordsworth were still writing when he began to act.  Goethe was still living.  The works of Thackeray and Dickens were yet to be created.  Cooper, Irving, Bryant, Halleck, and Percival were the literary lords of that period.  The star of Willis was ascending while those of Hawthorne and Poe were yet to rise; and the dramas of Talfourd, Knowles, and Bulwer were yet to be seen by him as fresh contributions to the literature of the stage.  All these great names are written in the book of death.  All that part of old Boston to which I have referred—­the scene equally of Gilbert’s birth and youth and first successes and of his tender retrospection—­has been swept away or entirely changed.  Gone is the old Federal Street Theatre.  Gone that quaint English alley with the cosey tobacconist’s shop which he used to frequent.  Gone the hospitable Stackpole where many a time at the “latter end of a sea-coal fire” he heard the bell strike midnight from the spire of the Old South Church!  But, though “the spot where many times he triumphed is forgot”—­his calm and gentle genius and his hale physique have endured in unabated vigor, so that he has charmed two generations of play-goers, still happily lives to charm men and women of to-day.  Webster, Choate, Felton, Everett, Rantoul, Shaw, Bartlett, Lunt, Halleck, Starr King, Bartol, Kirk—­these and many more, the old worthies of the bar, bench, and the pulpit in Boston’s better days of intellect and taste:—­all saw him as we see him in the silver-gray elegance and exquisite perfection with which he illustrates the comedies of England.