ng that a marked
characteristic of New Englanders is an unwillingness to talk, and
especially to talk about themselves. And I know that you are eager to
listen to the illustrious men whom we have the honor to gather about our
humble board this evening.

* * * * *

CAUSES OF UNPOPULARITY

[Speech of Rev. Dr. Heman L. Wayland at the eighty-fourth annual
dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December
23, 1889. The President, Cornelius N. Bliss, proposed the query for
Dr. Wayland, "Why are New Englanders Unpopular?" enforcing it with
the following quotations: "Do you question me as an honest man
should do for my simple true judgment?" [Much Ado About Nothing,
Act I, Sc. I], and "Merit less solid less despite has bred: the man
that makes a character makes foes" [Edward Young]. Turning to Dr.
Wayland, Mr. Bliss said: "Our sister, the New England Society of
Philadelphia, to-night sends us greeting in the person of her
honored President, whom I have the pleasure of presenting to you."
The eloquence of Dr. Wayland was loudly applauded; and Chauncey M.
Depew declared that he had heard one of the best speeches to which
he had ever listened at a New England dinner.]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--That I am here this evening is as
complete a mystery to me as to you. I do not know why your Society, at
whose annual meetings orators are as the sand upon the seashore for
multitude, should call upon Philadelphia, a city in which the acme of
eloquence is attained by a Friends' Yearly Meeting, "sitting under the
canopy of silence." I can only suppose that you designed to relieve the
insufferable brilliancy of your annual festival, that you wished to
dilute the highly-flavored, richly-colored, full-bodied streams of the
Croton with the pure, limpid, colorless (or, at any rate, only
drab-colored) waters of the Schuylkill. [Laughter.]

My first and wiser impulse was to decline the invitation with which you
honored me, or rather the Society of which I am the humblest member.
But I considered the great debt we have been under to you for the loan
of many of your most accomplished speakers: of Curtis, whose diction is
chaste as the snows of his own New England, while his zeal for justice
is as fervid as her July sun; of Depew, who, as I listen to him, makes
me believe that the doctrine of transmigration is true, and