Page:The life and letters of Sir John Henniker Heaton bt. (IA lifelettersofsi00port).pdf/294



Most of us know to-day something about the remarkable symposium of expressions of appreciation of Sir Henniker Heaton's work on behalf of universal and imperial penny postage, something about the character of those appreciations and the representative men of all classes who have contributed to them. It was fitting that the symposium preserved in an illuminated album should have been made the crux of the evening's ceremony, and it was fitting that so brilliant and so polished an orator of Empire as Lord Curzon should have consented to make the speech of presentation.

A commanding figure on the draped dais raised in the centre of the great hall, with the clustered light and the old civic banners above his head, Lord Curzon enraptured the brilliant assembly gathered around him in a speech that possessed the polish of fine oratory and the mellowing touch of human feeling. When he referred to the amount of happiness Sir Henniker had brought into the world, the mothers whom he had united to emigrant sons, and the "love knots" he had tied, by the wonder of the penny stamp, our eyes turned involuntarily to the white-haired figure of Sir Henniker himself, and it was easy to see that, as he listened with all the pride of a man who has served time well—and who has lived to be recognized by his generation—he was touched with profound emotion.

And in his reply he spoke at times with a pardonable emotion, but always with dignity. It was the speech of a man looking back upon the chronicle of his days, and seeing that it had been written in letters that were well and fair. It was, moreover, a speech of great natural modesty. It drew us closer to Sir Henniker, and, after all, it is not very difficult to be drawn close to a man who has drawn half the world together.