Your Legislature has since rendered my statement absolutely true, and has given full citizenship in this country to every English author. Personally I was never a fanatic on the matter. I have always rather had a tenderness for those buccaneers of the ocean of books who, in nefarious bottoms, carried my poetical goods far and wide, without any charge for freight. Laurels, in my opinion, for they can be won, are meant to be worn with thankfulness and modesty, not to be eaten like salad or boiled like cabbage for the pot, and when some of my comrades have said impatiently, about their more thoughtful works, that writers must live, I have perhaps, vexed them by replying that an author, who aspires to fame and an independent gratitude bestowed for the true creative service to mankind, should be content with those lofty and inestimable rewards, and not demand bread and butter also from the high Muses, as if they were German waitresses in a coffee-house.
[Laughter.]
Other ways of earning daily bread should be followed. If profit comes, of course it is to men, poets and authors welcome enough, and justice is ever the best of all excellent things, but the one priceless reward for a true poet, or sincere thinker, lives surely in the service his work has done to his generation, and in the precious friendships which even I have found enrich his existence and embellish his path in life. But this excursion on the literary rights, now equitably established, leads me to touch upon the noble community of language which our two countries possess.
I am not what Canning describes as the friend of every country but his own. Rather, in the best and worst sense of the word, I am a darned Britisher who rejoices to think that her Majesty is sovereign, is the best and noblest of all noble ladies, and that "the Queen's morning drum beats around the world;" but it was an American who first uttered that fine phrase,[1] and your greatness also marches to the glorious reveille. You, too, besides your own ample glories, have a large part by kinship and common speech in the work which England has done and is doing in Asia, by giving peace and development to India; in Africa, by fostering and preserving order; in Egypt, by opening the
- ↑ Sir Edwin Arnold probably quoted Daniel Webster from memory.
