A CLEVER SPEECH.

Evening Star, Issue 4115, 5 May 1876, Page 4

A CLEVER SPEECH.

Once a year, only now, Mrs Stirling, the celebrated actress, makes a public appearance. It is at the dinner of the Dramatic Fund Festival, when to her lot falls the task, which she discharges right well, of replying to the principal toast. This year she made the following pleasant little speech:— There was once—nay, I am happy to say there has been twice, in London a man—an American—called Jefferson. I don’t mean the Jefferson who was President of the United States, but the Jefferson, better known by his original name of Hip Van Winkle. If that illustrious Rip, some twenty years ago, had attended at this dinner, and had been driven by the too-loud tongue of his thrifty wife out of this room because he insisted on giving too much to this Dramatic and Equestrian Sick Fund—as, of course, that reckless and delightful dog would have been sure to do—and, failing the Katskill Mountains, had wandered forth into St. James’s Park, and there, after a carouse with the ghost of Hendrik Hudson had slept a sleep of twenty years, and thence been awakened by some bobby of the future and ordered to “‘move on” like poor Jo, what chauges would have met his eye ! At Westminster, where he remembers a squalid fringe of tumbledo*wn hovels and mud-banks, a stately hospital stares a still more stately House of Parliament in the face, the poor patients from the galleries of the one comfortably contemplating the wealthier patients on the terrace of the other. Really one hardly knows which phase of suffering is the more worthy of our sympathy, that of the unhappy subjects of fit. Thomas’s surgery, or of ; St, Stephens’s eloquence. (Laughter.) The original' Stephen was the first o) martyrs ; now he ikes it out by inflict--ing marfcydoxn.’ (Renewed laughter.) Ho -wouldV find, the dingy old mansion of the- Marlborough leas enlivened k by*tWw red brick than by the presence of a •bekfred princess/ and he would have seen her children'' on the look-out for/papa, who

is coining home with a tiger under each arm and an elephant in his pocket, and a large bale of pigskins. (Laughter and cheers.) In Trafalgar square he would see Landseer’s lions not merely in their places, but with their necks and backs worn smooth by the rough riding they have had in vindication of the indefeasible British rights of public meeting. (Laughter.) Then what a host of new theatres!—two out of three of them, I am told, doing an immense legitimate business, and, ten to one, an Othello (cheers) —in full blast inside them. Other novelties would perplex the wandering Rip—skating-rinks, spelling-bees, &c. But there is one thing in which Rip would have found no change. If he left me in Willis’s Rooms returning thanks for the ladies and pleading the cause of this fund he would have found me, after his twenty years’ sleep, at the same work still—(cheers) —like the daughter of the horseleech, uttering my annual cry of “Give, give!” a cry that I must utter, monotonous and melancholy as it may be, so long as our profession continues so pre-eminently a precarious one, divided, too often, alas ! unequally between prosperity and disappointment, with their still sadder concomitants—destitution, sickness, and death. But it is needless to sadden myself or you by this oft-told tale of need. You know how real and widespread the need is ; you will give to its relief tonight, as you have always given, liberally. Mr Chairman and gentlemen, you have drunk my health as the mouthpiece of my sister artists, for which I thank you. As I began with Rip, I will end with him, and so “Here is your good belts, unt your family’s, unt may dey live long unt prosper.” (Loud cheers.)