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got halfway across the field, even if one resigned it into such good hands as those of his successor. It was some consolation to feel that the team he had driven—if he might use so uncomplimentary a phrase (laughter)—might look back with no feelings of indignation to their driver. (Applause.) At the same time, he felt as if he were coming back as a ghost to hear his own funeral sermon, and he fancied that most ghosts, under these circumstances, would feel that the praises bestowed upon them, however sincere and kindly they might be, were rather more like a satire; that they represented much more what ought to have been achieved than what was actually done. But, incomplete as such work necessarily was—and everybody who had tried his hand at it must know that the best that could be done was only relatively good, and only an approximation of what such a work should be—he was contented to have done it, and he did not regret all the years of trouble that he had spent upon it. However, he did not wish to dwell more upon that. He would be content with a very simple epitaph:—
Affliction sore long time I bore;
Physicians were in vain;
Till I committed suicide,
And eased me of my pain.
He had died as an editor, and, unfortunately for some people, though happily for himself, he was still living in the ordinary sense of the word, and his great object at present was to live past the letter S—(laughter)—so that at any rate his friend Mr. Lee might not be troubled by the torture he foresaw he would undergo between his desire to speak kindly of an old friend and his stern sense of editorial justice. (Laughter.) He might mention as a little bit of autobiography that he came up to London thirty years ago, cast upon the inhospitable shores of literature from a far more respectable profession, and became connected with a journal of which Mr. Smith was the projector, so that when he began his work on the Dictionary he knew Mr. Smith well, and he believed they had perfect confidence in each other. To him that confidence was of the highest possible importance, as he could never have got through the work so far as he did if he had not known Mr. Smith was prepared to give him a perfectly free hand to let him save the ship, and to do everything that was necessary, not with a view to commercial profit, but to make it what they announced their intention of making it at the outset, an indispensable work for all serious students of English history and literature. (Applause.) It was impossible for any man to be better backed up than he was in the undertaking. That was simply one more case of what he believed to be a very general truth—that the relations between author and publisher, though no doubt unpleasant when the publisher was a rogue and the
