MR. FIELD. Ladies and Gentlemen: The first toast at a banquet is prescribed by custom, and is intended as a reminder and pledge of our nationality; a nationality represented by the flags which decorate this hall; and which I am sure all of us, whether from the North or the South, accept and honor. It is 1. The President of the United States. May health and Peace with mutual rays Music.-HAIL TO THE CHIEF. MR. FIELD. The second toast is intended to remind us of the nationality of him, in memory of whom we meet at this banquet; a nationality to which all of us can do honor, as that of our forefathers, whether Norman, or Saxon or Celt, for the blood of them all flows in American veins. It is 2. The Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. "Who will not sing, God save the Queen."-BURns. Music-God save the Queen. The President then proposed the toast of the evening, 3. The Memory of Robert Burns. His was the gift wi' magic power, Bright was thy fame in Scotia's isle, Sweet bard, where many a Rival sung; As soft thy harp melodious rung.-MCNEIL. "The muse was a' he took a pride in.”—BURNS. MR. FIELD. Ladies and Gentlemen: The great poet, whose birth, one hundred and ten years ago, we are now celebrating was condemned to a life-long struggle with adverse fortune. Born in the humblest class, poverty darkening his cradle and pursuing him to his grave, stinted in his education, pressed with the heavy burden of unremitting toil, led astray by many a temptation, he sunk before his time, and died broken-hearted at the age of thirtyseven. Yet this man, so struggling and so suffering, left an immortal name. The words which he uttered have become household words among the English speaking races wherever they dwell, whether in the three kingdoms under whose sovereign he lived, or in these States-once colonies, but now rivals of those kingdoms-or in that Canadian Dominion which stretches northward to the regions of everlasting ice, or in swarming Asia, or in the islands of either ocean, or in those vast Australian lands which lie beneath the Southern stars. [Applause.] The songs which he wrote are sung from age to age, by the maiden in the soft moonlight, by the ploughman in the summer noon, by the sailor watching at night in distant seas, by the boy exulting in life's first pursuits and the old man whose feet have ceased from pursuit and whose memory turns back to the melodies of early days. The cottage where he was born, the farm at Mossgiel, where his ploughshare turned up the mountain daisy; the kirk of Alloway, which his fancy filled with haunting spirits; the Brig o' Doon, which the flying horseman crossed, and the gurgling Ayr, which seems still to syllable his name all these are as familiar to us at this day, in another hemisphere, as they were to his countrymen when he died, and the monument which the men of a later age raised to his memory on the banks of his native river speaks to us as audibly as it spoke to them. [Applause.] His poetry is ours almost as truly as it was theirs; ours by language, by inheritance, by kindred and by sympathy. No brother poet has sung of him more fittingly and tenderly than our own Halleck: |