I hope I may be allowed in the very few closing words that I feel a desire to say in remembrance of some circumstances, rather special, attending my present occupation of this chair, to give those words something of a personal tone.I am not here advocating the case of a mere ordinary client of whom I have little or no knowledge.Ihold a brief to-night for my brothers.I went into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy not eighteen, and I left it - I can hardly believe the inexorable truth - nigh thirty years ago.I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren at home in England here, many of my modern successors, can form no adequate conception.I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of the night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.The very last time I was at Exeter, I strolled into the castle yard there to identify, for the amusement of a friend, the spot on which I once "took," as we used to call it, an election speech of my noble friend Lord Russell, in the midst of a lively fight maintained by all the vagabonds in that division of the county, and under such a pelting rain, that I remember two goodnatured colleagues, who chanced to be at leisure, held a pocket-handkerchief over my notebook, after the manner of a state canopy in an ecclesiastical procession.I have worn my knees by writing on them on the old back row of the old gallery of the old House of Commons; and I have worn my feet by standing to write in a preposterous pen in the old House of Lords, where we used to be huddled together like so many sheep - kept in waiting, say, until the woolsack might want re-stuffing.Returning home from excited political meetings in the country to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country.I have been, in my time, belated on miry by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys, and have got back in time for publication, to be received with never-forgotten compliments by the late Mr.Black, coming in the broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever knew.
Ladies and gentlemen, I mention these trivial things as an assurance to you that I never have forgotten the fascination of that old pursuit.The pleasure that I used to feel in the rapidity and dexterity of its exercise has never faded out of my breast.
Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long disuse.To this present year of my life, when I sit in this hall, or where not, hearing a dull speech, the phenomenon does occur - I sometimes beguile the tedium of the moment by mentally following the speaker in the old, old way; and sometimes, if you can believe me, I even find my hand going on the table-cloth, taking an imaginary note of it all.
Accept these little truths as a confirmation of what I know; as a confirmation of my undying interest in this old calling.Accept them as a proof that my feeling for the location of my youth is not a sentiment taken up to-night to be thrown away to-morrow - but is a faithful sympathy which is a part of myself.I verily believe -I am sure - that if I had never quitted my old calling I should have been foremost and zealous in the interests of this Institution, believing it to be a sound, a wholesome, and a good one.Ladies and gentlemen, I am to propose to you to drink "Prosperity to the Newspaper Press Fund," with which toast I will connect, as to its acknowledgment, a name that has shed new brilliancy on even the foremost newspaper in the world - the illustrious name of Mr.Russell.
