Speeches: Literary and Social

LONDON, APRIL 30, 1853

[At the annual Dinner of the Royal Academy, the President, Sir
Charles Eastlake, proposed as a toast, "The Interests of
Literature," and selected for the representatives of the world of
letters, the Dean of St. Paul's and Mr. Charles Dickens. Dean
Milman having returned thanks.]

Mr Dickens then addressed the President, who, it should be
mentioned, occupied a large and handsome chair, the back covered
with crimson velvet, placed just before Stanfield's picture of The
Victory.

Mr. Dickens, after tendering his acknowledgments of the toast, and
the honour done him in associating his name with it, said that
those acknowledgments were not the less heartfelt because he was
unable to recognize in this toast the President's usual
disinterestedness; since English literature could scarcely be
remembered in any place, and, certainly, not in a school of art,
without a very distinct remembrance of his own tasteful writings,
to say nothing of that other and better part of himself, which,
unfortunately, was not visible upon these occasions.

If, like the noble Lord, the Commander-in-Chief (Viscount
Hardinge), he (Mr. Dickens) might venture to illustrate his brief
thanks with one word of reference to the noble picture painted by a
very dear friend of his, which was a little eclipsed that evening
by the radiant and rubicund chair which the President now so
happily toned down, he would beg leave to say that, as literature
could nowhere be more appropriately honoured than in that place, so
he thought she could nowhere feel a higher gratification in the
ties that bound her to the sister arts. He ever felt in that place
that literature found, through their instrumentality, always a new
expression, and in a universal language.