[Speech of Charles Francis Adams, delivered at the Harvard Alumni dinner, in Cambridge, Mass., June 26, 1895.]
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Alumni:—Some years ago a distinguished literary character, as well as accomplished and lovable man,—since gone over to the silent majority,—stood here, as I now am standing, having a few hours before received Harvard's highest degree. Not himself a child of the University, he had been invited here a stranger,—though in Cambridge he was by no means a stranger in a strange land,—to receive well-deserved recognition for the good life-work he had done, and the high standard of character he had ever maintained. When called upon by the presiding officer of that occasion, as I now am called upon by you, he responded by saying that the day before he had left his New York home to come to Cambridge a simple, ordinary man; he would go back "ennobled."
In America patents of nobility may not be conferred,—the fundamental law itself inhibits; so, when from the Mother Country the name of Sir Henry Irving comes sounding across the Atlantic, we cannot answer in reply with a Sir Joseph Jefferson, but we do not less, perhaps, in honor of great Shakespeare's craft, by inviting him to whom you have this day given the greatest ovation on any bestowed, to come up and join the family circle which surrounds America's oldest Alma Mater. Still, figurative though it was, for George William Curtis to refer to Harvard's honorary degree as an ennoblement was a graceful form of speech; but I, to the manner born, stand here under similar circumstances in a
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