I thank you for your thoughtful courtesy and for this distinguished mark of your favor.  Being well aware of my defects both as a thinker and a speaker, I shrink from such emergencies as this, but having known him so long and having been in a professional way associated with so many of his labors and his triumphs, I should fail in duty if I were not at least to try to add my word of love, feeble and inadequate as it may be, to the noble volume of your sympathy and homage. [Cheers.]

The presence of this brilliant assemblage, the eloquent words which have fallen from the lips of your honored president and the speeches of your orators, they signify some change—­I will not say in regard to the advancement of the stage—­but they signify a wonderful advancement in our times in sympathetic and thoughtful and just appreciation of the theatre.  This was not always so.  It is not very long since so wise and gentle a man as Charles Lamb expressed his mild astonishment that a person capable of committing to memory and reciting the language of Shakespeare could for that reason be supposed to possess a mind congenial with that of the poet.  The scorn of Carlyle and the scarcely less injurious pity of Emerson for the actor are indications that in a time not remote, thought and philosophy have made but little account of the stage.

Something might be said about this by a voice more competent than mine, for in our time there has been a change in the intelligent spirit of the age, and I am sure that thought and philosophy now are of the opinion that the actor is an intellectual and spiritual force; that he is connected most intimately with the cause of public education; that he brings something of his own, and that, although the part provides the soul, it is the actor who must provide the body, and without the soul and the body, you could not have dramatic representations for the benefit of them. [Applause.]

I am not one of those writers who believe that it is the business of the newspaper to manage the theatres.  The question of what to do to please the public taste, to provide mankind with what they like, or what they want, or, which is the same thing, with what they think they want, opens a very complex inquiry.  Our dear friend has been puzzled by it himself more than a little.  I should not undertake to instruct him, but as the observer of his course I have been struck by wonder and admiration of the way he has carried his theatre through seasons of great competition and great peril.

I call to mind one season, now seventeen years ago, I think, when in the course of a very few months, he produced and presented upward of thirty-two plays, showing the best points of these plays and showing his great company to every possible advantage; so have I seen a juggler toss fifty knives in the air and catch them without cutting his fingers.

[At the close of his speech Mr. Winter read the following poem.]—­