The Very Reverend Charles William Stubbs, D.D., Dean of Ely, is a most charming gentleman and esteemed as one of the most accomplished English pulpit orators of the Church of England. Through the Rev. Dr. John Watson I induced him to come to America in the fall of 1899 to give a series of lectures to fill the demand which seemed to me had long existed in this country to hear from the platform one of the ablest lecturers of the Church of England. [Illustration] Besides being a fine pulpit orator, the Dean of Ely is a pleasing platform speaker, with but little English mannerism, a scholar of fine type, an essayist of gentle humor and kindly wit, a man of practical affairs, and a sympathetic poet in touch with history and humanity. As a poet he has the ballad quality, the lyric tone. Not only were his prepared lectures polished and scholarly, but when called upon suddenly he was always ready, with wit and humor and anecdote, for any occasion, as is attested by the following portion of an impromptu speech made at a banquet tendered by the Lotus Club to Sir Henry Irving in New York on the evening of the day of the Dean’s arrival: “Mr. President, Sir Henry, Gentlemen of the Lotus Club: In this atmosphere of resistless eloquence and wit and humor and good fellowship and eulogy, I confess I find myself somewhat embarrassed--embarrassed by the generosity of your kindly feeling toward me, expressed by your president, but embarrassed especially because your president has treated me with not even that amount of generosity which he extended to the gentleman who spoke last and who needed no such generosity. I have not even had a twenty-minutes’ grace in which to concoct any impromptu humorous remarks. What, then, can I do? I think it was one of your own prophets--shall I say one of your own poets?--one of the greatest of your literary men, an ambassador to England some years ago, a man of whom I am always glad to think as a personal friend of my own, Mr. James Russell Lowell, who once said that an after-dinner speech should consist of an anecdote, a commonplace, and a quotation. Now, how can I fulfil those canons of speech to-night?