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