Moreover, a warm nationality runs through all your verse; your imagination took the hue of the youth of our country and has reflected its calm, contemplative moods when the pulses of its early life beat vigorously but smoothly, and no bad passions had distorted its countenance. The clashing whirlwinds of civil war, the sublime energy and perseverance of the people, the martyrdom of myriads of its bravest and best, its new birth through terrible sufferings, will give a more passionate and tragic and varied cast to the literature of the coming generations. A thousand years hence posterity will turn to your pages as those which best mirror the lovely earnestness of the rising Republic, the sweet moments of her years of innocence, when she was all unfamiliar with sorrow, bright with the halo of promise, seizing the great solitudes by the busy hosts of civilization, and guiding the nations of the earth into the pleasant paths of freedom and of peace.

You have derived your inspiration as a poet from your love of Nature, and she has returned your affection, and blessed you as her favored son. At threescore and ten years, your eye is undimmed, your step light and free, as in youth, and the lyre, which ever responded so willingly to your touch, refuses to leave your hand.

Our tribute to you is to the poet; but we should not have paid it, had we not revered you as a man. Your blameless life is a continuous record of patriotism and integrity; and, passing untouched through the fiery conflicts that grow out of the ambition of others, you have, as all agree, preserved a perfect consistency with yourself, and an unswerving and unselfish fidelity to your convictions.

This is high praise, but the period at which we address you removes even the suspicion of flattery, for it is your entrance upon your seventieth year. It is a solemn thing to draw nearer and nearer to eternity. You teach us how to meet old age; with each year you become more and more genial, and cherish larger and still larger sympathies with your fellow men, and if Time has set on you any mark, you preserve in all its freshness the youth of the soul.

What remains but to wish you a long-continued life, crowned with health and prosperity, with happiness and honor? Live

on till you hear your children's children rise up and call you blessed. Live on for the sake of us, your old associates, for whom life would lose much of its luster in losing you as a companion and friend. Live on for your own sake, that you may enjoy the better day of which your eye already catches the dawn. Where faith discerned the Saviour of the world, the unbeliever looked only on a man of sorrows, crowned with thorns, and tottering under the burden of the cross on which He was to die. The social skeptic sees America sitting apart in her affliction, stung by vipers at her bosom, and welcomed to the pit by "earth's ancient kings"; but through all the anguish of her grief, you teach us to behold her in immortal beauty, as she steps onward through trials to brighter glory. Live to enjoy her coming triumph, when the acknowledged power of right shall tear the root of sorrow out of the heart of the country, and make her more than ever the guardian of human liberty and the regenerator of the race. [Applause.]

SIR JAMES BARRIE

AN INOFFENSIVE GENTLEMAN ON A

MAGIC ISLAND

Sir James Barrie (born at Kirriemuir, Scotland), one of the most eminent novelists and dramatists, appears only rarely as a public speaker but always with complete success. One famous speech of his is that made in presenting Ethel Barrymore with the rights of his comedy "The Twelve-Pound Look." The speech consisted of a single sentence-"Not that I love Barrie less, but that I love Barrymore." Another famous and longer speech was his rectorial address at Edinburgh University on "Courage." Shortly after that address, on May 27, 1922, he spoke at a dinner of the Critics' Circle at the Hotel Savoy, London. The speech which follows recalls the words which Barrie applied to Stevenson, and which often have been applied to the creator of Peter Pan-he is "the spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play."

Mr. A. B. Walkley, the veteran dramatic critic, presided and proposed the toast of "The Drama and Barrie." He said:

I fear I am going to disappoint most of you at the outset, though I hope to bring unlooked for relief to our honored guest, Sir James Barrie. I am not going to address him as McConnachie. [Laughter.] Since you raised that Frankenstein's Monster, sir, at St. Andrews-you were once a journalist yourself, and will not have forgotten those journalistic favorites, Frankenstein and his Monster-since you raised that monster, you have been powerless to lay it. You have been McConnachied here and McConnachied there; McConnachied with damnable iteration. Sir, let us drop it to-night. It is not, for one thing, the easiest of afterdinner words. And then, I fancy, it was an article intended for local consumption, for the people of Fife and Forfar. You told them in Fife how some of their queer words amazed you people in Forfarshire. Well, sir, we are Southrons and are apt to be-I won't say amazed-but rather puzzled by the queer words of both Reprinted from the London Times.

