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The Eighth General Meeting. 



and they would be sadly deficient in gallantry if they allowed the 

 evening to pass without expressing their sense of the honour so 

 conferred. He would therefore propose the health of the ladies, 

 with thanks to them for having attended the meeting. 



The Mayor gave the health of the President, Mr. Estcourt, 

 which was enthusiastically received. 



The Chairman was very much obliged to the Mayor for the 

 manner in which he had proposed his health. He did not conceive 

 that any man who took a part in meetings of this kind could be 

 said to be at all overstepping the position in which he was placed. 

 He believed that nothing so conduced to the education of the people 

 of this country, as the mixing up of different classes of Society for 

 a common abject, when that object was not only of an innocent 

 and rational, but of an educational and improving character. The 

 progress of education during the last thirty years had been most 

 favourable to the developement of meetings for such objects as had 

 then called them together. There had been a great change for the 

 better, and he was most thankful that his lot had been cast in a 

 generation when that improvement had taken place. Casting his 

 eyes back over the number of years embraced in their archaeological 

 scope, he had often asked himself how was it possible that the 

 Britons, who were possessed of letters and good schools, and were 

 fond of literature and poetry, should not, as far as we knew, have 

 left a single atom of writing or a single particle of literature for 

 400 years and upwards, from the time when Britain was made 

 known by the invasion of Julius Csesar ? Coming to another 

 period, to the 600 years during which the Saxons lived here, it was 

 remarkable what a little remained to us. They had writers, poets, 

 and historians, and yet it might be said, in a manner, that they 

 had left nothing behind them. Then we came to the Normans, 

 and to that amalgamated nation called by the old name of English, 

 and yet nearly 800 years were allowed to pass without any such 

 indications of the social improvement of the people as those of 

 which he held the present meeting to be one. The change had 

 been a pleasing one in every respect, and as good patriots they 



