we will now call upon Mr. George Cary Eggleston to
respond to that sentiment."]

MR. PRESIDENT:--I have cheered myself so hoarse that I do not
think I can make a speech at all. I will say a word or two if my voice
holds out. It is patriotically hoarse.

If I manage to make a speech it will be the one speech of the evening
which was most carefully prepared. The preparations were all made,
arrangements were completed and it was perfectly understood that I
should not make it. The name set down under this toast is that of Hon.
John Randolph Tucker, and the wild absurdity of asking a writer who does
not make speeches, to take the place of such an orator as John Randolph
Tucker would seem to be like asking a seasick land-lubber to take the
captain's place upon the bridge of the ocean steamer in a storm, and
there is another reason by which I am peculiarly unfit to speak in
response to the toast--"Southern Literature," and that is, that I am
firmly convinced that there is no Southern Literature; that there never
was a Southern Literature; that there never will be a Southern
Literature, and that there never ought to be a Southern Literature. Some
very great and noble work in literature has been produced by men of
Southern lineage and birth and residence. John Marshall, if he had not
been the greatest of American jurists, would have been counted, because
of his "Life of Washington," the greatest of biographers. I might name
an extended list of workers in this field, all of Southern birth. Sims;
my dead friend, John Esten Cooke; his brother, Philip Cooke; Cable, who
is married to New England; the gifted woman who calls herself Charles
Egbert Craddock; and a host of others including that noble woman now
going blind in Lexington, who has done some of the sweetest work in
American poetry, Margaret J. Preston. [Applause.] I might go further and
claim Howells, every drop of whose blood is Virginian. If it were not
getting personal and becoming a family affair, I might mention the fact
that the author of the "Hoosier Schoolmaster," with whom I used to play
on the hills of Ohio River, was of direct Southern descent; that he was
born as I was, exactly on Mason and Dixon's line, and one of us fell
over on one side and the other on the other when the trouble came.

Notwithstanding all this, I hold that there can be no such thing as a
Southern Literature, because literature is never provincial, and to say
of any literature that it is