"You have made allusion in terms of flattering kindness to a period of my life I can never contemplate without emotions of the most thrilling and pleasurable nature,--a period which beheld me, with a suddenness of transition more like a dream than reality, one day a poor, unknown, and unfriended boy, and the next surrounded by 'troops of friends,' counsellors ready to advise, and generous hearts prodigal of regard. In my immature and unschooled efforts lenient critics saw, or thought they saw, some latent evidences of talent, and, with a generosity rarely equalled, crowded around me with encouragement in payment of anticipated desert. The same spirit of kindness which matured the germ continued its fostering influence through each successive development; and now, at the end of eight years (eight _little_ years,--how brief they have been made by you!), with unexhausted, nay, increasing munificence, that spirit exercises itself in bestowing a memento of esteem as much beyond the deserts of the man as its early plaudits exceeded the merits of the boy. "If, in the course of a career by you made both pleasant and prosperous, I have appropriated a portion of your bounty to the encouragement of dramatic literature, I have, as it were, acted as your almoner, and have found my reward in the readiness with which you have extended in its support the same cherishing hand that sustained me in my youthful efforts. One of the writers whose services, at my invitation, were given to the drama, after having proved his ability by the production of a play the popularity of which you have not exaggerated, lies in a recent and untimely grave. The other, to whose noble Roman tragedy you have also particularly alluded, is now pursuing a successful career of literature in another land; and it is a source of no little pleasure to think that I have been in some measure instrumental in calling into exercise a mind which, if I do not overestimate its powers, will add a fresh leaf to that unfading chaplet with which Irving and Cooper and Bryant and Halleck, with a few other kindred spirits, have already graced the escutcheon of our country. "One allusion in your remarks has awakened emotions of the keenest sensibility. It brings home to me more strongly than all the rest how _deeply_ I am indebted to you; for you have not only strewn my own path with flowers, but enabled me to discharge with efficiency the obligations of nature to orphan sisters and a widowed parent. To you I owe it that after a period of adversity I have been permitted to render her latter days pleasant 'and rock the cradle of reposing age.' So far, however, from any compliment being due to me on this score, I may rather chide myself with having fallen short in my filial duties. Yet were it otherwise, how could he be less than a devoted son and affectionate brother who has experienced parental kindness and fraternal friendship _from a whole community_?