Let me begin by admitting the force of most that was said by the distinguished chairman on that occasion, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. No man living, perhaps, has a better right than he to complain of my countrymen, to whose intellectual pleasures and moral instruction he has contributed ever since I was a boy, out of the hard labor of his brains--helping to enrich our publishers and booksellers, and to stimulate all the trade connected with bookmaking, and vivifying the circulation of magazines and newspapers--for all which he has never received a penny. The same may be said of Dickens, whose works are of course as familiar to us as to you, and whose characters have become a part of our stock of ideas, more precious than the gold from our new-discovered mines. It is true that neither of these great men has benefited us so much as he might have done if we had paid for our pleasure honorably, for the influence of genius is like that of grace--the fertilizing shower falls in vain on the arid, stony places of selfish and unjust enjoyment. Charles Dickens has never received a penny from us, although we insulted our unpaid creditor when he came among us by asking him to Boz balls and dinners, given on a scale of splendor which showed how well we could have afforded to pay our debt if we had been honest enough to have admitted it. How degrading--how incongruous--for a great nation, such as we boast of being, to be thus the literary pensioners, the intellectual beggars of England, meanly enjoying what we won't pay for? An American would scorn to be fed or clothed gratis; he would "stand treat" with the world; yet he lets an Englishman (of all men!) gratuitously amuse his leisure, satisfy his thirst for knowledge, and clothe the nakedness of his mind. If Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, or Mr. Dickens, were to offer to pay for a pair of trousers for Brother Jonathan, he would knock him down; or if Miss Bell, or whatever is the name of the lady who wrote "Jane Eyre," and her sisters, pretended to make him up a dozen fine shirts as a charity, I think he would go out of his senses. He would rather go bare to the end of his days than owe such an obligation to any he or she Briton in existence; but what are such favors to those which he unblushingly accepts, year after year, from Sir Edward Bulwer and Miss Bell?