Fife and Forfarshire. We are like Mr. Micawber when he quoted Burns about the "gowans"-"I don't know exactly what gowans may be," said Mr. Micawber.

So I will not address you as McConnachie but simply as Sir James Barrie-and say that we have welcomed you to our board tonight as the best beloved of our dramatists. I avoid the word "great," still more the word "greatest," because those are idle words, characterizing nothing. Also, I am warned by a story I lately came across about Mr. Booker Washington, the great negro philanthropist. A Southern gentleman of the old school met Mr. Washington and said to him-"Well, sir, I guess you must be the greatest man in these United States." Mr. Washington modestly thought there must be some greater man, and instanced President Roosevelt. "No, sir," said the Southerner, "I did think him a great man, until he asked you to dinner." Well, sir, after that, as we have asked you to dinner, I feel that to use the word greatest would be an ambiguous compliment to both you and to ourselves.

It is peculiarly pleasant to me to have this privilege of toasting you as a dramatist, because I carry my mind back many, many years let us say to a moment in the reign of Queen Victoriawhen you walked with me through a little Surrey pine-wood (I remember it was a pine-wood, because you told me the fir-cones were called "needles" in Scotland) and you confided to me how very much you wanted to write for the stage. Well, sir, you have had your heart's desire! Heaven forbid that I should attempt at this moment to appreciate, even in a bird's-eye view, the work you have done for our stage. This is not, I am sure you will all agree with me, an occasion for dramatic criticism; we have enough of that on other nights in the week; this is an off-night. Yet it would perhaps be just a little paradoxical if, in proposing the toast of "The Drama and Barrie," I should be entirely silent about the relation between the two. One word, then, on that relation I must say.

You seem to me, sir, to have transfigured our drama. I mean that, under the most familiar and homely features, you have revealed to us unsuspected shapes of beauty. I am not thinking of your lighter moods, when "Queen Mab hath been with you," your fun and whim and quaint impish fancies, your "Barrieisms," as we have to call them, because they are unlike anything else. I am thinking of your graver moods. But I do not forget that this is a festive occasion and I must not be out of harmony with it. You remember Dickens' story of Cruikshoul at the funeral. He was on his knees, when the parson said something that annoyed him, and he whispered to his neighbor, "If this weren't a funeral, I'd punch his head." If this weren't a festive occasion, sir, I

would say that you have wrung our hearts, almost beyond pardon. If this weren't a festive occasion, I would say that you have given us glimpses into the mysteries of life and death and time that have sent us away strangely shaken, almost beside ourselves. There, I think, is your magic, your fascination. It is a fascination. Our oldest veteran of the stage-he was with you at St. Andrewstold me he had been some dozen times to "Mary Rose"; he simply couldn't tear himself away. [Cheers.]

SCUM! [Loud laughter.] Critics to right of him, critics to left of him, critics upper entrance at back leading to conservatory, critics down stage center-into that Circle some one has blundered. How I wish I could keep it up, dealing blows all around in this author's well-known sledge-hammer style. "Barrie gives them Beans"-Evening News. "A Roland for an Oliver"-Daily Chronicle. "Swashbuckler Barrie swashes on his Buckler"-Mail. "Barrie spells Walkley with a small 'u'"-Morning Post. [Laughter.] That is the kind I should like to give you. But, alas! in the words of the poet Pewelli of the blessed isle, so familiar to you all, Poga, mema allalula, which means that your chairman has spiked my guns.

...

I remember once going the length of very nearly telling a critic that quite possibly he was mistaken. It was many years ago, before I had written any plays, when red blood boiled in my veins. It is not a bad story, though unfortunately the critic comes rather well out of it, indeed I would not repeat it here except that I come rather well out of it also. It marks the night when I decided upon a rule of conduct with regard to you gentlemen, which, so far as I can remember, I have never broken. A historic occasion for me, therefore, and I am sorry I cannot remember what the weather was like. The criticized was one of my first books, a Scotch novel, and the critic was a man to whom I suppose every one here would take off his hat in homage and in proud memory-Andrew Lang. He not only slaughtered my book, but attacked my Scotch and picked out one word in particular as not being Scotch at all. To be as particular as that is perhaps always a mistake in criticism, and I thought I had him. I wrote a brief letter to that paper saying that this word was not only good Scotch but was in frequent use in the Waverley novels, that I could tell