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.