Part 4

I did not intend to detain you so long as I have (_cries of “Go on”_), but I have also in my experience of after-dinner speeches observed that a speech is like an ill-broken horse; it is apt to take the bit between its teeth and to bolt at the most unexpected moment. A speaker frequently brings up, not where he intended to bring up, but where his steed chooses to land him. I suppose that before coming here I ought to have studied carefully the history of Liverpool, with which I ought to have appeared to have been familiar from my earliest childhood. (_Laughter._) Unfortunately, there was no history of Liverpool in my friend Tom Brown’s library. (_Laughter._) There were histories of inferior places--Chester, and so on--but no history of Liverpool; and I therefore cannot give you a great deal of information which I have no doubt would have been new and very interesting to you, and which would make the staple of a proper after-dinner speech. But there is one thing I remember about Liverpool. I have always felt a sort of literary gratitude to Liverpool, strange as you may think it. In my father’s library I remember very well three quarto volumes stood side by side more years ago than I like to say. Two of these volumes were “Lorenzo the Magnificent,” and the other was “Poggio Bracciolini.” I, of course, when I was a boy, did not know precisely the meaning of those books; but they did to a certain extent afford me an introduction to the “Renaissance in Italy.” I thought--but Sir James Picton corrects me--that it was Roscoe who translated the life of the second Lorenzo; but it was his son, I am informed, who translated another book which gave me my first acquaintance with the Italian Novelists, and which was a book which I remember buying when I was making a library of my own very early in life.

But to an American Liverpool generally represents the gate by which he enters the Old World; for as our ancestors went across West to find a new world there in that unexplored Atlantic, as they thought it might be, we go back Eastward to find our new world in the old--a new world of continental instruction and freshness. And I am glad, linked as we are in history and speaking, as I am given to understand, a language which at least can be understood the one by the other (_laughter_)--I am glad to find that my countrymen linger more and more in the land of their ancestors. Formerly Bristol was the great port through which intercourse with America was kept up, but now certainly Liverpool is one end of the three-thousand-mile loom on which the shuttles which are binding us all in visible ties more and more together are continually shooting to and fro. Liverpool is also the gate by which Americans leave the Old World to go home, and I am to a certain extent, as a person who crosses the seas not infrequently, interested in a discussion which I saw in the newspapers the other day as to the difficulties of embarcation at Liverpool. But I have encountered one which I did not expect, and that difficulty has been put in my way by the Philomathic Society. You have made it harder to get away from Liverpool than I should have expected or supposed, and I shall carry away with me when I go to-morrow the recollections of this pleasant meeting with you, of its cordiality, of the pleasant things that have been said to me, and that we often accept things that we do not deserve. (_Laughter and cheers._)

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_A Selection_ ...

... _from the Publications of_

Transcriber’s Note:

Two misspelled words were corrected. Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_.