“The toast of the evening was proposed by Mr. Field, and responded to first by the American minister and then by the Duke of Argyll. Mr. Phelps’s speech had the one fault of being too brief. All he said was to the point, and was said with genuine feeling and in good taste. The duke has grown to be a venerable figure.... He speaks to-night with a depth of regard for America and Americans which goes straight to every American heart. The best friends of his life, he tells us, have been Americans—Prescott, Charles Sumner, Motley, Longfellow, and his host, Mr. Cyrus Field. He has brought back vivid memories of his brief visit to America, and paints for us one or two vivid pictures of American scenery and American life. He rejoices in our joy; in our independence; in the triumph of the Union over the rebellion; in the triumph we have since won here in England over English unfriendliness. And he says, truly, that it is difficult now to find an Englishman who is not convinced he was on our side all the time.
“Mr. Bright followed. He is seldom heard in these days.... He gave us of his best. He went back to the days of the civil war, when, as he told us, and as I have heard him say often, he used to spend the week in anxious expectation of the news which the Saturday steamer was to bring of events in America, I forget whether it was in this speech or later in the evening that Mr. Bright described the emotion with which he received the tidings of the defeat of Bull Run. At the first moment he thought, as so many of us in America thought at the first moment, that all was over. ‘No calamity ever seemed to me greater,’ said this English friend of America. The ultimate victory of freedom over slavery filled his life with happiness.... If anything could make us free-traders it might well be Mr. Bright’s eloquence, and his unequalled power of seeing the one side of the question in which his faith is so fervent. As long as I hear his voice I suspend my convictions....
“This dinner of Mr. Cyrus Field’s, though private in one sense, was pretty fully reported in the London papers.... Mr. Field’s health was proposed by the Duke of Argyll, and drunk with all the honors. Telegrams were read to and from General Grant and the President of the United States.”
Just a month later Mr. Phelps, then American minister in London, wrote to Mr. Field:
“You will be glad to know that I have a message from the Queen, who desires to send a representation to our service. I have also a telegram that Mr. Gladstone will attend, and Lord Harrowby, Lord Privy Seal, for the government.”
The service referred to was the eulogy on General Grant, delivered at Westminster Abbey, on August 4th, by Archbishop Farrar.
To this service these two letters also refer:
“August 6, 1885.
“My dear Mr. Field,—I had a long search for you among the crowds at Westminster, after the service, when I found that you were not among those bound to the dean’s lodging, but failed to find you, and I therefore write a line to thank you for having asked me to attend the service in memory of our great friend, as I was grateful for the opportunity to be again among so many of your countrymen, and to do honor to the memory of a most remarkable citizen.
“I think Farrar’s oration was excellent, and the place—the common shrine of so much of our past glories, to which both nations can equally look with pride—a very fitting one for the expression of our common mourning.