oppression and degradation of mankind, you would despise and reject
me. I hope you will, whenever, through such means, I give you the
opportunity. Trust me, that, whenever you give me the like
occasion, I will return the compliment with interest.
Gentlemen, as I have no secrets from you, in the spirit of
confidence you have engendered between us, and as I have made a
kind of compact with myself that I never will, while I remain in
America, omit an opportunity of referring to a topic in which I and
all others of my class on both sides of the water are equally
interested – equally interested, there is no difference between us,
I would beg leave to whisper in your ear two words: INTERNATIONAL
COPYRIGHT. I use them in no sordid sense, believe me, and those
who know me best, best know that. For myself, I would rather that
my children, coming after me, trudged in the mud, and knew by the
general feeling of society that their father was beloved, and had
been of some use, than I would have them ride in their carriages,
and know by their banker’s books that he was rich. But I do not
see, I confess, why one should be obliged to make the choice, or
why fame, besides playing that delightful REVEIL for which she is
so justly celebrated, should not blow out of her trumpet a few
notes of a different kind from those with which she has hitherto
contented herself.
It was well observed the other night by a beautiful speaker, whose
words went to the heart of every man who heard him, that, if there
had existed any law in this respect, Scott might not have sunk
beneath the mighty pressure on his brain, but might have lived to
add new creatures of his fancy to the crowd which swarm about you
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
in your summer walks, and gather round your winter evening hearths.
As I listened to his words, there came back, fresh upon me, that
touching scene in the great man’s life, when he lay upon his couch,
surrounded by his family, and listened, for the last time, to the
rippling of the river he had so well loved, over its stony bed. I
pictured him to myself, faint, wan, dying, crushed both in mind and
body by his honourable struggle, and hovering round him the
phantoms of his own imagination – Waverley, Ravenswood, Jeanie
Deans, Rob Roy, Caleb Balderstone, Dominie Sampson – all the
familiar throng – with cavaliers, and Puritans, and Highland chiefs
innumerable overflowing the chamber, and fading away in the dim
distance beyond. I pictured them, fresh from traversing the world,
and hanging down their heads in shame and sorrow, that, from all
those lands into which they had carried gladness, instruction, and
delight for millions, they brought him not one friendly hand to
help to raise him from that sad, sad bed. No, nor brought him from
that land in which his own language was spoken, and in every house
and hut of which his own books were read in his own tongue, one
grateful dollar-piece to buy a garland for his grave. Oh! if every
man who goes from here, as many do, to look upon that tomb in
Dryburgh Abbey, would but remember this, and bring the recollection
home!
Gentlemen, I thank you again, and once again, and many times to
that. You have given me a new reason for remembering this day,
which is already one of mark in my calendar, it being my birthday;
and you have given those who are nearest and dearest to me a new
reason for recollecting it with pride and interest. Heaven knows
that, although I should grow ever so gray, I shall need nothing to
remind me of this epoch in my life. But I am glad to think that
from this time you are inseparably connected with every recurrence
of this day; and, that on its periodical return, I shall always, in
imagination, have the unfading pleasure of entertaining you as my
guests, in return for the gratification you have afforded me tonight.